The president ordered the withdrawal of the country from the Paris climate agreement and took action on immigration policy and other issues such as creating the Department of Government Efficiency.
Trump Signs Executive Orders at Inaugural Celebration
President Trump signed several executive orders in front of his supporters at the Capital One Arena in Washington.
“So I am revoking nearly 80 destructive, radical executive actions of the previous administration, they’ll all be null and void within about what, five minutes. Is that them over there? Five minutes.” “The first item that President Trump is signing is the rescission of 78 Biden era executive actions, executive orders, presidential memoranda and others.” [cheering] “Thank you, sir.” [cheering] “The next item here is the withdrawal from the Paris climate treaty.” [cheering]
Trump Signs Executive Orders at Inaugural Celebration
1:01President Trump signed several executive orders in front of his supporters at the Capital One Arena in Washington.CreditCredit…Doug Mills/The New York Times
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Jan. 20, 2025, 9:05 p.m. ET59 minutes ago
Noah Weiland and Maggie Haberman
Here’s the latest.
President Trump on Monday pardoned members of the mob that attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, as well as signed executive orders addressing the first priorities of his administration.
Mr. Trump gave sweeping pardons to nearly all of the 1,600 rioters charged with storming the Capitol and commuted the sentences of several others. His decision appears to cover both people accused of low-level, nonviolent offenses that day and those who committed violence.
Some of Mr. Trump’s first executive orders froze most federal hiring, halted new federal rule-making and revoked roughly 80 executive orders issued by former President Joseph R. Biden Jr.
Here’s what else to know:
- Withdrawing from pacts: Among the orders Mr. Trump signed were a pair ordering the country to withdraw from the Paris climate agreement and from the World Health Organization.
- TikTok ban: Mr. Trump said he had signed an executive order to stall a federal ban of the app. The order told the attorney general not to enforce the law for 75 days to give the Trump administration “an opportunity to determine the appropriate course forward.” Read more ›
- Administrative actions: Some of the first administrative actions of the Trump administration took place around the time of Mr. Trump’s inaugural speech. Federal officials shut down a government app that allows migrants to schedule appointments to use ports of entry, an option that almost a million immigrants used while it was active.
- Return to the office: Mr. Trump also ordered federal workers to return full time to in-person work. His hiring freeze also specifically targeted the Internal Revenue Service.
- Birthright citizenship: Mr. Trump signed an executive order defining birthright citizenship. The president cannot change the Constitution on his own, but he has made it clear he wants to deny birthright citizenship, which is guaranteed by the 14th Amendment, to the children of noncitizens. It is all but certain to be challenged in court.
- Biden pardons: Mr. Trump expressed displeasure about a last-minute wave of pre-emptive pardons issued by President Biden to protect some of Mr. Trump’s adversaries, including Gen. Mark A. Milley. Two of those pardoned, Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi, and former Representative Liz Cheney, Republican of Wyoming, thanked Mr. Biden, saying they had been pardoned “not for breaking the law but for upholding it.”
Jan. 20, 2025, 10:00 p.m. ET3 minutes ago
Invoking emergency power and national security, Trump has issued an order barring asylum for people newly arriving at the Southern border. As a seemingly overlapping move, it also says undocumented migrants are ineligible for asylum if they do not provide federal officials, before entering the United States, “with sufficient medical information and reliable criminal history and background information” for vetting.
Jan. 20, 2025, 9:58 p.m. ET6 minutes ago
One of President Trump’s executive orders signed Monday night directs both the Department of Homeland Security secretary and the attorney general to make sure sanctuary jurisdictions are not given federal funds. The order also directs his leaders to encourage undocumented immigrants to leave the country and directs the Homeland Security Department to increase partnerships with local law enforcement on immigration enforcement.
Jan. 20, 2025, 9:56 p.m. ET9 minutes ago
Brent McDonald and Whitney Shefte
Outside the D.C. Central Detention Facility — where a number of people convicted of crimes on Jan. 6 are being held — we filmed a group of relatives, advocates and former Jan. 6 defendants watching live as President Trump announced that he would grant clemency to all of the nearly 1,600 people charged in connection with the attack on the Capitol.
A former Jan. 6 inmate who spent time inside the jail described it as a “joyous moment.”
“President Trump has made it clear that by midnight, they will release all of the J6ers across the country. Any veteran that was homeless, that was in struggle, or a prisoner of war underneath this time in the J6 gulags will be received and not only be celebrated, they will no longer just be tolerated. We are so grateful to President Trump. Promises made, promises kept, promises made, promises kept.” “This is such a joyous moment. But it’s also bittersweet because I have brothers in there that have done years of their lives in their years. I — 45 months for me, and I’m fortunate that I’m out here able to welcome my brothers and my sisters out. It is a very emotional day for me. We can never allow this to happen to another American again.”
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CreditCredit…Brent McDonald/The New York Times, Whitney Shefte for The New York Times
Jan. 20, 2025, 9:54 p.m. ET11 minutes ago
Trump’s order related to sex and gender instructs the Justice Department to issue guidance on the legality of single-sex spaces, which will be instrumental to any coming efforts to rescind Biden-era regulations extending protections to transgender students at schools receiving federal funds through Title IX. Chief among those protections was that denying students access to facilities consistent with their gender identity could be considered a form of discrimination under the Civil Rights Act.
Jan. 20, 2025, 9:45 p.m. ET20 minutes ago
The entire crowd outside the D.C. jail just rushed across the street to the doors of the facility after someone apparently announced they saw a detainee who was going to be released through the glass doors, creating a few minutes of chaos. Police on foot scrambled to push them back.
It’s unclear whether anyone is actually going to be released.
Jan. 20, 2025, 9:43 p.m. ET22 minutes ago
Trump declared earlier today that he would immediately declare Mexican drug cartels as terrorist organizations, but the executive order that the White House just published outlined a longer process of officials making “a recommendation” about doing so within the next two weeks.
Jan. 20, 2025, 9:43 p.m. ET21 minutes ago
The order also instructs Trump’s cabinet to make preparations for him to potentially invoke the Alien Enemies Act. Trump repeatedly promised to use that law to deport suspected members of drug cartels and criminal gangs without due process.
Jan. 20, 2025, 9:39 p.m. ET25 minutes ago
Trump moves to undermine Biden’s international tax deal.
President Trump signed an executive order challenging an international agreement the Biden administration had negotiated to try and stop large multinational corporations from booking profits in countries with low taxes.
Mr. Trump directed his administration to tell the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, an international body that facilitated the deal, that the agreement had no force in the United States without an act of Congress. In 2021, more than 130 countries signed onto the agreement, which included a new 15 percent minimum tax companies are supposed to pay in every country where they operate.
But Mr. Trump’s order will have little immediate impact on the taxation of multinational companies. The agreement had already run into trouble in the United States — Republicans have long abhorred the international tax deal, and Democrats failed to make the necessary changes to American tax law to bring the United States into compliance with the deal when they controlled Congress.
That failure has left American companies vulnerable to a key enforcement provision in the agreement. Under the deal, American companies could face higher taxes overseas because the United States did not put into place the 15 percent minimum tax. Some jurisdictions, including the European Union, have moved forward with the minimum tax.
The possibility of American companies paying higher taxes to European nations, for example, had enraged Republicans, who threatened to charge retaliatory taxes on countries that enforced the rules. Mr. Trump’s order directs the Treasury secretary and the United States Trade Representative to examine whether any countries are targeting taxes at American companies and prepare economic measures in response.
Mr. Trump’s order could help spur a new round of negotiations over international taxation, which has been an irritant among major economies for years. Those talks would take place as America’s economic partners are navigating Mr. Trump’s threats to dramatically raise tariffs on their exports to the United States.Show more
Jan. 20, 2025, 9:36 p.m. ET29 minutes ago
People outside the D.C. jail are congratulating each other and cheering on the names of Jan. 6 detainees across the country who they hear, through a network of supporters, are being processed for release. But the mood is not strictly celebratory.
Jan. 20, 2025, 9:34 p.m. ET30 minutes ago
Outside the D.C. jail, Peyton, 20, and Sarah, 28, the daughters of Guy Reffitt, a member of the Texas Three Percenters militia and the first Persian charged over Jan. 6, grappled with contradictory emotions. Peyton said she missed annoying her dad and giggled when Sarah imitated the expression he always made.
Jan. 20, 2025, 9:41 p.m. ET24 minutes ago
But Peyton said that their family had a lot of healing to do — her brother, Jackson, turned her dad in to the authorities. She said she believes in accountability for her dad but worried that his time in jail and her mom’s deep involvement in the movement on display tonight will be “toxic.”
“Everything else was taken and this is what they were left with.” She added, “they can’t just walk away. It’s sad.”
Jan. 20, 2025, 9:34 p.m. ET31 minutes ago
Trump is trying to dramatically expand the use of expedited removal, which does not afford full due-process hearings to undocumented migrants if they cannot prove they have been living in the United States for more than two years. Until now the government has used that authority only for people who were caught just after crossing the border, and it is not clear if courts will deem it constitutional to use it much more extensively.
Jan. 20, 2025, 9:32 p.m. ET33 minutes ago
Trump issued an order requiring executive branch agencies to abolish all “diversity, equity, and inclusion” programs, goals, mandates and plans, as well as environmental justice programs. All such offices are to be closed and the holders of like “chief diversity officer” are to be fired.
Jan. 20, 2025, 9:29 p.m. ET35 minutes ago
A representative for Enrique Tarrio, the pardoned former leader of the Proud Boys, says he has been released from a federal prison in Louisiana and is expected to return to Miami, his hometown, on Tuesday afternoon.
Jan. 20, 2025, 9:29 p.m. ET35 minutes ago
Trump’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency has officially been established by executive order. The order changes the name of the United States Digital Service, which was created in 2014 by former President Barack Obama to change the government’s approach to technology, to the “United States DOGE Service.” The unit will have an administrator established in the executive office who will report to the White House chief of staff.
Jan. 20, 2025, 9:12 p.m. ET52 minutes ago
Trump has set in motion what is likely to be an eventual restoration of his first term ban on travel to the United States of citizens from several predominantly Muslim countries. He issued an order directing a 60-day study to come up with a list “identifying countries throughout the world for which vetting and screening information is so deficient as to warrant a partial or full suspension on the admission of nationals from those countries.”
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Jan. 20, 2025, 9:12 p.m. ET53 minutes ago
Trump issued an order short-circuiting the security clearance vetting process for his White House staffers. Anyone on a list submitted by his White House counsel is to “immediately” be granted a Top Secret/Secure Compartmented Information-level clearance good for six months.
Jan. 20, 2025, 9:05 p.m. ET59 minutes ago
Trump fulfilled his promise to rescind former President Biden’s 2023 executive order on A.I. safety. The Biden order set safety standards for the use of artificial intelligence across the federal government. Trump’s executive order leaves a vacuum on federal A.I. regulations, while some states and European nations have enacted laws to regulate the fast-growing technology that poses risks to national security and jobs.
Jan. 20, 2025, 9:03 p.m. ET1 hour ago
President Trump has ended a program that allowed migrants from Cuba, Venezuela, Haiti and Nicaragua to enter the country for up to two years if they had a financial sponsor and passed security checks. More than 500,000 migrants entered the U.S. through the program since it was put in place in 2023.
Jan. 20, 2025, 8:59 p.m. ET1 hour ago
Trump has issued an executive order rescinding any security clearances still held by 51 former intelligence officials who signed a letter amid the 2020 election campaign suggesting the laptop of Hunter Biden obtained by Republican operatives was potentially Russian disinformation. That letter has become one of Trump’s biggest complaints about what he claims has been election interference against him.
Jan. 20, 2025, 9:00 p.m. ET1 hour ago
Trump’s executive order targeting security clearances also lashes out at a longtime nemesis: John R. Bolton, his former national security adviser.
The order strips Bolton of any security clearance he may still have, accusing him of writing a “reckless” book with sensitive information about his time in the Trump White House.
This is another instance where the president is returning to a battle from the end of his first administration.
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Jan. 20, 2025, 8:54 p.m. ET1 hour ago
In ‘weaponization’ order, Trump demands search for political bias in Justice Dept., other agencies.
President Trump’s executive order decrying the “weaponization” of the Justice Department instructs his attorney general to scour federal law enforcement agencies, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the Federal Trade Commission for any indications of political bias in work conducted under the Biden administration.
The same executive order instructs the director of national intelligence to conduct a similar review of intelligence agencies. Both reviews will culminate in a report to the White House and recommendations for “remedial action.” The executive order does not give a time frame for the reviews or reports.
The order also makes unclear what type of review will be conducted — an ethics investigation like the kind often undertaken by the Justice Department’s inspector general, or a criminal inquiry mounted by prosecutors. It also leaves vague what it means by the stated goal to “ensure accountability for the previous administration’s weaponization of the Federal government against the American people.”
The executive order, titled “ending the weaponization of the federal government,” begins with a list of misleading accusations against the Biden administration for what Mr. Trump has long claimed to be unfair use of the criminal justice system against him, his supporters and conservatives generally.
The Biden administration “and allies throughout the country engaged in an unprecedented, third-world weaponization of prosecutorial power to upend the democratic process,” the order continued.
The language of the document suggests — but does not explicitly state — that the Trump administration review will examine the actions of local district attorneys or state officials, such as the district attorneys in Manhattan or Fulton County, Ga., or the New York attorney general, all of whom filed cases against President Trump.
The presidential order accused the Justice Department of “ruthlessly” prosecuting more than 1,500 individuals for charges related to the Jan. 6, 2021, riot in the halls of Congress.Show less
Jan. 20, 2025, 8:46 p.m. ET1 hour ago
Trump’s border emergency declaration comes as crossings are near a 4-year low.
As part of a wave of executive orders to kick off a promised crackdown on illegal immigration, President Trump on Monday declared migrant crossings along the U.S.-Mexico border to be a national emergency.
Illegal crossings dropped sharply to about 47,000 in December since peaking a year earlier, according to government data.
In June, President Joe Biden issued an executive order that prevented migrants who crossed the southern border illegally from seeking asylum during periods of sustained illegal crossings.
The policy was an attempt to deter illegal crossings and to direct people toward new pathways, such as securing an appointment with an immigration officer using an app called CBP One, which Mr. Trump abruptly ended on Monday.Show less
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Jan. 20, 2025, 8:46 p.m. ET1 hour ago
Reporting from Washington
Trump commuted the sentence of Stewart Rhodes, the founder of the Oath Keepers militia.
When Stewart Rhodes, the founder of the Oath Keepers militia, appeared in court in 2023 to be sentenced on sedition charges stemming from the storming of the Capitol, he angrily declared himself a “political prisoner,” echoing language that President Trump has also used to describe those involved with the events of Jan. 6, 2021.
And on Monday, when Mr. Trump commuted Mr. Rhodes’ 18-year prison term to time served, he effectively validated the far-right leader’s belief that his criminal prosecution was a kind of political persecution, as he had defiantly claimed.
Mr. Rhodes, who spent more than a decade running the Oath Keepers before his arrest in 2022, was in the Federal Correctional Institute in Cumberland, Md., when his grant of clemency was handed down. It remained unclear when he might be freed.
While Mr. Rhodes never entered the Capitol on Jan. 6, prosecutors said he oversaw a large contingent of Oath Keepers as they concocted “a plan for an armed rebellion to shatter a bedrock of democracy” — the peaceful transfer of power after the 2020 election. Prosecutors also said he was on the Capitol grounds as military-style “stacks” of his militia’s members made their way into the building and other armed members stood ready as a “quick reaction force” at a hotel in Virginia in case things went wrong.
Even after the Capitol attack, Mr. Rhodes kept trying to keep Mr. Trump in office. Testimony at his trial showed that he sought to persuade a soldier turned I.T. expert who had ties to Mr. Trump to get the president a message, begging him to maintain his grip on power and offering to mobilize members of the Oath Keepers to keep him in the White House.
More than most Jan. 6 defendants, Mr. Rhodes left a voluminous paper trail of his increasingly violent thoughts after Mr. Trump lost the election and Joseph R. Biden Jr. was set to enter the White House. In private text messages and public open letters on the Oath Keepers’ website, he said his organization might have to engage in civil war to defeat his perceived enemies: a supposed coalition of the Democrats, leftist protesters and the Chinese Communist Party.
Mr. Rhodes founded the Oath Keepers in 2009, at the height of the right-wing Tea Party movement, specifically recruiting former and current law enforcement officers and military veterans who swore an oath not to follow any orders from a government they believed to be unconstitutional.
Throughout President Barack Obama’s time in office, the group inserted itself into prominent conflicts with federal officials. They turned up, for instance, in 2014 at a cattle ranch in Nevada after its owner, Cliven Bundy, and others engaged in an armed standoff with federal land management officials.
But after Mr. Trump was elected the first time, Mr. Rhodes and the Oath Keepers pivoted away from their anti-government views and seemed to embrace many of Mr. Trump’s own enemies and fixations — among them the so-called deep state and leftist movements like Black Lives Matter.
When he is released from prison, Mr. Rhodes will return to an organization in shambles. Prosecutors tried more than 20 members of the group in connection with Jan. 6. Their trials, which ended overwhelmingly in convictions, revealed, among other things, that Mr. Rhodes’s own vice president was an F.B.I. informant.Show more
Jan. 20, 2025, 8:40 p.m. ET1 hour ago
Enrique Tarrio, the pardoned ex-Proud Boys leader, helped initiate the Capitol riot.
By including Enrique Tarrio, the former leader of the Proud Boys, in his extraordinary pardons for the events of Jan. 6, 2021, President Trump granted clemency on Monday to a man whom prosecutors have described as a savvy, street-fighting extremist who helped his compatriots in “Trump’s army” initiate an assault on the Capitol.
Mr. Tarrio, 42, was serving a 22-year prison term after being convicted of seditious conspiracy and other felonies for his role in the Capitol attack. His was the longest sentence handed down against any of the nearly 1,600 people charged in connection with Jan. 6.
His lawyer said that he could be released from a federal prison in Louisiana as early as Monday night.
Even before Jan. 6, Mr. Tarrio was among the best-known far-right figures in the country, having been involved in violent protests going back to the deadly neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Va., in August 2017. Rarely seen without his sunglasses and baseball cap, he took control of the Proud Boys the next year after the group’s founder, Gavin McInnes, stepped aside.
But Mr. Tarrio is arguably better known for the part he played in supporting Mr. Trump during the 2020 election — and in the chaotic months after he lost the race. The Proud Boys were thrust into the heart of that campaign two months before Election Day when Mr. Trump, at one of the presidential debates, called out the group by name, telling its members to “stand back and stand by.”
Mr. Tarrio responded immediately on social media, “Standing by, sir.”
In December of that year, Mr. Tarrio responded to a message that Mr. Trump himself posted on social media, summoning his supporters to Washington on Jan. 6 for what he said would be a “wild” protest. The day after, Mr. Tarrio established a crew of “hand-selected members” for the rally, court papers said, known within the Proud Boys as the Ministry of Self-Defense.
During the trial of Mr. Tarrio and four other Proud Boys, federal prosecutors described how the group under his control was “thirsting for violence and organizing for action” after Mr. Trump lost the election and ultimately fought at the Capitol “to keep their preferred leader in power no matter what the law or the courts had to say about it.”
Mr. Tarrio was not in Washington on Jan. 6. He had been kicked out of the city days earlier by a local judge presiding over separate criminal charges brought against him for vandalizing a Black church after an earlier pro-Trump rally. But prosecutors say that he and other members of his group frenetically exchanged text messages while the mob, with the Proud Boys in the lead, overran the Capitol.
Ultimately, video clips of the attack showed that the Proud Boys were instrumental in encouraging other rioters to confront the police or in confronting officers themselves. Members of the group took part in several breaches of police lines and were at the forefront of violence almost the entire day.
When he was sentenced in Federal District Court in Washington, Mr. Tarrio sought to portray himself as humbled by the events of Jan. 6, apologizing for his role in the riot and calling it a “national embarrassment.”
“I am not a political zealot,” he said.
A few months before he went on trial, he met secretly with federal prosecutors who, by his own account, offered him leniency if he could corroborate their theory that he had been in touch with Mr. Trump in the run-up to Jan. 6 through at least three intermediaries.
Mr. Tarrio said he told the prosecutors they were wrong — a position that, regardless of its veracity, would have surely pleased Mr. Trump when it was made public.
It remains unclear what Mr. Tarrio’s release might mean for the future of the Proud Boys. He is a polarizing figure in the group, beloved by some members and despised and distrusted by others, including many from Miami, his hometown.
Moreover, the organization dismantled its national leadership and largely retreated from high-profile demonstrations after Jan. 6, which led to the arrest and prosecution of dozens of its members. While some chapters of the Proud Boys used violent language on their online accounts during the 2024 campaign, the group was barely present on the street or at rallies in support of Mr. Trump.Show more
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Jan. 20, 2025, 8:32 p.m. ET2 hours ago
Reporting from Washington
Trump withdraws U.S. from World Health Organization
President Trump moved quickly on Monday to withdraw the United States from the World Health Organization, a move that public health experts say will undermine the nation’s standing as a global health leader and make it harder to fight the next pandemic.
In an executive order issued about eight hours after he took the oath of office, Mr. Trump cited a string of reasons for the withdrawal, including the W.H.O.’s “mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic,” and the “failure to adopt urgently needed reforms.” He said the agency demands “unfairly onerous payments” from the United States, and complained that China pays less.
The move was not unexpected. Mr. Trump has been railing against the W.H.O. since 2020, when he attacked the agency over its approach to the coronavirus pandemic and threatened to withhold United States funding from it. In July 2020, Mr. Trump took formal steps to withdraw from the agency.
But after he lost the 2020 election, the threat did not materialize. On his first day in office, Jan. 20, 2021, former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. blocked it from going into effect.
Leaving the W.H.O. would mean, among other things, that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention would have no access to the global data that the agency provides. When China characterized the genetic sequence of the novel coronavirus in 2020, it released the information to W.H.O., which shared it with other nations.
More recently, the W.H.O. has become a target of conservatives over its work on a “pandemic treaty” to strengthen pandemic preparedness and set legally binding policies for member countries on surveillance of pathogens, rapid sharing of outbreak data, and building up local manufacturing and supply chains for vaccines and treatments, among others.
Talks on the treaty broke down last year. In the United States, some Republican lawmakers viewed the agreement as a threat to American sovereignty.
Lawrence O. Gostin, a public health law expert at Georgetown University who helped negotiate the treaty, said that a United States withdrawal from W.H.O. would be “a grievous wound” to public health but an “even deeper wound to American national interests and national security.”
Founded in 1948 with help from the United States, the World Health Organization is an agency of the United Nations. Its mission, according to its website, is to “confront the biggest health challenges of our time and measurably advance the well-being of the world’s people.”
That includes bringing aid to war-torn areas like Gaza and tracking emerging epidemics like Zika, Ebola and Covid-19. The annual budget of W.H.O. is about $6.8 billion; the United States has typically contributed an outsize share.
According to Mr. Gostin, it will take some time for the United States to withdraw. A joint resolution adopted by Congress at the agency’s founding addressed a potential withdrawal, and requires the United States to give a year’s notice and pay its financial obligations to the organization for the current fiscal year.Show less
Jan. 20, 2025, 8:29 p.m. ET2 hours ago
President Trump has been sitting in the Oval Office signing executive orders and answering questions from the press for more than half an hour now, previewing some of his policy stances that he may carry out on the economy and foreign policy. He has also aired grievances about political opponents and repeated false claims about the 2020 election. “I believe in the sanctity of the vote. The Democrats didn’t because they cheated like dogs,” Trump said.
Jan. 20, 2025, 8:28 p.m. ET2 hours ago
In its first cuts, Elon Musk’s non-governmental advisory group, the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, posted a screenshot on X of a deleted page for the Office of Personnel Management’s inter-agency council for chief diversity officers. The council advised agencies on diversity, equity and inclusion programs. Trump on Monday promised the end of DEI practices in federal government and said hiring would be based on merit. “It begins,” Musk said, sharing the post by @DOGE on X.
Jan. 20, 2025, 8:25 p.m. ET2 hours ago
Trump signs an executive order withdrawing the United States from the World Health Organization.
Jan. 20, 2025, 8:25 p.m. ET2 hours ago
After courting the vote of Muslims by promising peace in Gaza, it’s notable how quickly President Trump seemed to express little interest in the enclave, except to say that it looked like a “massive demolition site” following the war and adding that it needed to be rebuilt differently. He sounded more more like a real-estate mogul than a president as he called the Gaza Strip a “phenomenal location,” citing its proximity to the sea.
Jan. 20, 2025, 8:21 p.m. ET2 hours ago
Trump said that he was “not confident” that the cease-fire in Gaza would hold, and he signaled disinterest in the conflict. “That’s not our war. It’s their war. I’m not confident. But I think they’re very weakened on the other side,” Trump said, presumably referring to Hamas.
Jan. 20, 2025, 8:19 p.m. ET2 hours ago
Former Speaker Nancy Pelosi, still one of the most influential figures in the Democratic party, condemned President Trump’s pardons of more than 1,500 defendants arrested in connection with the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.
“The president’s actions are an outrageous insult to our justice system and the heroes who suffered physical scars and emotional trauma as they protected the Capitol, the Congress and the Constitution,” she said.
Jan. 20, 2025, 8:18 p.m. ET2 hours ago
Trump signs an executive order in an attempt to stall the TikTok ban.
President Trump signed an executive order on Monday to delay enforcing a federal ban of TikTok for at least 75 days. It’s unclear if the order could override the federal law.
Reporter: “What did your TikTok order do, Mr. President?” “Just gave me the right to sell it or close it. Essentially, with TikTok, I have the right to either sell it or close it, and we’ll make that determination. And we may have to get an approval from China too. I’m not sure, but I’m sure they’ll approve it. And if they don’t approve it, it would be somewhat of a hostile act, I think. But it’s good for China if it gets approved.” Reporter: “Mr. President, you’re not guaranteeing that TikTok will be around after 90 days from today?” “No, but it could very well be. It makes sense for it to be because it’s got tremendous value. But if we create the value by approving — you know, in other words, that approval gives a tremendous value. If that’s the case, then we should be entitled to 50 percent as a country. You haven’t heard that one before, right? That’s called a joint venture. And nobody ever thought that way before.” Reporter: “Who would be a partner?” “Well, I don’t know. I think you have a lot of people that would be interested in TikTok with the United States as a partner.” Reporter: “You wanted to block TikTok. Why did you change your mind?” “Because I got to use it. And remember, TikTok is largely about kids, young kids. If China is going to get information about young kids, I don’t know. I think, I think, to be honest, I think we have bigger problems than that.”
Trump Tries to Stall TikTok Ban With Executive Order
1:23President Trump signed an executive order on Monday to delay enforcing a federal ban of TikTok for at least 75 days. It’s unclear if the order could override the federal law.CreditCredit…Doug Mills/The New York Times
President Trump signed an executive order on Monday to delay enforcing a federal ban of TikTok for 75 days, even though the law took effect on Sunday and it is unclear that such a move could override it.
The order, one of Mr. Trump’s first acts after taking office, instructs the attorney general not to take any action to enforce the law so that his administration has “an opportunity to determine the appropriate course forward.” The order is retroactive to Sunday.
As he signed the order, Mr. Trump told reporters that “the U.S. should be entitled to get half of TikTok” if a deal for the app is reached, without going into detail. He said he thought TikTok could be worth a trillion dollars.
The order could immediately face legal challenges, including over whether a president has the power to halt enforcement of a federal law. Companies subject to the law, which forbids providing services to Chinese-owned TikTok, may determine that the order does not provide a shield from legal liability.
The federal law banning TikTok, which is owned by ByteDance, mandated that the app needed to be sold to a non-Chinese owner or it would be blocked. The only workaround provided by the law is a 90-day extension if a likely buyer is found. Even then, it is unclear if that option is viable, given that the law is already in effect. The law also restricts how much of a TikTok stake can remain under foreign ownership.
By seeking to override the federal law, Mr. Trump raised serious questions about the limits of presidential power and the rule of law in the United States. Some lawmakers and legal experts have expressed concerns about the legality of an executive order, particularly in the wake of a Supreme Court ruling that upheld the law on Friday and the national security concerns that prompted legislators to draft it in the first place.
Former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. had signed the law, which passed overwhelmingly in Congress last year, forcing ByteDance to sell TikTok or face a ban. TikTok had faced security concerns that the Chinese government could use it to spread propaganda or collect U.S. user data. The law levies financial penalties on app stores and cloud computing providers unless they stop working with the app.
TikTok briefly went dark for U.S. users over the weekend, but returned Sunday following Mr. Trump’s social media announcement that he was planning an executive order. While the app was working again for people who have already downloaded it, it vanished from Google’s and Apple’s app stores on Saturday and remained unavailable on Monday.
Mr. Trump’s efforts to keep TikTok online have major implications for its users. The app has reshaped the social media landscape, defined popular culture and created a living for millions of influencers and small businesses that rely on the platform.
In the executive order, Mr. Trump said that his constitutional responsibilities include national security. It says he wants to consult with advisers to review the concerns posed by TikTok and the mitigation measures the company has taken already.
The administration will “pursue a resolution that protects national security while saving a platform used by 170 million Americans,” according to the order, which called the law’s timing “unfortunate.”
The attorney general will send letters to companies covered by the law to tell them “that there has been no violation of the statute” and they won’t be held liable for providing services to TikTok during the 75 days, the order said.
That might not be enough reassurance, some legal experts said.
“I don’t think it’s consistent with faithful execution of the law to direct the attorney general not to enforce it for a determinate period,” said Zachary Price, a professor at the University of California College of the Law, San Francisco. “And even if that’s OK, the president doesn’t have the authority to eliminate the law itself and remove liability for the people who violate it while it’s not being enforced.”
TikTok and Apple did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Google declined to comment.
TikTok’s ties to China have long raised national security concerns, including with Mr. Trump. Near the end of his first term in 2020, Mr. Trump issued an executive order that would bar app stores from making TikTok available for download. He then pushed for an American company to buy the app, but those efforts fizzled when he lost re-election.
Last year, the effort was revived by Congress and Mr. Biden signed it into law in April. The law targeted app stores, like those run by Apple and Google, and cloud computing companies. It said those companies could not distribute or host TikTok unless the app was sold to a non-Chinese owner by Jan. 19.
Mr. Trump then reversed positions. He joined the app in June and said on television in March that there are young people who would go “crazy” without TikTok.
“I guess I have a warm spot for TikTok that I didn’t have originally,” Mr. Trump said as he signed executive orders Monday evening.
TikTok challenged the law in federal court, saying it impeded its users’ rights to freedom of speech as well as the company’s own First Amendment rights. The Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit upheld the law in December. TikTok appealed to the Supreme Court, which on Friday also upheld the law.
TikTok and some Democrats made a last-ditch effort to stop the law from taking effect. But on Saturday, TikTok stopped operating in the United States and disappeared from Apple’s and Google’s app stores a few hours before midnight. Users grieved its disappearance.
On Sunday morning, Mr. Trump announced on Truth Social that he would “issue an executive order on Monday to extend the period of time before the law’s prohibitions take effect, so that we can make a deal to protect our national security.” He said he would not punish companies that had violated the law to keep the app online.
Hours later TikTok restored its service to U.S. users and welcomed them back with a message: “As a result of President Trump’s efforts, TikTok is back in the U.S.!”
As he signed executive orders in the Oval Office, Mr. Trump was asked why he had changed his mind about the app.
“Because I got to use it,” he said.
The Fight for TikTok
TikTok Makes Last-Minute Push as Supreme Court Is Poised to Rule on Ban
What We Know About the TikTok Ban
TikTok Engineered Its Shutdown to Get Saved. But Trump’s Solution May Fall Short.
Sapna Maheshwari contributed reportingShow less
Jan. 20, 2025, 8:14 p.m. ET2 hours ago
Trump singles out the I.R.S. work force in his hiring freeze executive order.
President Trump made clear on Monday that he plans to closely scrutinize the Internal Revenue Service, which received a large financial boost from President Biden and Democrats in Congress.
Mr. Trump singled out the I.R.S. in an executive order dictating a hiring freeze across the federal government. The president said the governmentwide hiring freeze would be lifted after the completion of a broader plan for reducing the size of the federal work force. But he called for the freeze to stay in place at the I.R.S. for longer, until the Treasury secretary and other federal officials said the tax collector could hire additional employees.
The I.R.S. has been adding to its ranks in recent years after the Biden administration and Democrats in Congress gave it a large infusion of new funds. Former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. had hoped to turn around an agency that has seen its staff and budget fail to keep pace with the rise in the number of taxpayers.
A critical goal for the I.R.S. has been to hire more staff to ensure that wealthy Americans are paying the taxes they owe. But Republicans have loudly criticized the new I.R.S. money for years and portrayed the agency as an invasive burden on middle-class Americans.
Mr. Trump has already taken the unusual step of nominating a new I.R.S. commissioner — former Representative Billy Long — despite the recent tradition of presidents allowing leaders of the agency to serve out their five-year terms.
Daniel Werfel, who was running the I.R.S. under Mr. Biden, had several years left in his term. Mr. Werfel resigned on Monday. Mr. Long will need to be confirmed by the Senate before he can lead the I.R.S.Show more
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Jan. 20, 2025, 8:07 p.m. ET2 hours ago
Trump signed an executive order on TikTok that he said gave him “the right to either sell it or close it. And we’ll make that determination.” He added that, “We may have to get an approval from China, too. I’m not sure. But I’m sure they’ll approve it. And if they don’t approve it, it would be somewhat of a hostile act, I think. But it’s good for China if it gets approved.”
Jan. 20, 2025, 8:16 p.m. ET2 hours ago
Trump also floated his idea for a 50-50 “joint venture” between the existing Chinese owner, ByteDance, and some kind of American entity.
Jan. 20, 2025, 8:07 p.m. ET2 hours ago
Trump said he is planning to enact 25 percent tariffs on Canada and Mexico starting Feb. 1. He says they are allowing undocumented immigrants and fentanyl into the U.S.
Jan. 20, 2025, 8:04 p.m. ET2 hours ago
Reporting from Washington
Trump grants broad clemency to Jan. 6 rioters.
President Donald J. Trump, in one of his first official acts, issued a sweeping grant of clemency on Monday to all of the nearly 1,600 people charged in connection with the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, issuing pardons to most of the defendants and commuting the sentences of 14 members of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers militia, most of whom were convicted of seditious conspiracy.
Mr. Trump’s moves amounted to an extraordinary reversal for rioters accused of both low-level, nonviolent offenses and for those who had assaulted police officers.
And they effectively erased years of efforts by federal investigators to seek accountability for the mob assault on the peaceful transfer of presidential power after Mr. Trump’s loss in the 2020 election. As part of his pardon order, Mr. Trump also directed the Justice Department to dismiss “all pending indictments” that remained against people facing charges for Jan. 6.
Sitting in the Oval Office, Mr. Trump said he hoped that many of the defendants could be released from prison as early as tonight.
“They’ve already been in jail for a long time,” he said. “These people have been destroyed.”
The pardons Mr. Trump issued — “full, complete and unconditional,” he wrote — will touch the lives of about 1,000 defendants accused of misdemeanors like disorderly conduct, breaching the Capitol’s restricted grounds and trespassing at the building. Many of these rioters have served only days, weeks or months in prison — if any time at all.
The pardons will also wipe the slate clean for violent offenders who went after the police on Jan. 6 with baseball bats, two-by-fours and bear spray and are serving prison terms, in some cases of more than a decade.
Moreover, Mr. Trump pardoned Enrique Tarrio, the former leader of the Proud Boys, who was serving a 22-year prison term after being convicted at trial of seditious conspiracy — a crime that requires prosecutors to prove that a defendant used violent force against the government.
A representative for Mr. Tarrio said he had been released from a federal prison in Louisiana and was expected to return to Miami, his hometown, by Tuesday afternoon.
Mr. Trump’s actions drew an immediate firestorm of criticism, not least from some of the investigators who had worked on Jan. 6 cases.
“These pardons suggest that if you commit acts of violence, as long as you do so on behalf of a politically powerful person you may be able to escape consequences,” said Alexis Loeb, a former federal prosecutor who personally supervised many riot cases. “They undermine — and are a blow to — the sacrifice of all the officers who put themselves in the face of harm to protect democracy on Jan. 6.”
In a separate move, Mr. Trump commuted the prison sentences of five other Proud Boys, some of whom had been convicted at trial with Mr. Tarrio. He also commuted the sentences of Stewart Rhodes, the leader of the Oath Keepers militia, and eight of his subordinates.
Altogether, the commutations erased more than 100 years of prison time for the 14 defendants, almost all of whom were convicted of seditious conspiracy.
The twin acts of clemency were greeted with jubilation by several Jan. 6 defendants, their families and the activists who had worked on their behalf, seeking to push Mr. Trump toward issuing the broadest version possible. Many Jan. 6 rioters had been riding high ever since Mr. Trump won the election in November, convinced that he would come to their aid and pardon everyone involved in the attack.
Last week, in fact, Mr. Tarrio’s family in Miami started to plan a “cocktail event” to celebrate his pardon. Other defendants hired cars in advance to meet them outside their prisons or awaited Mr. Trump’s decision at so-called pardon watch parties, some of them wearing court-ordered ankle monitors.
Beyond the effect the pardons and commutations will have on the lives of those who received them, they also served Mr. Trump’s mission of rewriting the history of Jan. 6. Throughout his presidential campaign and after he won the election, he has tried repeatedly to play down the violent nature of the Capitol attack and reframe it, falsely, as a “day of love.”
Mr. Trump’s actions were in essence his boldest moves yet in seeking to recast his supporters — and himself — as the victims, not the perpetrators, of Jan. 6. By granting clemency to the members of a mob that used physical violence to stop the democratic process in its tracks, Mr. Trump gave the imprimatur of the presidency to the rioters’ claims that they were not properly prosecuted criminal defendants, but rather unfairly persecuted political prisoners.
As a legal matter, the pardons and commutations effectively unwound the largest single criminal inquiry the Justice Department has undertaken in its 155-year history. They wiped away all of the charges that had already been brought and the sentences already handed down while also stopping any news cases from moving forward.
Starting virtually from the moment the Capitol was breached, investigators spent more than four years obtaining warrants for thousands of cellphones and Google accounts, scrolling through tens of thousands of hours of police body-camera and surveillance camera footage, and running down hundreds of thousands of tips from ordinary citizens.
Their work resulted in charges being brought in Federal District Court in Washington — just blocks from the Capitol itself — against almost 1,600 people. More than 600 of those defendants were accused of assaulting or impeding law enforcement officers, many with weapons that included hockey sticks, firecrackers, crutches and broken wooden table legs.
More than half of the nearly 1,100 people who have been sentenced for their crimes were sentenced to at least some time in jail. Mr. Tarrio, the former Proud Boys leader, received the longest prison term of any defendant — 22 years. He was followed closely by a Proud Boys member from California, David Dempsey, who had attacked the police with his hands, his feet, a flagpole, pepper spray and other weapons and was sent to prison for 20 years.
Both of those sentences will now be erased, along with others for far-right leaders like Mr. Rhodes, the Oath Keepers founder, who was serving an 18-year prison term when the commutations were issued.
The pardons and commutations did not address the separate but related question of what Mr. Trump plans to do with the Justice Department’s continuing investigation of Jan. 6.
Two weeks ago, department officials said that prosecutors were still weighing whether to bring charges against as many as 200 additional people, including about 60 suspected of assaulting or impeding police officers during the riot. And as recently as Friday, court proceedings in Washington for Jan. 6 defendants continued more or less normally.
Mr. Trump appears to have decided to grant an expansive form of clemency relatively recently and after a debate among his advisers. In recent months, he has said different things to different people about how he planned to proceed, sometimes suggesting he would grant pardons to violent offenders, sometimes indicating that they would be reserved for those who did not act violently and were only charged with misdemeanors.
A few weeks ago, Vice President JD Vance said on Fox News that rioters who had assaulted the police would most likely not get pardons.
“If you committed violence on that day, obviously you shouldn’t be pardoned,” Mr. Vance said, but added that “there’s a little bit of a gray area there.”
Mr. Vance’s comments elicited almost immediate outrage among many of the rioters.
“J6 defendants are very angry at JD Vance,” Philip Anderson, who was accused of taking part in a violent scrum in a tunnel outside the Capitol, wrote on social media. “All J6 defendants need to be saved.”
Mr. Vance quickly tried to walk back his remarks.
“I assure you, we care about people unjustly locked up,” he wrote on X. “Yes, that includes people provoked and it includes people who got a garbage trial.”
David C. Adams and Glenn Thrush contributed reporting.Show more
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Jan. 20, 2025, 8:01 p.m. ET2 hours ago
“I’ll be meeting with President Putin,” Trump says. He does not specify when.
Jan. 20, 2025, 8:01 p.m. ET2 hours ago
Reporting from Washington
DeSantis adopts ‘Gulf of America’ language even before Trump’s order.
Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida referred to the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America” in a state executive order on Monday, even before President Trump had taken any presidential action to rename the body of water.
Mr. Trump said during his inaugural address that one of his first actions in the White House would be to rename the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America, but he had yet to take action on the promise hours into his second term. The pledge during his inaugural speech drew an audible laugh in the Capitol Rotunda from Hillary Clinton, the former secretary of state and two-time Democratic presidential candidate.
But it was no laughing matter for Mr. DeSantis, who attended the inauguration on Monday and sat in the overflow room in Emancipation Hall, where he watched the proceedings on a video screen with other Republican governors. He didn’t wait for Mr. Trump to take any presidential action before forging ahead on his own in an early act of self-implementation that appeared indicative of how Republicans seeking to please Mr. Trump may act as he outlines his agenda.
In an executive order describing a brewing winter storm heading for the Florida Panhandle, Mr. DeSantis catered to Mr. Trump in his official language as he declared a state of emergency in his state.
“WHEREAS, an area of low pressure moving across the Gulf of America, interacting with Arctic air, will bring widespread impactful winter weather to North Florida beginning Tuesday, Jan. 21, 2025,” Mr. DeSantis wrote, before describing icy and hazardous driving conditions that were expected to lead to a state of emergency.Show more
Jan. 20, 2025, 8:01 p.m. ET2 hours ago
Trump has revoked a Biden executive order on law enforcement reforms that sought to end the use of chokeholds by federal agents and reduce the number of no-knock warrants, a type of sudden entry into a home that has at times ended in violent confrontations.
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Jan. 20, 2025, 7:58 p.m. ET2 hours ago
Trump said he has revoked a Biden executive order to gradually end the Justice Department’s use of private prisons.
Jan. 20, 2025, 7:56 p.m. ET2 hours ago
Reporting from Washington
Dueling pardons by Biden and Trump show an intensified fight over the meaning of Jan. 6.
The dueling pardons issued Monday by the outgoing and incoming presidents were the latest and perhaps clearest reminders of how Donald J. Trump’s efforts to rewrite the history of the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol have gradually worn down the consensus that the riot marked one of American democracy’s darkest days.
There has never been any doubt about who was responsible for the violence: Mr. Trump’s supporters attacked the building, fought police and ransacked offices as they attempted to block the certification of Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s 2020 victory. Republicans and Democrats alike condemned the violence and Mr. Trump’s role in summoning an angry crowd to Washington.
But four years later, many Americans now view the events of Jan. 6 as a choose-your-own-reality narrative. Depending on one’s politics, heroes and villains have become interchangeable. Those who investigated the attack could be either truth-tellers or corrupt partisans. Those who attacked the Capitol and were jailed could be either criminals or “hostages.”
Now each side has its own set of pardons to bolster its case.
By pardoning those charged in connection with the Capitol assault, Mr. Trump made clear he was erasing their crimes and endorsing the narrative they had been victimized by an overzealous and politicized Justice Department.
By pardoning the members of the House Jan. 6 Committee, which investigated the attack, and the injured officers who testified before the panel, Mr. Biden provided them protection against any politicized prosecution. But he also gave ammunition to those who believe the panel committed crimes. After all, why would they need pardons if they did nothing wrong?
“The two sets of pardons formalize the bifurcated, even schizoid, official memories of Jan. 6: with one large segment of the country seeing the Jan. 6 people as criminals trying to undo a democratic process and another segment regarding them as heroes who were unfairly persecuted,” said Alexander Keyssar, the Matthew W. Stirling Jr. professor of history and social policy at Harvard Kennedy School, who has taught a course about Jan. 6.
Mr. Keyssar said it is “remarkable” that “the contrast in memories has widened since the event itself. Or, to be more precise, that the number, or proportion, of people who accept the Trumpian version of the history, or at least tolerate it, has grown.”
There are often fights to control the narrative about major incidents in U.S. history, and they can rage for decades and bury some shameful events for generations.
Jan. 6 is not the first event to have been consumed by an effort to minimize it or shift the blame to others.
“The same thing happened during the Civil War,” said Jim Downs, history professor at Gettysburg College and editor of the book “Jan. 6 and the Politics of History.”
“The Civil War ended,” he said. “The issue of slavery then became buried by the South. People then built monuments and said that they were attacked by Northern aggression. The point is, who gets the power to tell the story? They can marshal whatever evidence they want in order to propagate a particular narrative.”
At first, supporters of Mr. Trump tried to blame the Jan. 6 attack on antifa or undercover F.B.I. agents. They alternately tried to recast the riot as a “day of love” in which protesters hugged the police — despite the 150 officers injured in the violence. They have suggested the prosecutors and members of Congress who investigated the attack are the true criminals, and demanded they be investigated.
On Monday, Mr. Trump, fewer than eight hours after being sworn in to his second term, took his final step in what has now been a four-year campaign to rewrite the history of the attack. He issued pardons to about 1,500 people accused of crimes in connection with Jan. 6.
At the same time, Mr. Trump condemned Mr. Biden’s pardons of the lawmakers, saying, without evidence, they were “very, very guilty of very bad crimes” and referring to the panel as the “Unselect Committee of Political Thugs.”
Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi and former chairman of the panel, had been in conversations with Biden White House staff about the pardons and had asked for one, saying he feared becoming the victim of a politically motivated prosecution.
But others connected with the committee were surprised. Some staff members expressed shock at the move, but also relief that they could no longer be targeted by a prosecutor.
Mr. Thompson and former Representative Liz Cheney, Republican of Wyoming, the panel’s vice chair, thanked Mr. Biden in a statement.
“We express our gratitude to President Biden for recognizing that we and our families have been continuously targeted not only with harassment, lies and threats of criminal violence, but also with specific threats of criminal prosecution and imprisonment by members of the incoming administration, simply for doing our jobs and upholding our oaths of office,” the said. “We have been pardoned today not for breaking the law but for upholding it.”
There were others who watched the dueling pardons with a sense of distress.
Craig Sicknick is the older brother of Capitol Police Officer Brian D. Sicknick, who died shortly after the attack on the Capitol. His brother suffered multiple strokes hours after sparring with a pro-Trump mob during the Jan. 6 riot and died of natural causes.
He became politically outspoken after his brother’s death, and condemned Mr. Trump’s pardons of those who had participated in the Capitol riot.
“The message to me is that the United States is no longer a nation under the rule of law and anything goes,” he said. “If you tell a lie big enough and often enough, it becomes the truth, and that’s exactly what Trump is doing.”Show more
Jan. 20, 2025, 7:55 p.m. ET2 hours ago
Trump also signed an executive order declaring a national emergency at the U.S.-Mexico border.
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Jan. 20, 2025, 7:54 p.m. ET2 hours ago
Trump is asked by a reporter if Biden left him a letter. Trump then looks in his desk to find a letter Biden left him and jokes that he should read it aloud. Trump then complains about Biden pardoning his relatives.
Jan. 20, 2025, 7:51 p.m. ET2 hours ago
“That’s a big one,” Trump says as he signs an executive order defining birthright citizenship. The president cannot change the Constitution on his own, but Trump has made it clear he wants to deny birthright citizenship, which is guaranteed by the 14th Amendment, to the children of noncitizens. That would be all but certain to be challenged in court.
Jan. 20, 2025, 7:48 p.m. ET2 hours ago
Trump signs an executive order designating cartel organizations as “foreign terrorist organizations.” Trump says Mexico will probably not be happy with the order.
Jan. 20, 2025, 7:45 p.m. ET2 hours ago
Trump, from the Oval Office, has signed what he described as “full pardons” for about 1,500 Jan. 6 defendants. He said he also signed commutations of sentences for six defendants but did not say who they were.
Jan. 20, 2025, 7:41 p.m. ET2 hours ago
Trump also revoked Biden’s 2021 order to restore faith in the country’s legal immigration system and incorporate new residents into American life. Biden’s order also called for developing welcoming strategies for new Americans. Biden meant it as a direct rebuke to the first Trump administration’s message that immigrants were not welcome. Trump rebuked that rebuke.
Jan. 20, 2025, 7:40 p.m. ET2 hours ago
Two of the 78 rescissions Trump announced on Monday restore immigration orders that former President Joe Biden revoked through executive order four years ago. One addresses civil immigration enforcement. In 2017, Trump issued an order to strengthen immigration enforcement inside the country and to withhold federal funds from local agencies that refuse to cooperate with immigration enforcement. Another is related to the government’s refugee programs. Four years ago, Biden revoked one of Trump’s 2017 orders to increase the security vetting of refugees applying to resettle in the United States.
Jan. 20, 2025, 7:22 p.m. ET3 hours ago
Trump also rescinded a Biden executive order that directed the federal government to rebuild the U.S. refugee program. White House officials have said refugee admissions will be suspended for at least four months.
Jan. 20, 2025, 7:22 p.m. ET3 hours ago
The Trump administration revoked a Biden executive order that created a task force to reunify families separated at the southern border. In the time the task force was in place, it reunified nearly 800 children with their parents, according to a report it released last year.
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Jan. 20, 2025, 7:17 p.m. ET3 hours ago
Reporting from Washington
Trump administration fires immigration court officials, beginning crackdown.
The acting head of the U.S. immigration court system and three other top officials were fired on Monday soon after President Trump took office, according to three people familiar with the matter, in a purge of the top echelon of a critical part of the government’s immigration system.
The abrupt removals signaled that the Trump administration wants to remake the immigration court system, which is housed under the Justice Department, as part of a broader immigration crackdown that Mr. Trump began within minutes of being sworn in for his second term.
Immigration judges oversee an essential part of the system: granting asylum to migrants whose claims pass muster and ordering the deportation of those whose cases do not.
Tom Jawetz, a senior lawyer in the Homeland Security Department in the Biden administration, said the move suggested that Mr. Trump would try to insert loyalists who could undermine veteran career officials into key roles, as he did during his first term.
“Politicals during the first Trump administration ran roughshod over the career civil servants who have dedicated their lives to public service,” Mr. Jawetz said in an interview. “A Day 1 blood bath like this indicates that they don’t intend to change course now.”
The four officials included Mary Cheng, the acting director of the Executive Office of Immigration Review. The three others fired were Sheila McNulty, the chief immigration judge; Lauren Alder Reid, the head of policy for the agency; and Jill Anderson, the general counsel in the Executive Office of Immigration Review.
On Monday evening, Sirce E. Owen, an immigration court official, took over as acting director of the Executive Office of Immigration Review.
“I received an email from the justice management division after 3 p.m. that informed me that I had been removed,” Ms. Alder Reid said in an interview on Monday.
Ms. Alder Reid had been with the agency for more than 14 years. Ms. Cheng had been with the department since 2009.
In Mr. Trump’s first term, his administration sought to reshape the immigration court system by instituting quotas for judges and no longer allowing them to pause cases that they felt were not a priority. It also altered when immigration judges could grant asylum to migrants appearing in court.
“The firing of these senior immigration court officials will be a severe setback to the effective functioning of the courts which are already backlogged with millions of cases and need experienced court administrators to ensure cases move expeditiously through the judicial process,” said Greg Chen, senior director of government relations for the American Immigration Lawyers Association, which represents the nation’s immigration lawyers.
The court system has been under immense pressure for years. The immigration court backlog ballooned to more than three million cases at the end of 2024 fiscal year, according to the Congressional Research Service.
A correction was made on
Jan. 20, 2025
:
An earlier version of this article, relying on incorrect information from Mary Cheng, misstated how long Ms. Cheng had been with the Executive Office of Immigration Review before her firing. She had been with the department since 2009, not 2001.
When we learn of a mistake, we acknowledge it with a correction. If you spot an error, please let us know at nytnews@nytimes.com.Learn moreShow more
Jan. 20, 2025, 7:11 p.m. ET3 hours ago
Among the Biden executive actions rescinded by Trump include an order that directed the federal government to prioritize racial equity in its policy making.
Jan. 20, 2025, 6:56 p.m. ET3 hours ago
Michael Crowley covers diplomacy and the State Department and traveled to dozens of foreign countries with Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken.
Marco Rubio is confirmed by Senate as secretary of state.
The Senate confirmed Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida, on Monday as America’s 72nd secretary of state, putting a former political rival of President Trump at the helm of American diplomacy.
Mr. Rubio, 53, was unanimously confirmed in a 99-to-0 vote, becoming the first Latino to occupy the job and Mr. Trump’s first cabinet secretary to be confirmed.
In his last act as a sitting senator, Mr. Rubio voted for himself, giving the Senate clerks a thumbs up as colleagues from both parties applauded.
Mr. Rubio’s mainstream views and friendly relations with Democrats paved the way for the unanimous vote. Senator Chuck Schumer, the Democratic leader, said beforehand that while he disagreed with many of Mr. Rubio’s positions, “it is important for the new administration to have a Senate confirm its secretary of state as soon as possible, so I’ll vote yes.” Every Senate Democrat followed suit.
As he replaces Antony J. Blinken in the job, Mr. Rubio confronts a daunting list of foreign policy tests. They include the war in Ukraine, a fragile cease-fire in Gaza and, in what Mr. Rubio calls the century’s defining challenge, China’s global ambitions.
But perhaps his biggest hurdle will be managing his relationship with Mr. Trump, whose temperament and worldview are very different from his own. Over three terms as a senator, Mr. Rubio was known for his hawkish foreign policy views with a heavy emphasis on human rights. Mr. Trump is a skeptic of foreign entanglements and takes a transactional approach to the world.
Senator Jim Risch, Republican of Idaho, the top Republican on the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, called Mr. Rubio “a principled, action-oriented chief diplomat” capable of taking on American adversaries like Russia, China and Iran.
Foreign diplomats will also closely study the relationship between the president and Mr. Rubio, given that they clashed with memorable bitterness as rivals in the 2016 Republican presidential primaries. Mr. Trump was never in sync with his first secretary of state, Rex W. Tillerson, and fired him over social media after a little more than a year in the role.
Mr. Rubio was born in Miami in 1971 to parents who left Cuba for the United States in 1956, shortly before Fidel Castro took power in the island’s communist revolution. His father worked as a bartender and his mother as a hotel housekeeper, and the family spent several years in Las Vegas before returning to Miami. Mr. Rubio graduated from the University of Florida in 1993 and then earned a law degree from the University of Miami. He served in the Florida House of Representatives, including as its speaker, from 2000 to 2008.
Mr. Rubio then won a 2010 election for Senate and arrived in Washington amid talk that an energetic young Latino from Florida could make a formidable presidential candidate. He made an early name as a proponent of bipartisan compromise on immigration and promoted an interventionist U.S. foreign policy with a special distaste for repressive dictatorships like the one that Mr. Castro imposed on his parents’ native Cuba.
But when he sought the presidency in 2016, he met a roadblock in the form of Mr. Trump, who called him a scripted Washington insider and ridiculed his stature with the nickname “Little Marco.” Mr. Rubio’s arguments that Mr. Trump was unsuited for the presidency fell flat.
But Mr. Rubio became a defender of Mr. Trump and continued to hone expertise as a member of Senate committees on foreign relations and intelligence. He also earned the respect of his Democratic colleagues, including the senior Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations panel, Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire.
“While we may not always agree, I believe he has the skills, knowledge and qualifications to be secretary of state,” Ms. Shaheen said of Mr. Rubio before voting to confirm him. “Given the uncertainty around the globe right now, it is in America’s interest not to skip a beat, and to fill this role immediately.”
At his confirmation hearing earlier this month, he pledged to take a more “realistic” view of American interests abroad. He also called for ending the war in Ukraine, expressed strong support for Israel, and said that countering Chinese power would be among his top priorities.
Mr. Rubio stopped short at his hearing of backing Mr. Trump’s talk that the United States should purchase or even seize Greenland. But as senators congratulated Mr. Rubio during the vote, several quips about the Arctic territory, which is controlled by Denmark, could be overheard from the gallery above.Show more
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Jan. 20, 2025, 6:55 p.m. ET3 hours ago
The event is abruptly over as Trump and his family leave.
Jan. 20, 2025, 6:54 p.m. ET3 hours ago
Trump loves handing out Sharpies he’s used to sign things, and now he’s throwing them into the crowd.
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Jan. 20, 2025, 6:54 p.m. ET3 hours ago
The next one prevents “government censorship of free speech,” and then finally a directive against the “weaponization of government” against “political adversaries of the previous administration.”
Jan. 20, 2025, 6:54 p.m. ET3 hours ago
Signing executive orders and pardons are two of the parts of the job that Trump loves most. They are unilateral, instantaneous displays of power and authority.
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Jan. 20, 2025, 6:53 p.m. ET3 hours ago
Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida, has been confirmed as the 72nd secretary of state in a 99-0 vote. After casting a vote for himself, Rubio gave the Senate clerks a thumbs-up while a small bipartisan group of senators around him applauded.
Jan. 20, 2025, 6:55 p.m. ET3 hours ago
As fellow senators congratulated Rubio during the vote, several quips about Greenland could be overheard from the gallery above. The 99-0 vote represented the support of every U.S. senator because the Ohio Senate seat that belonged to Vice President J.D. Vance is now vacant.
Jan. 20, 2025, 6:52 p.m. ET3 hours ago
The aide providing these orders is Will Scharf, the staff secretary and a former Trump personal lawyer.
Jan. 20, 2025, 6:51 p.m. ET3 hours ago
Trump signs an executive order requiring federal employees to return to full-time, in-person work. Some of Trump’s advisers who are focused on cutting the number of federal civil servants have said that requiring employees to come work in offices would result in voluntary departures.
Jan. 20, 2025, 6:51 p.m. ET3 hours ago
Huge cheers as Trump signs the order withdrawing from the Paris climate treaty.
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Jan. 20, 2025, 6:50 p.m. ET3 hours ago
Trump signs an executive action rescinding 78 of Biden’s executive actions, according to one of his aides who picked up on the microphone.
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Jan. 20, 2025, 6:49 p.m. ET3 hours ago
Trump has just signed an order preventing additional regulations until he controls the government in full. The third is a freeze on all federal hiring.
Jan. 20, 2025, 6:45 p.m. ET3 hours ago
The families of some of the hostages kidnapped from Israel have been standing in a line next to Trump as he has talked about a variety of other topics. Trump stops to talk to some of them as he walks to the small desk onstage.
Jan. 20, 2025, 6:44 p.m. ET3 hours ago
Trump makes his most explicit point on retribution so far today. He says he will have the government preserve records related to investigations and make “abuses” public.
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Jan. 20, 2025, 6:43 p.m. ET3 hours ago
The lawyer for Enrique Tarrio, the former leader of the Proud Boys who is serving a 22-year sentence on a seditious conspiracy conviction connected to Jan. 6, said Tarrio is currently being processed for release from a federal prison in Louisiana. Even though Trump has not yet formally granted clemency to Jan. 6 defendants, the lawyer, Nayib Hassan, said Tarrio could be out of prison by as early as Monday night.
Jan. 20, 2025, 6:49 p.m. ET3 hours ago
Lawyers for other Proud Boys convicted with Tarrio on sedition charges have also been called from their cells this evening to sign release papers, according to defense lawyers and Condemned USA, a group that has provided legal funds and advocacy for Jan. 6 defendants.
Jan. 20, 2025, 6:40 p.m. ET3 hours ago
This is the part that Trump likes best: campaigning and holding rallies. Some who were in touch with him throughout the transition said he didn’t yet seem especially focused on governing. The rubber is about to hit the road.
Jan. 20, 2025, 6:37 p.m. ET3 hours ago
Trump is now trashing Jack Smith, the special counsel who indicted him. He asks if Smith was pardoned and then asks if people are aware Biden pardoned his family members.
Jan. 20, 2025, 6:37 p.m. ET3 hours ago
Trump says he will withdraw from the Paris agreement, the pact among almost all nations to fight climate change.
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Jan. 20, 2025, 6:35 p.m. ET3 hours ago
This day has been a reintroduction of sorts for Barron. Eight years ago, he was a kid and his mother worked hard to shield him from the public. Now he is seen as a next-generation MAGA mascot, hobnobbing with billionaires and enjoying a hero’s welcome at his father’s political rally.
Jan. 20, 2025, 6:32 p.m. ET4 hours ago
Trump reiterates he wants no taxes on tips.
Jan. 20, 2025, 6:32 p.m. ET4 hours ago
Trump says he will soon revoke nearly 80 executive actions put forth by the Biden administration. “They’ll all be null and void,” Trump says.
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Jan. 20, 2025, 6:31 p.m. ET4 hours ago
The acting head of the U.S. immigration court system, along with three other key leaders of the court system, were fired soon after the Trump administration took office on Monday, according to three people familiar with the matter.
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Jan. 20, 2025, 6:30 p.m. ET4 hours ago
In renaming Denali for McKinley, Trump invokes a presidential idol
President Trump announced on Monday that he would sign an executive order renaming the tallest mountain in North America as Mount McKinley, undoing a 2015 decision that had restored the peak’s Alaska Native name, Denali.
The decision appears to reflect Mr. Trump’s increasingly public admiration for William McKinley, the 25th president. In the final months of the campaign, Mr. Trump invoked Mr. McKinley and his support of high tariffs, calling him a “a great but highly underrated president.”
The name change is likely to face some pushback in Alaska, where politicians and Alaska Natives alike have long favored calling the mountain Denali. The name, given by the Koyukon Athabascans, translates to “the great one” or the “high one.”
Mr. McKinley first championed tariffs as a member of the House of Representatives in the late 19th century. He also oversaw the expansion of American territories, including through the forced annexation of Hawaii, as well as the empowerment of wealthy industrialists.
In 1896, as news spread that Mr. McKinley had won his first term, a prospector exploring the mountain range declared that the tallest peak should be named in honor of the new president — a decision codified in 1917. (Mr. McKinley, assassinated in the first year of his second term, never stepped foot in Alaska.)
The mountain, which stretches more than 20,000 feet high, has been informally known as Denali for decades and, in 1975, Alaskans began to push for a formal name change.
Lawmakers from Ohio, the home state of Mr. McKinley, repeatedly objected to efforts to legislatively change the name, until President Barack Obama used his executive power to restore the Denali name in 2015.
Both Senators Lisa Murkowski and Dan Sullivan have expressed support for calling the mountain Denali, according to The Anchorage Daily News.
“I strongly disagree with the President’s decision on Denali,” Ms. Murkowski, the chair of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee, said in a statement on Monday. “Our nation’s tallest mountain, which has been called Denali for thousands of years, must continue to be known by the rightful name bestowed by Alaska’s Koyukon Athabascans, who have stewarded the land since time immemorial.”Show more
Jan. 20, 2025, 6:29 p.m. ET4 hours ago
Barron Trump has become a cult hero to the MAGA base, receiving the longest applause of any of the Trumps.
Jan. 20, 2025, 6:28 p.m. ET4 hours ago
Barron Trump stands at his father’s request, exhibiting some of his dad’s flash by pointing at his father, waving his hands and giving a thumbs up. The crowd is cheering.
Jan. 20, 2025, 6:27 p.m. ET4 hours ago
Trump says he’s about to sign executive orders in the arena, which we knew was coming. It still underscores how much the new president combines wrestling-style theatrics with governing.
Jan. 20, 2025, 6:24 p.m. ET4 hours ago
Trump moves seamlessly from talking about the hostages kidnapped by Hamas in Israel and the Jan. 6 “hostages” he plans to pardon — meaning the people imprisoned for their role in the storming of the Capitol.
Jan. 20, 2025, 6:23 p.m. ET4 hours ago
Trump begins his remarks by saying he will sign pardons for the Jan. 6th rioters tonight.
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And tonight I’m going to be signing on the J6 hostages — pardons to get them out. And as soon as I leave, I’m going to the Oval Office and we’ll be signing pardons for a lot of people. A lot of people.
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Jan. 20, 2025, 6:06 p.m. ET4 hours ago
Reporting from the Capitol
Senate Armed Services Committee rushes through Hegseth’s nomination along party lines.
Republicans moved behind closed doors on Monday to speed the nomination of Pete Hegseth, President Trump’s nominee for defense secretary, to the Senate floor, brushing aside the objections of Democrats who have raised concerns about his personal conduct.
In a private vote, the Senate Armed Services Committee approved Mr. Hegseth’s nomination strictly along party lines on a vote of 14 to 13, with Republicans voting as a bloc to move it to the floor and Democrats unanimously opposed.
Democrats on the panel had tried to delay the vote amid deep concerns about allegations that have been raised about Mr. Hegseth’s conduct. But their efforts to slow his march toward confirmation to allow more time to investigate those claims were unsuccessful.
Shortly after Mr. Trump chose him to lead the Pentagon, Mr. Hegseth faced a raft of allegations of personal misconduct, including an accusation of sexual assault and reports of public drunkenness and financial mismanagement.
During his confirmation hearing, Mr. Hegseth denounced the claims that he sexually assaulted a woman in California and had been severely intoxicated in public as “anonymous smears.” Mr. Hegseth reached a legal settlement with his accuser in the sexual assault case, which included a nondisclosure agreement that barred her from speaking about it publicly. He was not charged in the case.
Because Mr. Hegseth’s accusers have, to date, remained anonymous, Republicans refused to let them upset their push for his quick confirmation.
“All day, I’ve been hearing about allegations,” Senator Roger Wicker, Republican of Mississippi and the chairman of the panel, said Monday before the panel’s vote.
“That sort of thing certainly is not going to stop us from sending the nomination on to the full Senate,” he said, adding, “If they were substantiated and taken seriously, we’d look at them.”
Sharon LaFraniere contributed reporting.Show more
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Jan. 20, 2025, 6:01 p.m. ET4 hours ago
The White House website got a quick Trump makeover on Monday.
President Trump’s administration quickly put its imprint on the official White House website on Monday, ushering out the Biden years with a new landing page that declared “America Is Back.”
The changes on the website — whitehouse.gov — were underway by the time Mr. Trump finished his inaugural address inside the Capitol Rotunda on Monday afternoon. The digital face-lift continued throughout the day.
Replacing a website that on Monday morning had been a colorful, video-rich homage to President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s accomplishments and record, the Trump administration introduced a simpler website with a dark blue background.
As of Monday evening, the website included a rundown of Mr. Trump’s early actions in office, a list of priorities for his presidency, and brief biographies of his cabinet nominees.
The differences were stark. Gone was talk of “tackling the climate crisis,” replaced with a pledge to end “policies of climate extremism.”
Out were Biden administration boasts that the White House had “forged historic partnerships” and “restored American leadership.” In was a promise that the United States would “no longer be beholden to foreign organizations.”
“Every single day I will be fighting for you with every breath in my body,” read a message on the homepage, above a rendering of Mr. Trump’s signature. “I will not rest until we have delivered the strong, safe and prosperous America that our children deserve and that you deserve.”
The replacement of the website is a digital tradition that follows the swearing-in of every new president. Before Mr. Biden took office on Jan. 20, 2021, replacing Mr. Trump after his first term, the website carried a banner that said “Promises Made, Promises Kept” and highlighted Mr. Trump’s work to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and help American workers.
By that evening, a new, bare-bones homepage had appeared showing Mr. Biden at a lectern, hands folded, in front of a large American flag.
Robert Jimison contributed reporting.Show more
Jan. 20, 2025, 5:50 p.m. ET4 hours ago
Biden commutes prison sentence of Leonard Peltier, an Indigenous rights activist convicted in F.B.I. killings.
President Biden commuted the prison sentence of Leonard Peltier, an imprisoned Native American rights activist, using his final minutes of presidential power on Monday to free a man who has spent nearly 50 years in federal prison after he was convicted of murder in connection with the killing of two F.B.I. agents.
Supporters of Mr. Peltier, who include tribal leaders, lawmakers and global figures, have long pushed for his release, arguing that he was unjustly convicted after an unfair trial. But former and current F.B.I. officials, including Christopher Wray, the agency director, resisted the commutation as a betrayal of the dead officers.
Mr. Peltier, 80, is in poor health and partially blind, after suffering bouts of Covid-19, an aortic aneurysm, diabetes and a stroke. The commutation, Mr. Biden said in the grant issued shortly before President-elect Donald J. Trump took his oath of office, will allow Mr. Peltier to serve the remainder of his sentence in home confinement.
“If there were ever a case that merited compassionate release, Leonard Peltier’s was it,” said Senator Brian Schatz of Hawaii, the top Democrat on the Senate Indian Affairs Committee, who has long championed a pardon for Mr. Peltier. “President Biden did the right thing by showing this aging man in poor health mercy and allowing him to return home to spend whatever days he has remaining with his loved ones.”
Mr. Peltier, a citizen of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians, received two life sentences in connection with a shootout between federal agents and tribal rights activists in 1975, which left two F.B.I. agents and one activist dead. Mr. Peltier, part of a movement dedicated to upholding Native American treaty rights with the American government, has admitted to participating in the shootout in self-defense, but says he did not kill either agent.
“This last-second, disgraceful act by then-President Biden, which does not change Peltier’s guilt but does release him from prison, is cowardly and lacks accountability,” said Natalie Bara, president of the F.B.I. Agents Association, a private nonprofit that serves the bureau’s current and former special agents. “It is a cruel betrayal to the families and colleagues of these fallen agents and is a slap in the face of law enforcement.
Mr. Wray had also argued against granting any form of clemency in the case. And on Monday, Attorney General Marty Jackley of South Dakota said his office “strongly opposes this action and has in recent months argued against any change in the defendant’s sentence.”
In the waning days of the Biden administration, as the president granted thousands of pardons, tribal leaders and Democratic lawmakers intensified their yearslong push for Mr. Biden to include Mr. Peltier.
His supporters said that his trial was unjust, pointing to exculpatory evidence used in other trials related to the shootout that was excluded from Mr. Peltier’s. The U.S. attorney whose office oversaw Mr. Peltier’s prosecution has also joined an array of global and federal leaders, including the Dalai Lama, in calling for his release.
Mr. Peltier had parole denied repeatedly, including in July. But he remained “a leader of our people, and an elder of our people,” said Nick Tilsen, the founder and chief executive of NDN Collective, an Indigenous rights organization. “It wasn’t just about his freedom. It was about freedom for Indian people.”
Devlin Barrett, Mark Walker, Mattathias Schwartz, and Rachel Nostrant contributed reporting.
A correction was made on
Jan. 20, 2025
:
An earlier version of this article misstated the action taken by President Biden. Mr. Biden commuted Mr. Peltier’s sentence. He didn’t issue a pardon.
When we learn of a mistake, we acknowledge it with a correction. If you spot an error, please let us know at nytnews@nytimes.com.Learn moreShow more
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Jan. 20, 2025, 5:49 p.m. ET4 hours ago
Senators are set to vote later this evening to confirm Marco Rubio as secretary of state. A number of Democrats have said they will support his nomination.
Jan. 20, 2025, 5:35 p.m. ET4 hours ago
Marco Rubio’s nomination to be secretary of state has been approved unanimously by the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, according to a joint statement by the committee’s top Republican and Democratic members. “We hope to see his nomination pass the full Senate without delay,” said senators Jim Risch, Republican of Idaho, and Jeanne Shaheen, Democrat of New Hampshire,
Jan. 20, 2025, 5:34 p.m. ET4 hours ago
The parade announcer is now paying tribute to people who provided aid during the attempt on Trump’s life, calling out Corey Comperatore, who was killed in the shooting in Butler, Pa.
Jan. 20, 2025, 5:29 p.m. ET5 hours ago
Trump and his crowd are chanting “Fight! Fight! Fight!” Those were his words when he got to his feet after being shot at in Butler, Pa.
Jan. 20, 2025, 5:26 p.m. ET5 hours ago
Trump and the first lady have descended from an upper tier of the arena to the stage.
Jan. 20, 2025, 5:23 p.m. ET5 hours ago
The Senate Armed Services Committee voted to advance the nomination of Pete Hegseth, President Trump’s pick to serve as defense secretary, on a party line vote of 14 to 13, Senator Tim Kaine, Democrat of Virginia and a member of the panel, told reporters as he exited the committee room.
Jan. 20, 2025, 5:16 p.m. ET5 hours ago
Trump’s children have joined the stage. The crowd has let out a huge cheer, again, for Barron, who has quite a following.
Jan. 20, 2025, 5:13 p.m. ET5 hours ago
There is a heavy police presence gathering outside the D.C. jail, and the number of supporters has grown to several dozen as they await a pardon for the Jan. 6 defendants.
Jan. 20, 2025, 5:06 p.m. ET5 hours ago
Theodore Schleifer and Madeleine Ngo
Reporting from Washington
Ramaswamy will bow out of the efficiency initiative and run for governor in Ohio.
The advisory group called the Department of Government Efficiency is losing one of its leaders before it even begins.
Vivek Ramaswamy, whom President Trump named in November as co-leader of the initiative alongside Elon Musk, will quit the project because he plans to run for governor of Ohio.
“Vivek Ramaswamy played a critical role in helping us create DOGE,” said Anna Kelly, a spokeswoman for the White House, adding, “We thank him immensely for his contributions over the last two months and expect him to play a vital role in making America great again!”
Mr. Ramaswamy’s position in Mr. Trump’s orbit has been tenuous for weeks as he irritated the president, several of Mr. Trump’s aides and, crucially, Mr. Musk. Mr. Musk has been sharply critical of Mr. Ramaswamy in private conversations.
Mr. Ramaswamy plans to announce his bid for governor of Ohio next week, according to a person familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.
Mr. Trump announced the two billionaires to be co-leaders of the project, but it was an unequal partnership from the start. Mr. Musk has a much greater amount of wealth and a higher profile, and a top lieutenant of Mr. Musk, Steve Davis, largely runs the project.
Some allies of Mr. Ramaswamy insisted until recently that he was not immediately leaving his position. Mr. Ramaswamy has told others close to him that he would not begin a bid in Ohio until much later in 2025, and so he was working to explore a campaign for governor even as he remained a partner with Mr. Musk in the project.
But Mr. Ramaswamy recently came to see the idea of coleading the efficiency effort and running for office at the same time as unworkable, the person familiar with the matter said. The governor’s seat is up for election in November 2026, and officials at the advisory group are expected to offer recommendations for reducing federal spending by July 4, 2026.
The decision came after Gov. Mike DeWine of Ohio announced that Lt. Gov. Jon Husted would fill the Senate seat being vacated by Vice President JD Vance. Mr. Ramaswamy was also a contender for the vacancy, and Mr. Trump recently told him that he would be a good fit.
It also followed Mr. Ramaswamy’s comments blaming an American culture that venerated “mediocrity over excellence” for top tech companies often hiring foreign-born engineers. People close to Mr. Trump said he was unhappy about Mr. Ramaswamy wading into the online debate over H-1B visas among conservatives, many of whom saw Mr. Ramaswamy’s comments as critical of American workers.
The Department of Government Efficiency is not an official government department, despite its name. In November, Mr. Trump said the entity would provide outside advice on how to cut spending and work closely with White House budget officials.
Mr. Musk arrived in Washington for Mr. Trump’s inauguration and was seen spending time on Sunday afternoon at the SpaceX headquarters in downtown Washington, which is where most of Mr. Musk’s and Mr. Ramaswamy’s team operates. Mr. Ramaswamy is also in Washington for Mr. Trump’s inauguration.
Mr. Ramaswamy had enthusiastically merged his brand with that of the project. He changed his biography on Mr. Musk’s social media platform, X, to “small-government crusader” and shared a picture of himself at the beach reading Congressional Budget Office reports on options for reducing the deficit.
In November, Mr. Trump initially said that the “Great Elon Musk” would work alongside “American Patriot Vivek Ramaswamy” on the project. “Together, these two wonderful Americans will pave the way for my Administration to dismantle Government Bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure Federal Agencies,” he said at the time.
On Monday morning, Mr. Ramaswamy posted a message on X that said “a new dawn,” along with a photo of him and Mr. Musk.Show more
Jan. 20, 2025, 5:06 p.m. ET5 hours ago
The Senate Intelligence Committee has approved the nomination of John Ratcliffe to serve as the director of the Central Intelligence Agency by a vote of 14-3, according to Congressional officials. His nomination will head to the floor for a full vote by the Senate.
Jan. 20, 2025, 5:03 p.m. ET5 hours ago
The Trump team has started descending on the arena. Trump legal adviser Boris Epshteyn is standing on the viewing stand created for the indoor parade.
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Jan. 20, 2025, 5:03 p.m. ET5 hours ago
A stack of executive orders are on a table at the Capital One Arena.
Jan. 20, 2025, 4:51 p.m. ET5 hours ago
The Trump administration is formally announcing that Vivek Ramaswamy, one of the leaders of the Trump Department of Government Efficiency, is leaving his post alongside Elon Musk. Ramaswamy has been surrounded by speculation about whether he planned to actually steer the department, also known as DOGE, or run for governor in Ohio.
Jan. 20, 2025, 4:51 p.m. ET5 hours ago
“Vivek Ramaswamy played a critical role in helping us create DOGE,” said Anna Kelly, a spokeswoman for the White House, adding, “We thank him immensely for his contributions over the last two months and expect him to play a vital role in making America great again!”
Jan. 20, 2025, 4:34 p.m. ET6 hours ago
Musk now has a badge to enter the White House complex and is likely to get a West Wing office, Jonathan Swan, Charlie Savage, Theodore Schliefer and I reported today. Previously, he had been expected to be in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building.
Jan. 20, 2025, 4:14 p.m. ET6 hours ago
Stephen Miller, White House deputy chief of staff, just shared a warning on X to migrants thinking of crossing into the country: “All illegal aliens seeking entry into the United States should turn back now. Anyone entering the United States without authorization faces prosecution and expulsion,” he said. Earlier today, the Trump administration shut down an app that allowed migrants to schedule appointments to enter at legal ports of entry.
Jan. 20, 2025, 4:31 p.m. ET6 hours ago
The term “expulsion” refers to the rapid removal of migrants at the border through a public health authority, known as Title 42. We know that Miller and other Trump advisers have for months considered using a public disaster rule at the border and have searched for diseases that they could use to justify the action. It is unclear if they will still try to use that public health authority to shutter the border or rely on another policy.
Jan. 20, 2025, 3:59 p.m. ETJan. 20, 2025
Trump promised to end electric vehicle ‘mandates.’ Here’s what that means.
President Trump’s promise to end electric vehicles “mandates” using executive action on Monday reflects the view among Republicans that Americans are being coerced into giving up their gasoline cars. But no law or regulation forces anyone to buy an electric car.
Most Biden-era policies were incentives, including $7,500 tax credits for electric vehicle buyers and subsidies and loans that automakers and suppliers could use to build battery factories.
The Biden administration’s goal was for half of all new cars sold by the early 2030s to be electric, meaning that half would still run on fossil fuels.
Existing clean air and fuel economy standards arguably forced automakers to sell more electric cars to comply, but it was up to the automakers to determine what technology to use, and they had until the end of the decade to do so.
General Motors, Hyundai, Volkswagen and other automakers have invested hundreds of billions of dollars to set up assembly lines for electric vehicles and produce batteries domestically. Regardless of what governments do, they have a strong interest in continuing to sell electric cars.
Electric vehicles are also popular with buyers while sales of cars that run on fossil fuels are fading. Hybrid-electric and fully electric vehicles gained 4 percentage points of market share in the United States during the third quarter compared to a year earlier, according to a report this month by the Alliance for Automotive Innovation, which represents most major automakers. The gains came at the expense of gasoline and diesel vehicles.
California and some other states have also required that all cars sold by 2035 be electric. But even that rule allows plug-in hybrids to qualify if they are capable of traveling 50 miles on battery power alone.
The incoming administration is expected to join lawsuits challenging California’s right to set its own standards for motor vehicles.Show more
Jan. 20, 2025, 3:51 p.m. ETJan. 20, 2025
Helene Cooper and Eric Schmitt
Reporting from Washington
A new portrait of General Milley was removed from the Pentagon.
The Pentagon on Monday removed a portrait of Gen. Mark A. Milley, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, from a corridor of the building filled with paintings of all of his predecessors.
The decision to take down the portrait was an early salvo by the new administration against a military establishment that President Trump has assailed for a variety of perceived offenses.
The portrait of the now retired General Milley went up last week in the last days of the Biden administration. Less than two hours after Mr. Trump took the oath of office, Pentagon officials had taken it down. A U.S. official said that “the White House” ordered the removal. The official declined to speak further.
Mr. Trump has called General Milley “a woke train wreck.” The president has complained in particular about the general’s calls to his Chinese counterpart during the waning weeks of Mr. Trump’s first term, an act the president, in a post on Truth Social, called “so egregious that, in times gone by, the punishment would have been DEATH!”
President Joseph R. Biden Jr. issued a pre-emptive pardon for General Milley before he left office.
Taking down the general’s portrait is unprecedented; the position of chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is viewed as apolitical.
Jan. 20, 2025, 3:46 p.m. ETJan. 20, 2025
J. David GoodmanEdgar Sandoval and Reyes Mata III
Reporting from the Texas cities of McAllen, Eagle Pass and El Paso.
On a quiet U.S.-Mexico border, there is a feeling of disquieted anticipation.
Sheriff Tom Schmerber, an elected Democrat in Maverick County, Texas, was watching on a television in his office near the U.S.-Mexico border on Monday as President Trump delivered his second inaugural address.
“It’s all about common sense,” Mr. Trump was saying, as he promised drastic changes to the nation’s immigration system.
“I hope so,” Mr. Schmerber replied to the television, with some skepticism.
There were immediate changes — especially for migrants with pending appointments to meet with immigration officials — but along much of the border, already quieted by recent Biden administration policy changes, the dominant feeling was anxious anticipation, tinged with confusion.
When Mr. Trump said from the U.S. Capitol that he would send federal troops to the border, Sheriff Schmerber wondered how they would operate legally.
“The soldiers cannot go on private property unless they have permission of the owners,” he said.
And the new president’s portrayal of a nation on its knees might have seemed out of place in Eagle Pass, Texas, which had been ground zero for Gov. Greg Abbott’s clashes with the Biden administration. National Guard troops stood watch in a cold wind in a park, but all was quiet. There had been no illegal crossings from Mexico, or much of anything in recent days.
“It’s pretty dead,” said Spc. Blaine Roldan. Nearby, a tan stray dog the soldiers nicknamed “Pooper” slowly wagged his tail for food not far from a wall of shipping containers and concertina wire installed at Mr. Abbott’s direction.
Hope turned to disappointment for many migrants as they found that their long-sought appointments to meet with federal immigration officials had been suddenly canceled under Mr. Trump’s new administration.
Standing on American soil, steps from the international bridge connecting McAllen, Texas, with Hidalgo, Mexico, Martin Gomez, 45, said he felt defeated by the closure of an app, called CBP One, for migrants seeking to claim asylum and worried that his appointment, scheduled for Aug. 28 in Orlando, Fla., would not happen and that he would have to return to Colombia.
“I think people are going to start crossing illegally,” he said. “At least with CBP One, the government knew where people were going.”
In McAllen, a city with a large population of families with documented and undocumented immigrants, U.S. citizens and migrants with more tenuous holds on the United States, more than a hundred residents gathered to protest Mr. Trump’s incoming administration.
“He’s always portrayed the border as a negative place and immigrants as criminals. I’m here to say that’s not true,” said Karla America Hernandez, 18. “I refer to Martin Luther King. Let’s live in peace.”
In El Paso, Humvees from the Texas National Guard and Texas state police trucks were stationed along the international border Monday, parked and facing the Mexican city of Juarez. Officials said the area had been quiet so far on this Inauguration Day, but that they had orders to keep people away from the river.
“I thought there would be more undocumented people around the bridges, but there was not many,” said Andres Hernandez, 60, a U.S. citizen, as he walked back into El Paso just minutes after Mr. Trump was sworn in.
“It’s very peaceful. We even thought that they would be closing the bridges, but that has not happened,” Mr. Hernandez said.Show more
Jan. 20, 2025, 3:45 p.m. ETJan. 20, 2025
Lisa FriedmanBrad PlumerRebecca F. Elliott and Eric Lipton
Trump announces a raft of measures to promote fossil fuels.
Hours after his inauguration on Monday, President Trump signed a barrage of executive orders to grant his administration new powers to promote fossil fuels and to withdraw support for renewable energy, signaling that the United States government would no longer fight climate change.
Mr. Trump ordered the withdrawal of the United States from the Paris Agreement on global warming for a second time. He initiated plans to open vast areas of public land and federal waters, including fragile wilderness in Alaska, for oil drilling and mining. He ordered the elimination of government offices and programs aimed at protecting poor communities from pollution. And he said he would repeal regulations aimed at promoting electric vehicles and would halt approvals of new wind farms in federal waters.
Mr. Trump also declared a national energy emergency despite the fact that the United States is currently producing more oil and natural gas than any other country. He was the first president to do so, claiming that this declaration could help speed the development of pipelines, refineries, mines and other facilities for fossil fuels.
“We’re going to drill, baby, drill and do all of the things that we wanted to,” Mr. Trump told a cheering crowd of supporters at the Capital One Arena in Washington shortly before he began signing some of the orders.
And, he said, “We aren’t going to do the wind thing.”
Mr. Trump’s dramatic pivot to fossil fuels comes after the hottest year in recorded history and as scientists say the world is running out of time to keep global warming at relatively low levels. Last year, emissions from burning coal, oil and gas helped push average global temperatures past 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, above preindustrial levels. Scientists have said that every fraction of a degree of warming above that level brings greater risks from deadly heat waves, wildfires, drought, storms and species extinction.
Many of Mr. Trump’s energy policies cannot be achieved with the mere stroke of a pen because some would require action by federal agencies or Congress and others could face legal challenges. He also could not, by fiat, rename the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, or Denali in Alaska, the highest mountain peak in North America, to Mount McKinley. Mr. Trump promised to do both.
But taken together, the declarations underscore how Mr. Trump views the world: oil and gas are symbols of strength and power, and plentiful fossil fuels will ensure that the United States is able to dominate allies and rivals alike. Unspoken was the fact that the country is historically the biggest source of the greenhouse gases that are dangerously heating the planet.
Instead, Mr. Trump said the United States had “the largest amount of oil and gas of any country on earth, and we are going to use it. We will bring prices down, fill our strategic reserve up again, right to the top, and export American energy all over the world.”
The remarks earned a standing ovation in the Capitol Rotunda, where Mr. Trump spoke, and applause at the Hay-Adams hotel in downtown Washington, where some of the country’s leading oil and gas executives popped champagne and ate mini Pop-Tart pastries with Mr. Trump’s image. The party was sponsored by Harold Hamm, the billionaire founder of Continental Resources, an oil company, who helped raise millions of dollars for Mr. Trump’s campaign.
Mr. Trump called the Paris Agreement, a pact among nearly 200 nations to curb greenhouse gases and avoid the worst impacts of global warming, “one-sided.” He said it was unfair that the United States would be expected to reduce its emissions while China is currently the world’s biggest polluter.
“The say we have to clean the air, but, yeah, the dirty air is dropping all over us, so what the hell are they talking about?” Mr. Trump asked.
In one executive order ending Biden administration efforts to consider climate change in all federal agencies, Mr. Trump declared that “climate extremism has exploded inflation and overburdened businesses with regulation.” In another Mr. Trump called for rolling back protections for a tiny fish known as the Delta smelt. Mr. Trump has blamed the water that is kept in Northern California to protect the smelt for water shortages during the fires in Los Angeles, something experts in the state said is inaccurate.
Another order directed the Department of Energy to restart reviews of new export terminals for liquefied natural gas, a process that the Biden administration had halted.
Mr. Trump’s agenda is a reverse image of his predecessor’s approach. Former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. called climate change an existential threat and said the United States had an obligation to lead the world in curbing fossil fuel pollution for the sake of generations to come.
Mr. Biden never sought an immediate end of coal, oil or gas. But he imposed regulations making it more expensive to operate coal plants, limited future drilling leases and signed laws that invested hundreds of billions of dollars in wind, solar, electric vehicles and other low-carbon technologies in order to lay the groundwork for a transition away from fossil fuels.
“We really moved the clean energy transition forward in a really huge way,” Deb Haaland, Mr. Biden’s interior secretary, said. Mr. Biden “really understood that he had a responsibility to do what he could for the climate crisis,” she said.
Mr. Trump’s efforts to reshape America’s energy landscape could bump up against market realities. U.S. oil production reached new heights last year, and natural gas prices fell to their lowest annual average on record, adjusted for inflation, according to the Energy Information Administration. While many oil and gas companies have asked for looser regulations, they have also said they are not looking to drastically increase output, as doing so most likely would weigh on prices, squeezing profits. On Monday, U.S. oil prices fell around 1 percent as details about Mr. Trump’s energy plans emerged.
“If there’s more energy production, you could see a decline in price from that,” said Jacques White, a petroleum engineer from Colorado, at Mr. Hamm’s party.
“Misguided, irrational energy policies are done,” said Jeff Eshelman, the chief executive of the Independent Petroleum Association of America, which represents oil and gas companies. “America’s vast resources will be unleashed responsibly.”
Some experts questioned whether Mr. Trump’s declaration of a national energy emergency would be more symbolic than substantive.
“It’s not clear what the emergency is,” said Michael Gerrard, director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University. “The U.S. is producing more oil and gas than ever before, more than any other country in the world, we have no gas lines, we have no widespread electricity blackouts.” He called the emergency order “mostly performative.”
In a call with reporters, a White House official said that the emergency declaration was motivated by the idea that U.S. energy costs were currently higher than they should be because of policy decisions by the Biden administration. Interest in artificial intelligence and a boom in data center construction have created an urgent need for more energy, the official said.
Legal experts have identified roughly 150 emergency powers that a president could invoke under certain conditions, such as suspending certain air pollution requirements or ordering the release of certain raw materials from strategic stockpiles. But many of the powers are relatively limited. In his first term, Mr. Trump proposed invoking certain emergency powers to keep unprofitable coal and nuclear plants from retiring, but that effort was eventually abandoned.
While it remained unclear which powers Mr. Trump might try to employ, his remarks on Monday suggested that he intended to try to test limits of presidential authority.
Some climate activists had pushed Mr. Biden to declare a national emergency around climate change, but legal experts concluded that doing so “wouldn’t really unlock major powers,” said Daniel Farber, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley.
On the campaign trail, Mr. Trump promised to unleash oil and gas production and eliminate the “Green New Deal,” his catchall phrase to mean Mr. Biden’s climate policies. Doing so, he promised, would cut grocery and energy prices in half within 18 months of his inauguration.
Environmental groups as well as a coalition of mayors and governors said on Monday that many states, cities and businesses would continue cutting planet-warming emissions on their own. But they warned that Mr. Trump could significantly slow progress.
“The climate crisis is a global issue that demands urgent action,” said Jonathan Pershing, a former deputy climate envoy under Mr. Biden. “Failure to act will lead to more wildfires, droughts, and harm to communities and businesses both in the United States and around the world.”
Mr. Trump ordered federal agencies to pause and review all further grant spending under the Inflation Reduction Act, a sweeping climate and clean energy bill that Mr. Biden signed into law in 2022.
In recent months, however, Biden administration officials have raced to finalize contracts for more than $96.7 billion, or 84 percent of the law’s grants for clean energy, meaning the money is essentially out the door. That includes $8.8 billion for state programs to help consumers buy energy-efficient appliances, $3 billion for cutting air pollution at U.S. ports and $9 billion to help rural electric providers switch from burning coal and gas to alternatives like wind, solar and nuclear power.
That still leaves roughly $11 billion in grants and other spending that has not been finalized, including money for agricultural conservation and a program aimed at helping to reduce pollution in disadvantaged communities.
At the same time, the vast majority of spending in the Inflation Reduction Act, potentially hundreds of billions of dollars, flows through tax credits that companies can claim if they use or manufacture carbon capture technology or various low-carbon energy sources, including wind, solar, batteries, hydrogen, nuclear and geothermal.
Those credits would not be affected by the executive order, and repealing them would require Congress to act. Some Republicans whose districts have benefited from the spending have said that at least some of the tax breaks should remain in place.
Mr. Trump, a longtime critic of wind power, also ordered a halt to government leasing for large wind farms in federal waters, pending further review.
The Biden administration has already approved 11 commercial-scale wind farms in the Atlantic Ocean. Some are currently under construction but others have been halted or faced delays because of inflation or supply-chain problems. Several Eastern states — including Massachusetts, New Jersey and New York — have set ambitious renewable energy targets and were hoping to build many more offshore wind farms this decade. Additional projects, however, would require federal approval.Show more
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Jan. 20, 2025, 3:42 p.m. ETJan. 20, 2025
Brian Driscoll, currently director of the F.B.I. field office in Newark, has been named interim director of the bureau, pending the confirmation of Kash Patel as permanent director, according to a list of appointees posted on the White House website.
Jan. 20, 2025, 3:40 p.m. ETJan. 20, 2025
Trump says he’ll take action to rename the Gulf of Mexico. It might not be that easy.
President Trump said in his inaugural address on Monday that he would soon take steps to rename the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America, drawing visible laughter from former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
“A short time from now, we are going to be changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico,” Mr. Trump vowed, repeating a pledge that has irritated Mexico’s leadership.
A chuckling Mrs. Clinton, who lost to Mr. Trump in the 2016 presidential election, looked down as she caught the giggles while seated a few feet behind Mr. Trump in the Capitol Rotunda.
Aides indicated that Mr. Trump was serious. A spokeswoman for the president, Karoline Leavitt, said on social media that efforts to rename the Gulf of Mexico would be part of a flurry of Day 1 executive actions.
The shores of the gulf, a 600,000-square-mile, semi-enclosed basin, are shared by Mexico and the United States. Six Mexican states and five American states border the gulf.
The U.S. Board on Geographic Names, part of the U.S. Geological Survey, is responsible for maintaining official geographic names in the United States. It says on its website that it “discourages name changes unless there is a compelling reason.”
The most important considerations for name changes are typically “local use and acceptance,” the website says.
The U.S. Geological Survey did not immediately reply to requests for comment on Mr. Trump’s speech on Monday. The chair of the Board on Geographic Names, Michael Tischler, declined to comment.
Mr. Trump has spoken openly about his desires for American expansion, refusing to rule out using military force to reclaim the Panama Canal or take control of Greenland when speaking at a news conference at his Mar-a-Lago residence in Palm Beach, Fla., this month. It was at that same news conference that he first floated a change in name to the Gulf of Mexico, musing that the phrase “Gulf of America” had “a beautiful ring.”
Even if the U.S. Geological Survey were to change the Gulf of Mexico’s official name in the United States, it is unclear if atlases or other governments would accept the change.
President Claudia Sheinbaum of Mexico has rejected Mr. Trump’s proposal, responding by jokingly suggesting that the United States be called Mexican America.
“It sounds pretty, no?” Ms. Sheinbaum said at a news conference two weeks ago.
The gulf gained its name more than a century before the founding of the United States. As early as the 16th century, the gulf’s name appeared on maps used by Spanish explorers.
Mr. Trump also said on Monday that he intended to rename Denali, which is in Alaska and is the tallest mountain in North America.
In 2015, President Barack Obama used executive powers to change the mountain’s name from Mount McKinley to Denali, an Alaska Native name.
The mountain had officially been called Mount McKinley for almost a century before Mr. Obama’s action.
“We will restore the name of a great president, William McKinley, to Mount McKinley, where it should be and where it belongs,” Mr. Trump said in his inaugural address, referring to the 25th president.Show more
Jan. 20, 2025, 3:10 p.m. ETJan. 20, 2025
After no Biden appointee agreed to take the job, Pentagon taps midlevel official as acting defense secretary.
Robert G. Salesses, a midlevel Pentagon official, will serve as acting defense secretary until a new secretary is confirmed by the Senate, the White House said on Monday.
The move to have a midlevel official take over, even temporarily, was unusual, but no Biden political appointees agreed to fill the job under Mr. Trump, Defense Department officials said, speaking on condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to speak publicly.
The Senate Armed Services Committee voted Monday to advance the nomination of Pete Hegseth, President Trump’s choice for the position, but the full Senate may not vote on the nomination until later in the week. The vote is expected to be close.
Typically in a transition, a senior politically appointed official from the outgoing administration would stay on as acting secretary until the Senate confirmed the new secretary. Robert O. Work, the deputy defense secretary at the end of the Obama administration, briefly served as acting secretary until Jim Mattis was confirmed as Mr. Trump’s first defense secretary.
Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III resigned effective upon Mr. Trump’s swearing in, as is typical. But no Biden political appointees agreed to fill in, even temporarily, the Defense Department officials said.
Mr. Salesses, a retired Marine Corps officer, is the deputy director of the Pentagon’s Washington-area headquarters services, which is focused on human resources, facilities and resource management.
According to his official Pentagon biography, Mr. Salesses manages annual resources of nearly $1.2 billion, and oversees nearly 4,000 civilian, military, and contractor personnel who provide a full range of financial, contracting, and security services.
Mr. Salesses, who on Monday received a classified intelligence briefing on threats and military missions typical of what’s presented to the secretary each day, previously served as the deputy assistant secretary of defense of continuity and mission assurance, where he oversaw some of the Pentagon’s most sensitive functions, including ensuring that the secretary and deputy secretary had the necessary means to receive and act on top-secret military orders.
Mr. Salesses has also served in top Defense Department policy jobs overseeing the Pentagon’s support for homeland defense missions and domestic crisis management. The uniformed leadership of the U.S. military, including Gen. C.Q. Brown Jr., the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the president’s top military adviser, remains unchanged as the Biden administration hands off to the incoming Trump administration.
Helene Cooper contributed reporting.Show more
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Jan. 20, 2025, 2:49 p.m. ETJan. 20, 2025
Trump orders the U.S. to exit the world’s main climate agreement.
President Trump on Monday signed an executive order to withdraw the United States from the Paris Agreement, the pact among almost all nations to fight climate change.
By withdrawing, the United States will join Iran, Libya and Yemen as the only four countries not party to the agreement, under which nations work together to keep global warming below levels that could lead to environmental catastrophe.
The move, one of several energy-related announcements in the hours following his inauguration, is yet another about-face in United States participation in global climate negotiations. During his first term Mr. Trump withdrew from the Paris accord, but then President Biden quickly rejoined in 2020 after winning the White House.
Scientists, activists and Democratic officials assailed the move as one that would deepen the climate crisis and backfire on American workers. Coupled with Mr. Trump’s other energy measures on Monday, withdrawal from the pact signals his administration’s determination to double down on fossil-fuel extraction and production, and to move away from clean-energy technologies like electric vehicles and power-generating wind turbines.
“If they want to be tough on China, don’t punish U.S. automakers and hard-working Americans by handing our clean-car keys to the Chinese,” said Gina McCarthy, former White House climate adviser and former head of the Environmental Protection Administration. “The United States must continue to show leadership on the international stage if we want to have any say in how trillions of dollars in financial investments, policies and decisions are made.”
On Monday Mr. Trump also signed a letter to the United Nations, which administers the pact, notifying the world body of the withdrawal. The withdrawal will become official one year after the submission of the letter.
U.S. efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions were already stalling in 2024, and Mr. Trump’s entry into office makes it increasingly unlikely the United States will live up to its ambitious pledges to cut them even further. Emissions dropped just a fraction last year, 0.2 percent, compared with the year earlier, according to estimates published this month by the Rhodium Group, a research firm.
Despite continued rapid growth in solar and wind power that was spurred by the previous administration’s signature climate legislation, the Inflation Reduction Act, emissions levels stayed relatively flat last year because demand for electricity surged nationwide, which led to a spike in the amount of natural gas burned by power plants.
The fact that emissions didn’t decline much means the United States is even further off-track from hitting Mr. Biden’s goal, announced last month under the auspices of the Paris Agreement, of slashing greenhouse gases 61 percent below 2005 levels by 2030. Scientists say all major economies would have to cut their emissions deeply this decade to keep global warming at relatively low levels.
In a scenario where Mr. Trump rolled back most of Mr. Biden’s climate policies, U.S. emissions might fall only 24 to 40 percent below 2005 levels by 2030, the Rhodium Group found.
“President Trump is choosing to begin his term pandering to the fossil fuel industry and its allies,” the Union of Concerned Scientists said in a statement. “His disgraceful and destructive decision is an ominous harbinger of what people in the United States should expect from him and his anti-science cabinet.”
Since 2005, United States emissions have fallen roughly 20 percent, a significant drop at a time when the economy has also expanded. But to meet its climate goals, U.S. emissions would need to decline nearly 10 times as fast each year as they’ve fallen over the past decade.
The United States is also a major exporter of emissions. Because of policies promoted by both Republicans and Democrats, the United States is now producing more crude oil and natural gas than any nation in history. Mr. Trump has vowed to further ramp up production and exports.
While the United States may not be party to the Paris Agreement, it will still be part of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, which hosts annual climate negotiations known as COPs. This year’s COP will be held in Brazil in November and nations will be announcing new pledges for emissions reductions.
One recent study by Climate Action Tracker, a research group, found that, if every country followed through on the pledges they have formally submitted so far, global average temperatures would be on track to rise roughly 2.6 degrees Celsius, or 4.7 degrees Fahrenheit, above preindustrial levels by the end of the century, well above the 1.5 degrees Celsius the Paris Agreement originally set as a goal.
“Trump’s irresponsibility is no surprise,” said Christiana Figueres, a Costa Rican diplomat and an architect of the Paris Agreement in 2015. “In time, Trump will not be around but history will point to him and his fossil fuel friends with no pardon.”
A correction was made on
Jan. 20, 2025
:
An earlier version of this article stated incorrectly the target for greenhouse gas reductions announced by former President Biden last month. The goal was to cut emissions by 61 percent below 2005 levels by 2030, not by 50 percent.
When we learn of a mistake, we acknowledge it with a correction. If you spot an error, please let us know at nytnews@nytimes.com.Learn moreShow more
Jan. 20, 2025, 2:32 p.m. ETJan. 20, 2025
James R. McHenry III, a career Justice Department official who serves in the immigration review section, has been named interim attorney general, according to a federal official with knowledge of the pick. He is not expected to serve long: The Senate Judiciary Committee is expected to vote Pam Bondi’s nomination out of committee on Wednesday and the full Senate could vote to confirm her shortly after.
Jan. 20, 2025, 2:34 p.m. ETJan. 20, 2025
Emil Bove, who has been tapped as the department’s No. 3, will temporarily serve as the deputy attorney general, the department’s No. 2 post, pending confirmation of Todd Blanche, who must be confirmed by the Senate.
Jan. 20, 2025, 2:31 p.m. ETJan. 20, 2025
Reporting from Tijuana, Mexico
‘We will be stranded.’ Migrants shocked after Trump cancels border appointments.
A sense of hopelessness and confusion spread among migrants at the El Chaparral border crossing in Tijuana on Monday as news came that the CBP One program had been abruptly canceled by President Trump. CBP One is an app that allowed migrants to schedule appointments at border ports of entry to present their asylum claims.
Dozens of migrants who stared at their phone screens trying to check whether their appointments were still valid found a crushing message: “Existing appointments have been canceled.”
“I am in shock,” said Maura Hernandez who received the news this morning as she arrived in Tijuana with her four small children from the state of Michoacán, one of Mexico’s most violent states. She had a scheduled appointment on Tuesday.
“I don’t know what is going to happen to us,” she said, adding that they had fled their homes amid rampant insecurity. “I had a whole plan and now life has made a horrible turn.”
Gustavo Selva from Venezuela had received the hopeful news of his scheduled appointment 21 days ago. Over the weekend, however, he received an email informing him it had been delayed until Feb. 9.
“We are so disappointed,” he said after reading the update on his phone.
By then he had already traveled to Tijuana from the southern state of Chiapas, where he had waited for seven months for his appointment to go through.
“We thought we could enter today without a problem; now we will be stranded here indefinitely,” Mr. Selva added.
Uncertainty and confusion reigned in this popular border crossing as more and more migrants read or heard the news, while many stayed in line saying they would wait until an immigration officer told them otherwise.
“This is so hard,” said Juan Antonio Nieto, who left El Salvador four months ago and had a scheduled appointment for Monday. “If the government does not let us in, we don’t know what we are going to do, we have no money to go back.
“But until someone tell us we can’t go in, we still have faith in God they will allow us in,” Mr. Nieto added.
A Mexican immigration officer said that as of 9:30 a.m. Monday morning, there had been “no logistical changes” to deal with migrants who had a scheduled appointment for today.”
Aline Corpus contributed reporting.Show more
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Jan. 20, 2025, 2:31 p.m. ETJan. 20, 2025
Mary Triny ZeaReporting from Panama City
In a statement posted on X, President José Raúl Mulino of Panama said that he roundly rejected the statements President Trump made during his inaugural address, namely that China is operating the Panama Canal and that the United States plans on taking it back. “The canal is and will continue to belong to Panama and its administration will continue to be under Panamanian control,” Mulino said.
Jan. 20, 2025, 2:08 p.m. ETJan. 20, 2025
Nonprofit groups sue Musk-led cost-cutting effort moments after Trump is sworn in.
Nonprofit groups filed three lawsuits against President Trump’s administration minutes after he took office on Monday, arguing that his so-called Department of Government Efficiency was violating laws that require federal advisory committees to be open to the public and to include a diversity of viewpoints.
Mr. Trump’s new “department” is not actually an agency of government but rather an informal effort to slash spending and bureaucracy that is led by two wealthy supporters, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy. Those two have said they will work outside government and advise officials inside the new Trump administration.
That setup violates the law, the nonprofits said in their lawsuits.
The 1972 Federal Advisory Committee Act says that committees of outside government advisers must be “fairly balanced in terms of the points of view represented,” and that they must make their records available to the public.
The lawsuits say that Mr. Musk and Mr. Ramaswamy’s effort meets neither of those requirements. They say its leaders all share one viewpoint: that the size and cost of government should be cut drastically.
All the suits asked federal judges to stop the cost-cutting effort until it complies with the law.
One of Monday’s lawsuits was filed by a coalition that includes the American Federation of Government Employees, a union of federal workers, as well as a watchdog group called State Democracy Defenders Fund. In the other case, the plaintiffs include the liberal good-government group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington and the American Federation of Teachers.
“The question every American should be asking is ‘What are they hiding?’” said Skye Perryman, the chief executive of a legal nonprofit called Democracy Forward, which is representing the second group of plaintiffs. “DOGE must not be allowed to operate in the shadows.”
The third suit was filed by a nonprofit called National Security Counselors, which represents federal whistle-blowers.
Katie Miller, a spokeswoman for the operation, did not immediately respond to questions.Show more
Jan. 20, 2025, 2:04 p.m. ETJan. 20, 2025
Hamed Aleaziz and Paulina Villegas
Hamed Aleaziz reported from Washington, and Paulina Villegas from Tijuana, Mexico.
Trump shuts down migrant entry app, signaling the start of his border crackdown.
The Trump administration on Monday abruptly closed down a government program created by the Biden administration to allow migrants to use an app to secure an appointment for admission into the United States through legal ports of entry, signaling the start of President Trump’s promised crackdown at the southern border.
Moments after Mr. Trump took the oath of office, an announcement posted on the CBP One program’s website declared that the app would no longer function and that “existing appointments have been canceled.”
The program, which debuted in early 2023, allowed 1,450 migrants a day to schedule a time to present themselves at a port of entry and seek asylum through U.S. immigration courts. More than 900,000 migrants entered the country using the app from its launch in the beginning of 2023 to the end of 2024.
A former Department of Homeland Security official who spoke on the condition of anonymity said that around 30,000 migrants had appointments to enter the United States through the app as of Monday morning.
At the El Chaparral border crossing in Tijuana, Mexico, dozens of migrants who stared at their phone screens trying to check whether their appointments were still valid instead found the crushing message that they no longer existed.
“I am in shock,” said Maura Hernandez, who received the news on Monday morning as she arrived in Tijuana with her four small children from the state of Michoacán. She had a scheduled appointment on Tuesday.
“I don’t know what is going to happen to us,” she said, adding that they had fled their home amid rampant insecurity.
The program was a key part of the Biden administration’s effort to gain control over migration through the southern border. On the one hand, the administration blocked asylum for migrants who crossed illegally. At the same time, U.S. officials believed that by offering migrants an organized way to enter legally through an app, they could discourage attempts to gain entry without authorization. Border numbers have dropped dramatically in recent months, and officials believe the program is a major reason.
“I would say that the model that we have built of restricting asylum at our southern border and building accessible, lawful, safe and orderly pathways for individuals to seek relief under our laws is the model that should be sustained,” said Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas in an interview with NPR this month. “And we have delivered the border and those accessible pathways to the incoming administration.”
The end of the program will test that theory as the Trump administration moves toward a more restrictive policy at the border. The former homeland security official said that they estimated that, in total, nearly 300,000 migrants were in Mexico waiting to use the app.
“We are so disappointed,” said Gustavo Selva from Venezuela after reading the update on his phone that the program had been shut down. He had received hopeful news of his scheduled appointment 21 days ago.
Two days ago, however, he received an email informing him that it had been delayed until Feb. 9. By then, he had already traveled to Tijuana from the southern state of Chiapas after waiting there for seven months for his appointment to go through.
“We thought we could enter today without a problem,” Mr. Selva added. “Now we will be stranded here indefinitely.”
Critics of the program, especially Republican lawmakers, viewed it as a way to allow those who otherwise had no way of entering the U.S. to come into the country and remain for years as their immigration cases languished in the courts.
“The fact that this application exists is the most underreported scandal of the Biden admin. They made an application to facilitate illegal immigration. It boggles the mind,” Vice President JD Vance said in a social media post last week.
Matthew Hudak, a former senior Border Patrol official, said the decision was a clear sign that things were changing at the southern border.
“Simply wanting to immigrate to the U.S. and signing up to get in line will be replaced by more stringent policies that will significantly raise the bar for those seeking to come here, including reimplementing the Remain in Mexico program,” he said. “Many will be left to decide if they will work through the legal process or attempt to enter the country illegally and face what will likely be much more significant consequences.”
Aline Corpus contributed reporting from Tijuana, Mexico.Show more
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Jan. 20, 2025, 1:57 p.m. ETJan. 20, 2025
Allison McCannAlbert Sun and Eileen Sullivan
Who are the millions of immigrants Trump wants to deport?
President Trump has promised to deport millions of people who are living in the United States without permission. This population is commonly referred to as “undocumented,” “unauthorized” or “illegal.” But these terms are not entirely accurate.
Millions of these immigrants have some current authorization to live or work legally in the United States. They include people who arrived during the Biden administration through humanitarian and other programs, and even some people who arrived during Mr. Trump’s first term whose cases remain tied up in immigration court.
The New York Times compared estimates from several research organizations and the federal government, as well as more recent administrative data, to better understand this population, and who might be most vulnerable to Mr. Trump’s immigration crackdown.
Who Are the Millions of Immigrants Trump Wants to Deport?
Jan. 20, 2025, 1:44 p.m. ETJan. 20, 2025
The Transportation Safety administrator, David Pekoske, was asked on Monday to step down by Trump administration officials, according to two people familiar with the matter who were not authorized to discuss it publicly. He was confirmed to a second five-year term in 2022, after being appointed to the post in 2017 during President Trump’s first term. The resignation comes as a surprise to many within the agency who expected him to stay on. He was also was expected to be the acting Homeland Security Department secretary until Trump’s nominee, Gov. Kristi Noem of South Dakota, is confirmed to the post.
Jan. 20, 2025, 1:41 p.m. ETJan. 20, 2025
Ana Swanson covers international trade.
Trump promises tariffs on Canada and Mexico, and paves the way for future trade action.
President Trump said on Monday night that he planned to impose a 25 percent tariff on products from Canada and Mexico on Feb. 1 and might impose levies on most American imports, as he signed an executive order directing federal agencies to deliver a sweeping review of U.S. trade policies by this spring.
Speaking to reporters from the Oval Office on Monday evening, Mr. Trump said he was thinking of putting tariffs on Mexican and Canadian products because those nations were allowing “mass numbers of people to come in and fentanyl to come in.” Asked when he might put those in place, Mr. Trump said, “I think we’ll do it Feb. 1.”
Mr. Trump also said he “may” impose a universal tariff on all imports, saying that “essentially all countries take advantage of the U.S.”
The comments renewed the threat of an imminent trade war, just hours after such an outcome had appeared to recede. Mr. Trump signed an executive order on Monday directing various agencies to study a wide variety of trade issues with an eye toward future tariffs, but he did not impose any new levies immediately, as he had previously threatened.
Still, the executive order could tee up a variety of significant trade actions in the months to come. The order directed Mr. Trump’s officials to deliver reports to him, mostly by April 1, assessing unfair trade practices, currency manipulation, U.S. technology controls and discriminatory foreign taxes.
It ordered U.S. officials to examine flows of migrants and drugs from Canada, China and Mexico to the United States, and the compliance of those three countries and others with their existing trade agreements with the United States.
The executive order also called for officials to investigate the causes of large and persistent trade deficits and “recommend appropriate measures, such as a global supplemental tariff or other policies, to remedy such deficits.”
Mr. Trump’s order also followed through on his recent comments to create an agency he has called the External Revenue Service to collect tariffs. It asked officials to “investigate the feasibility of establishing and recommend the best methods for designing, building and implementing” the External Revenue Service to collect tariffs and duties from foreign sources. Tariffs and other import duties are currently collected by Customs and Border Protection.
U.S. officials will also spend the next few months identifying countries the United States could negotiate new trade deals with, as well as carrying out a full review of the U.S. industrial and manufacturing base to assess whether further national-security-related tariffs are warranted.
In his inauguration address on Monday, Mr. Trump said he would “immediately begin the overhaul of our trade system to protect American workers and families.”
“The American dream will soon be back and thriving like never before,” he added.
Mr. Trump’s advisers say he remains more convinced than ever that tariffs can be used to great advantage. The executive order will tee up the president’s ability to deploy tariffs on numerous targets should he so choose, moves that could still scramble international supply chains and spawn global trade wars.
People familiar with the plans said the president and his advisers have been favoring a combination of trade policies like those he floated on the campaign trail. Those include a universal tariff on foreign products, a higher tariff on China and separate measures that could address the trade relationship with Mexico and Canada by imposing taxes on those countries as well.
By ordering investigations into a variety of trade topics, Mr. Trump may firm up the legal rationale that will help his tariffs survive court challenges, while also giving some of his top trade officials time to be confirmed by the Senate, analysts said.
Mr. Trump has praised tariffs for their ability to help U.S. factories, raise revenue to help pay for the tax cuts he hopes to enact and generally serve as a source of leverage in negotiations with foreign countries.
While managing trade is technically the domain of Congress, various trade laws have given the president wide-ranging powers to issue tariffs. The president can use them to defend U.S. national security, answer unfair trade practices and counter various types of international emergencies.
Mr. Trump and his advisers are continuing to debate the best method to issue their tariffs, but they believe they have the legal authority to use any of them, people familiar with the deliberations said.
Mr. Trump said on social media in November that he would impose tariffs on Canada and Mexico on his first day in office. In response, the Canadian and Mexican governments have tried to mollify Mr. Trump and ward off tariffs. They have arranged meetings with the president and his advisers, and reassured him about the measures they are taking to secure their borders.
Still, both governments have also warned that they will respond to any tariffs with penalties of their own. Canada said it planned to retaliate with tariffs and other trade restrictions if Mr. Trump went ahead with his plan, and Mexico has also threatened its own tariffs on American exports.
During his first term, Mr. Trump rocked the country’s global trade relationships by imposing tariffs on foreign washing machines, solar panels, metals and a variety of products from China. Those moves nearly doubled the average tariff rate applied to imported goods, though U.S. tariffs remained comparatively low by international standards.
Some U.S. manufacturers credit the tariffs that Mr. Trump imposed during his first term — and that President Joseph R. Biden Jr. kept in place — with helping their businesses survive amid intense competition from countries like China.
But economists and other businesses argue that tariffs can also cause economic harm, by raising costs for households and businesses that rely on imported products, and inciting retaliation from other governments that can hurt U.S. exports.
Lydia Cox, an economist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, described tariffs as “a pretty blunt instrument” in an online forum hosted by the Harvard Kennedy School last week. Tariffs offer some potential benefits for protected industries, she said, “but they create a lot of collateral damage along the way.”
Matina Stevis-Gridneff contributed reporting from Toronto.Show more
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Jan. 20, 2025, 12:58 p.m. ETJan. 20, 2025
The Trump administration moved quickly to shut down a government app that allows migrants to schedule appointments to enter at a port of entry. Nearly a million immigrants entered this way during the time it was in place. The U.S. Customs and Border Protection website says the application is down and appointments are cancelled.
Jan. 20, 2025, 12:59 p.m. ETJan. 20, 2025
The website alert reads: “Effective January 20, 2025, the functionalities of CBP One™ that previously allowed undocumented aliens to submit advance information and schedule appointments at eight southwest border ports of entry is no longer available, and existing appointments have been cancelled.” The Biden administration allowed up to 1,450 migrants to enter this way every day.
Jan. 20, 2025, 12:01 p.m. ETJan. 20, 2025
Scores of Senior Diplomats Are Leaving Posts as Trump Takes Office
A transition team for President Trump has asked scores of senior career diplomats to resign from their positions on Monday, as soon as Mr. Trump takes office, and many of those asked to step down intend to do so, two U.S. officials said.
The practice is common when a presidential transition occurs, but it is happening faster and on a larger scale than with previous administrations, one U.S. official said. That means a possible loss of valuable knowledge of both the American institution and global affairs at the start of the administration.
The Trump transition team at the State Department is led by aides to Marco Rubio, the Florida senator picked by Mr. Trump to replace Antony J. Blinken as secretary of state. Mr. Rubio is expected to be confirmed quickly by the Senate.
Some of the officials stepping down are at the level of assistant secretary or higher and run large bureaus in the department that focus on regions of the world or broad issues. Many of those positions were held by political appointees and will be vacated, which is expected during a transition. The Trump transition team asked for the resignations on Friday.
It is unclear what kinds of jobs the veteran diplomats, known as foreign service officers, will seek or get in the coming weeks or months. Career diplomats are members of a union that would try to protect them from being fired from the State Department if that were to happen unfairly.
Every president and their appointed secretary of state replaces all or most of the people in those senior positions early in an administration. In some cases, foreign service officers decide to retire, especially if they have served for more than two decades. In some cases, they have held top positions throughout the department already and have no clear advancement path when a new administration comes in.
Among the top department officials who had earlier planned to step down is Daniel J. Kritenbrink, a longtime diplomat who has served as assistant secretary of East Asian and Pacific affairs in the Biden administration and is a former ambassador to Vietnam. He retired last Friday after 31 years in the State Department.
Ambassadors also offer their resignations, which the incoming president and secretary of state accept in most cases.
Ambassadors have been announcing their departures. Jeffrey Prescott, a political appointee representing the United States at United Nations agencies in Rome, posted on social media about his departure on Monday and his work on U.N. food programs during his tenure.
Like top officials at the State Department in Washington, ambassadors are a mix of political appointees and career diplomats. Many of the political appointees are wealthy donors to the president’s campaign, whether a Democratic or Republican one, and have little experience in diplomacy or global affairs.
At a confirmation hearing for Mr. Rubio last week, Senator Tim Kaine, Democrat of Virginia, asked him to leave career diplomats serving as ambassadors in place until new ones appointed by Mr. Trump are confirmed and in place to do their jobs.
On Jan. 13, R. Nicholas Burns, the ambassador to China, said in an email that he was departing Beijing for Washington and then would leave the State Department. Mr. Burns had an unusual career: He was a foreign service officer for many decades and eventually became the third-ranking official at the department. He left for other jobs, including a teaching post at the Harvard Kennedy School, and then returned to serve as an ambassador under President Biden.
Mr. Burns said he was proud to have represented the United States during an “enormously difficult and challenging time” in U.S.-China relations.
And he defended the federal government and its many employees, saying that “we have truly outstanding men and women in public service” and that “they are working very hard and often at great personal sacrifice to represent us in seriously challenging circumstances in China and around the world.”
“I believe they deserve our full support going forward,” he added.Show more
Jan. 20, 2025, 11:55 a.m. ETJan. 20, 2025
Reporting from Washington
Biden pardons five members of his family in final minutes in office.
President Biden pardoned five members of his family in his last minutes in office, saying in a statement that he did so not because they did anything wrong but because he feared political attacks from incoming President Donald J. Trump.
“My family has been subjected to unrelenting attacks and threats, motivated solely by a desire to hurt me — the worst kind of partisan politics,” he said in his last statement as president. “Unfortunately, I have no reason to believe these attacks will end.”
Mr. Biden’s action pardoned James B. Biden, his brother; Sara Jones Biden, James’s wife; Valerie Biden Owens, Mr. Biden’s sister; John T. Owens, Ms. Owens’s husband; and Francis W. Biden, Mr. Biden’s brother.
The White House announced the pardons with less than 20 minutes left in Mr. Biden’s presidency, after he had already walked into the Capitol Rotunda to witness the swearing-in of Mr. Trump before leaving the Capitol for the last time as president.
The pardons were a remarkable coda to Mr. Biden’s 50-year political career, underscoring the mistrust and anger that the president feels about Mr. Trump, the man who preceded and will succeed him in office.
Mr. Biden had repeatedly warned that Mr. Trump was a threat to democracy in America. But he also said that he believed in the rule of law, and was confident in the stability of the institutions of law enforcement. The pardons — like one that he did earlier for his son, Hunter Biden, threatened to challenge that assertion.
In his statement, Mr. Biden explained his action.
“I believe in the rule of law, and I am optimistic that the strength of our legal institutions will ultimately prevail over politics,” Mr. Biden wrote. “But baseless and politically motivated investigations wreak havoc on the lives, safety and financial security of targeted individuals and their families. Even when individuals have done nothing wrong and will ultimately be exonerated, the mere fact of being investigated or prosecuted can irreparably damage their reputations and finances.”
Mr. Biden also commuted the life sentence for Leonard Peltier, the Native American activist who was convicted of killing two F.B.I. agents in 1975 on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. Mr. Biden said that his action would allow Mr. Peltier, who is 80 years old, to serve the remainder of his time in home confinement.
In his statement, White House officials noted that “Tribal nations, Nobel Peace laureates, former law enforcement officials (including the former U.S. attorney whose office oversaw Mr. Peltier’s prosecution and appeal), dozens of lawmakers, and human rights organizations strongly support granting Mr. Peltier clemency, citing his advanced age, illnesses, his close ties to and leadership in the Native American community and the substantial length of time he has already spent in prison.”
The president also pardoned two Democratic politicians, Ernest William Cromartie, a former city councilman in South Carolina, and Gerald G. Lundergan, a state legislator from Kentucky.Show more
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Jan. 20, 2025, 11:42 a.m. ETJan. 20, 2025
President Biden just pardoned five members of his family in his last minutes in office: his brothers Jimmy and Frank Biden; his sister Valerie Biden Owens; Valerie’s husband, John Owens; and Jimmy’s wife, Sara Jones Biden.
Jan. 20, 2025, 11:52 a.m. ETJan. 20, 2025
“My family has been subjected to unrelenting attacks and threats, motivated solely by a desire to hurt me — the worst kind of partisan politics,” President Biden said in a statement. “Unfortunately, I have no reason to believe these attacks will end.”
Jan. 20, 2025, 11:36 a.m. ETJan. 20, 2025
Patrick J. LyonsIsabelle Taft and Eileen Sullivan
Trump plans to put an end to birthright citizenship. That could be hard.
President Donald J. Trump plans to order the end of birthright citizenship — the guarantee, rooted in common law and enshrined in the Constitution for more than 150 years, that anyone born in the United States is automatically an American citizen.
An incoming White House official told reporters on Monday that Mr. Trump would move to terminate that right for births that take place after the signing of his order, meaning children born in the United States to unauthorized immigrants would no longer automatically be treated as American citizens.
Mr. Trump has long said that conferring American citizenship on the children of undocumented immigrants was unacceptable to him. But because birthright citizenship is guaranteed by the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, such an order would face major legal challenges. Any change to the Constitution requires supermajority votes in Congress, and then ratification by three-quarters of the states.
Even so, some of his supporters have suggested that Mr. Trump could simply direct federal agencies to bar the children of noncitizens from using public services, denying them the benefits of birthright citizenship without changing the Constitution. That, too, would be all but certain to be challenged in the courts.Show more
Jan. 20, 2025, 11:23 a.m. ETJan. 20, 2025
Adam GoldmanWilliam K. Rashbaum and Maggie Haberman
Adam Goldman covers the F.B.I. and reported from Washington. William K. Rashbaum reported from New York, and Maggie Haberman from Washington.
Paul Abbate retires as F.B.I. acting director after Wray departs.
The Trump administration said on Monday that it had named two veteran agents to run the F.B.I. as the bureau braces for potentially tumultuous changes under a president who has repeatedly denounced the agency.
Brian Driscoll, who was recently named the special agent in charge of the Newark field office, will be acting director, according to a statement on the White House’s website. Robert Kissane, the top counterterrorism agent in New York, will serve as the acting deputy director. Both men are well-respected inside the F.B.I.
In an email to F.B.I. employees, Mr. Driscoll said the acting attorney general had asked Mr. Kissane to fill the deputy role. Mr. Driscoll said he looked forward to working with Mr. Kissane over the “course of the transition to ensure the F.B.I.’s critical mission to protect the American people and uphold the Constitution continues.”
The decision to elevate Mr. Driscoll and Mr. Kissane to the seventh floor of bureau headquarters where senior leadership sits signals that the Trump administration wanted a clean break after lengthy F.B.I. investigations that ensnared the president.
Kash Patel, Mr. Trump’s pick to run the F.B.I., had written that the president needed to “fire the top ranks of the F.B.I.”
The moves capped a chaotic 24 hours after Paul Abbate, the longtime No. 2, became acting director on Sunday and retired just hours later, fueling confusion about who would run the bureau. Before the White House published Mr. Driscoll’s name, Mr. Kissane had been mentioned as a possibility for acting director, people familiar with the matter said.
As the changes were underway, Mr. Patel made clear his skepticism toward the bureau at a political rally. “We are going to remove the weaponization of the intelligence community for political purposes, and we are going to put the men and women of America first,” he said.
Mr. Abbate was installed as acting director after Christopher A. Wray, the previous director, announced last month that he would step down before the inauguration. President Trump appointed Mr. Wray in 2017 but publicly attacked him and the F.B.I., which repeatedly investigated Mr. Trump.
In a rare move, Mr. Wray extended the service of Mr. Abbate, who is 57, the mandatory retirement age for certain F.B.I. agents.
In an email to senior F.B.I. officials, Mr. Abbate wrote: “When the director asked me to stay on past my mandatory date for a brief time, I did so to help ensure continuity and the best transition for the F.B.I. Now, with new leadership inbound, after nearly four years in the deputy role, I am departing.”
He added, “I have complete confidence in you and in your ability as a team to continue to carry out our mission of protecting the American people and upholding the Constitution.”
A spokeswoman for the F.B.I. declined to comment.
Mr. Abbate was named deputy director in February 2021, and Mr. Wray has said it was one of the best decisions he made during his time at the bureau. As deputy, Mr. Abbate oversaw all of the F.B.I.’s domestic and international investigative and intelligence activities and operations. The bureau has about 38,000 employees with agents stationed around the world and other U.S. agencies.
Mr. Trump has said he intends to nominate Mr. Patel, 44, to be the bureau’s next director. His confirmation hearing has not been scheduled yet, though it could come at the end of the month. Typically the acting director would remain in place until Mr. Patel was confirmed by the Senate to ensure stability at the highest ranks of the bureau. But it was clear that the administration wanted a fresh start in filling the two top slots at the bureau.
Former agents said that Mr. Kissane and Mr. Patel have a history together. Mr. Kissane was the case agent for the F.B.I.’s investigation into the 2010 bombings in Kampala, Uganda, that killed scores of people, including an American, watching the World Cup finals. As a trial attorney in the Justice Department’s National Security Division, Mr. Patel was assigned to help the Ugandan prosecution team.
Mr. Driscoll, a decorated agent, previously worked in the F.B.I.’s New York field office.
It is not clear if Mr. Patel knows Mr. Driscoll, who spent many years on the F.B.I.’s elite hostage rescue team and commanding it. Neither Mr. Driscoll nor Mr. Kissane worked on the F.B.I.’s Russia investigation in 2016 that Mr. Patel and the President Trump have repeatedly dismissed as a hoax. He also does not appear to worked on two prosecutions of Mr. Trump that the president and Mr. Patel have decried.
Mr. Patel will need to rely on senior F.B.I. leaders to run the organization. He lacks the experience of previous directors, but his unwavering loyalty to Mr. Trump has catapulted him to consideration for the F.B.I.’s top job.
He has portrayed law enforcement agencies as part of an inept and politicized “deep state,” and he has fiercely criticized the agency and Justice Department over a court-authorized warrant to search for classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s private club and residence in Florida.
In his 2023 book, “Government Gangsters,” Mr. Patel published an extensive enemies list that includes a current F.B.I. agent and an analyst. Mr. Wray also made the list, but Mr. Abbate did not appear on it.
Former and current F.B.I. officials are concerned about the drastic changes Mr. Patel has promised at a time that Mr. Wray has said the country faces a serious increase in threats, including from terrorism or from countries like China.
For Mr. Wray, the decision to resign was not an easy one. Last month, he explained to F.B.I. employees why he made the choice, rather than finish out his 10-year term in 2027.
“After weeks of careful thought, I’ve decided the right thing for the bureau is for me to serve until the end of the current administration in January and then step down,” he said. He added that “in my view, this is the best way to avoid dragging the bureau deeper into the fray, while reinforcing the values and principles that are so important to how we do our work.”
Jan. 20, 2025, 11:09 a.m. ETJan. 20, 2025
When Speaker Mike Johnson arrived at the Capitol for Trump’s inauguration, a reporter asked him what he’s expecting on executive orders. Johnson responded: “A lot.
Jan. 20, 2025, 11:05 a.m. ETJan. 20, 2025
Trump has promised an immigration crackdown as his first order of business.
President Trump has promised that his first order of business after taking office would be to take executive action to seal off the southern border and undertake a massive deportation effort, including using the military to crack down on unauthorized immigration.
One of Mr. Trump’s incoming White House officials told reporters on Monday morning to expect Mr. Trump to issue an executive order declaring a national emergency. That would allow Mr. Trump to unilaterally unlock federal funding, without approval from Congress, for stricter enforcement efforts, such as sending military personnel and technology to the border.
His top advisers have signaled that he will be using the same playbook as he did during his first term, when he tried, with mixed success, to clamp down on border crossings, build a border wall and sharply reduce the number of immigrants admitted as refugees.
“I suspect what you’re going to see is President Trump dusting off a lot of what we did in the first administration because they were proven effective and put them back in place,” Thomas D. Homan, Mr. Trump’s “border czar,” said on a recent podcast.
This includes restricting access to asylum at the southern border of the United States. A White House official said Mr. Trump was also expected to tell the military to prioritize border security as part of its planning.
This would draw immediate legal challenges because of the strict limits in American law for how the armed forces can be deployed inside the country.
Mr. Trump is also expected to issue broad directives to federal immigration agencies to step up the detention and deportation of immigrants who are undocumented or whose status is uncertain, including those who have lived in the country for long periods of time or who have been allowed to remain on humanitarian grounds. The official said this would include creating joint federal and local task forces dedicated to arresting and deporting criminal gang members.
The U.S. refugee system is also a target, and Mr. Trump is expected to suspend the resettling of refugees for at least four months, the incoming White House official said. During his first term, Mr. Trump stopped the program that admits persecuted people into the country. Mr. Biden took steps to restore the changes the first Trump administration made, but Mr. Trump can reverse much of that with the stroke of a pen.
Mr. Trump has also threatened to try to end the constitutional guarantee of birthright citizenship. For more than 150 years, the Constitution has allowed for the children of noncitizens born in the United States to automatically become citizens. Some who support stricter immigration enforcement say this right is an incentive that draws illegal border crossings. Because the policy is enshrined in the Constitution, a change would face significant legal hurdles.
The official said Mr. Trump would also issue an executive order to designate two criminal gangs — the Venezuelan group Tren de Aragua, and the El Salvadoran MS-13 — as foreign terrorist organizations, which could potentially unlock additional military powers to pursue them.Show more
Jan. 20, 2025, 11:04 a.m. ETJan. 20, 2025
Trump will sign an executive order to again withdraw the U.S. from the Paris climate agreement, an aide confirmed. Actually leaving the global accord will take a year, according to U.N. rules, but Trump’s order sends a signal that the U.S. under his administration will no longer curb the greenhouse gas pollution that is dangerously heating the planet. Trump withdrew from the Paris deal during his first administration, and President Biden returned the U.S. to the accord.
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Jan. 20, 2025, 10:56 a.m. ETJan. 20, 2025
In an interview, one of the committee members, Representative Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland, said “it is strange to receive a pardon simply for doing your job and upholding your constitutional oath of office, but the incoming administration has been consistently leveling threats.”
Jan. 20, 2025, 10:39 a.m. ETJan. 20, 2025
Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi, and former Representative Liz Cheney, Republican of Wyoming, released a joint statement on behalf of the former members of the House Jan. 6 Committee, thanking President Biden for his pre-emptive pardons. “We have been pardoned today not for breaking the law but for upholding it,” they said.
Jan. 20, 2025, 10:27 a.m. ETJan. 20, 2025
Corporate leaders are feeling optimistic and anxious about a new Trump administration, which has promised a more business-friendly approach to regulation and policy. The president-elect sees himself as the deal maker in chief, and that will mean executives will probably have to go into negotiation mode to strike the right balance with the White House. Read more in the DealBook newsletter.
Jan. 20, 2025, 10:19 a.m. ETJan. 20, 2025
U.S. oil prices fell more than 1 percent this morning, below $77 a barrel, as details emerged about President-elect Trump’s plans to sign executive orders aimed at “unleashing” American energy. The U.S. is already pumping record amounts of oil and near-record amounts of natural gas. And while many oil and gas companies are keen for the Trump administration to loosen certain regulations, they’re not looking to drastically boost output, as doing so likely would weigh on prices, squeezing profits. That’s one area where the industry’s interests are not aligned with those of Trump, who has pledged to cut energy bills by at least half.
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Jan. 20, 2025, 10:15 a.m. ETJan. 20, 2025
Zolan Kanno-YoungsMichael D. Shear and Noah Weiland
Reporting from Washington
Here are Trump’s expected executive orders.
President Trump on Monday began issuing a barrage of executive orders, kicking off his presidency with a muscular use of power intended to signal a sharp reversal from existing policies.
The flurry of executive actions is an effort to roll back of many of President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s most significant domestic policies, primarily on climate and immigration, while also reimposing a Trump agenda that would launch drilling and mining on natural resources and fundamentally upend the United States’ global role as a sanctuary for refugees and immigrants.
In a speech on Monday evening, Mr. Trump said he was revoking almost 80 “disruptive, radical executive actions of the previous administration.”
Among those revoked Biden orders were directives that the federal government rebuild the refugee program, and gradually end the Justice Department’s use of private prisons.
Some of Mr. Trump’s orders are almost certain to be challenged in court, and others will be largely symbolic. But taken together, they represent his intention to sharply turn away from the direction of the Biden administration, and to make good on his campaign promises to break what he and his aides cast as a “deep state” effort to thwart his agenda.
Here are some of the orders Mr. Trump signed on his first day in office:
Federal Work Force
- Freeze federal hiring, except for members of the military or “positions related to immigration enforcement, national security, or public safety.”
- Restore a category of federal workers known as Schedule F, which would lack the same job protections enjoyed by career civil servants.
- Halt new federal rules from going into effect before Trump administration appointees can review them.
- Review the investigative actions of the Biden administration, “to correct past misconduct by the federal government related to the weaponization of law enforcement and the weaponization of the intelligence community.”
- End remote work policies and order federal workers back to the office full time.
Immigration and the Border
- Move to end birthright citizenship, which is guaranteed by the 14th Amendment, for the children of undocumented immigrants. The president cannot change the Constitution on his own, so it is not yet clear how Mr. Trump plans to withhold the benefits of citizenship to a group of people born in the United States. Any move is all but certain to be challenged in court.
- Suspend the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program “until such time as the further entry into the United States of refugees aligns with the interests of the United States.”
- Declare migrant crossings along the U.S.-Mexico border to be a national emergency, allowing Mr. Trump to unilaterally unlock federal funding for border wall construction, without approval from Congress, for stricter enforcement efforts.
- Resume a policy requiring people seeking asylum to wait in Mexico while an immigration judge considers their cases.
- Designate cartel organizations as “foreign terrorist organizations.”
Gender and Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Initiatives
- Terminate D.E.I. programs across the federal government.
Tariffs and Trade
- Direct federal agencies to begin an investigation into trade practices, including trade deficits and unfair currency practices, and examine flows of migrants and drugs from Canada, China and Mexico to the United States.
- Assess China’s compliance with a trade deal Mr. Trump signed in 2020, as well as the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, which Trump signed in 2020 to replace the North American Free Trade Agreement.
- Order the government to assess the feasibility of creating an “External Revenue Service” to collect tariffs and duties.
Energy and the Environment
- Withdraw the United States from the Paris Agreement, the pact among almost all nations to fight climate change.
- Declare a national energy emergency, a first in U.S. history, which could unlock new powers to suspend certain environmental rules or expedite permitting of certain mining projects.
- Attempt to reverse Mr. Biden’s ban on offshore drilling for 625 million acres of federal waters.
- Begin the repeal of Biden-era regulations on tailpipe pollution from cars and light trucks, which have encouraged automakers to manufacture more electric vehicles.
- Roll back energy-efficiency regulations for dishwashers, shower heads and gas stoves.
- Open the Alaska wilderness to more oil and gas drilling.
- Restart approvals of export terminals for liquefied natural gas.
- Halt the leasing of federal waters for offshore wind farms.
- Eliminate environmental justice programs across the government, which are aimed at protecting poor communities from excess pollution.
- Review all federal regulations that impose an “undue burden” on the development or use of a variety of energy sources, particularly coal, oil, natural gas, nuclear power, hydropower and biofuels.
TikTok ban
- Consult federal agencies on any national security risks posed by the social media platform, then “pursue a resolution that protects national security while saving a platform used by 170 million Americans.” Mr. Trump ordered his attorney general not to enforce a law that banned the site for 75 days to give the Trump administration “an opportunity to determine the appropriate course forward.”
Other
- Withdraw from the World Health Organization.
- Fly the American flag at full-staff on Monday and on future Inauguration Days.
- Implement the Department of Government Efficiency, the Elon Musk-led cost-cutting initiative.
- Revoke security clearances for 51 signers of a letter suggesting that the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop could be Russian disinformation.
Reporting was contributed by Erica L. Green, Zach Montague, Ana Swanson, Hamed Aleaziz, Lisa Friedman and Brad Plumer.Show more
Jan. 20, 2025, 10:02 a.m. ETJan. 20, 2025
Trump is displeased by the last-minute wave of preemptive pardons issued by President Biden and is considering discussing it at some point today, according to a person with knowledge of his thinking. It is unclear if he will raise it directly with Biden when they see each other this morning.
Jan. 20, 2025, 10:01 a.m. ETJan. 20, 2025
In his pardon announcement tied to the Jan. 6 Committee, Biden did not name any specific member of the committee or its staff, somewhat burying the fact that he was extending clemency to former Representative Liz Cheney, a former top G.O.P. official who became a target of Trump after investigating his actions related to Jan. 6.
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Jan. 20, 2025, 9:53 a.m. ETJan. 20, 2025
Inside the Capital One Arena in Washington, a table had been set up for Trump to sign executive orders after he is sworn in.
Jan. 20, 2025, 9:50 a.m. ETJan. 20, 2025
Trump says he will release records on the assassinations of the Kennedy brothers and Martin Luther King.
Donald J. Trump has said he will quickly release records relating to the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, his brother Robert F. Kennedy and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as part of measures to restore confidence in government.
The assassinations, particularly that of the president, who was shot dead in Dallas in November 1963, have been the subject of decades of controversy as well as conspiracy theories. Mr. King was shot and killed in Memphis in April 1968, while Robert F. Kennedy was shot and killed in California that June, shortly after winning California’s Democratic primary. The three deaths shook America in different ways, and historians view each as a turning point in the tumultuous decade.
“As a first step toward restoring transparency and accountability to government, we will also reverse the over-classification of government documents,” Mr. Trump said at a rally on Sunday ahead of his inauguration, adding that documents related to other topics of “great public interest” would also be declassified. “It’s all going to be released, Uncle Sam,” he said.
Mr. Trump’s statement will likely generate particular interest among his supporters, given the fascination he has expressed with certain conspiracies and the fact that he survived an assassination attempt in July when he was shot and wounded while running for president.Show more
Jan. 20, 2025, 9:44 a.m. ETJan. 20, 2025
Former members of the Jan. 6 Committee staff are reacting with a mix of surprise and relief to the preemptive pardons announced by President Biden today. None I spoke with said they felt they needed or even wanted a pardon, but they say they now feel a sense of relief in case they are targeted in the next two years.
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Jan. 20, 2025, 9:41 a.m. ETJan. 20, 2025
The order on sex and gender will also direct agencies, including the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security, to reflect biological sex rather than gender identity on official documents, including passports and visas. An incoming official said it would affect how spaces such as single-sex prisons and migrant shelters, where officials aim to keep men and women separated, are administered.
Jan. 20, 2025, 9:39 a.m. ETJan. 20, 2025
In a news conference Monday morning, Juan Ramón de la Fuente, Mexico’s foreign affairs minister, said that Mexico disagrees with the Remain in Mexico policy being reinstated, and if it is, Mexico would have no obligation to process U.S. asylum requests. Still, he said the country would find ways to operate “in the best way possible.”
Jan. 20, 2025, 9:34 a.m. ETJan. 20, 2025
The Trump administration will order an end to diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives across the federal government, an administration official told reporters, which will affect hiring practices, environmental justice programs, equity-related grants and agencies’ equity action plans. These initiatives were cornerstones of President Biden’s racial equity agenda, which he signed on his first day in office.
Jan. 20, 2025, 9:26 a.m. ETJan. 20, 2025
Trump is set to sign a national energy emergency declaration, his aides said Monday. Environmental activists over the past four years pressured President Biden to declare a national climate emergency, but he never did. Depending upon how Trump uses this declaration, it could grant him vast new powers to loosen permits and ease the way for fossil fuel production. Notably the United States under Biden hit record oil production levels.
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Jan. 20, 2025, 9:24 a.m. ETJan. 20, 2025
The Trump administration will create federal law enforcement task forces to cooperate with local authorites for the “removal of gangs, criminals and illegal aliens from the United States,” an incoming White House official told reporters.
Jan. 20, 2025, 9:20 a.m. ETJan. 20, 2025
An incoming White House official said the Trump administration would end asylum and birthright citizenship today. The president cannot change the Constitution on his own, so it’s not yet clear how Trump plans to end the guarantee of citizenship for those born in the United States, which is in the 14th Amendment.
Jan. 20, 2025, 9:25 a.m. ETJan. 20, 2025
The Trump administration’s effort to end birthright citizenship will be prospective — affecting only future births — an incoming White House official said. The administration will attempt to do this by interpreting the language of the Constitution to mean that the government will not recognize “automatic birthright citizenship for children of illegal aliens born in the United States,” the official said.
Jan. 20, 2025, 9:20 a.m. ETJan. 20, 2025
Trump will not be imposing tariffs today, an incoming White House official said. Instead, the president plans to issue an executive order that will direct federal agencies to investigate unfair trade and currency practices by other nations, singling out China, Mexico and Canada.
Jan. 20, 2025, 9:18 a.m. ETJan. 20, 2025
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Peter Baker and Michael D. Shear
Reporting from Washington
Biden issues pre-emptive pardons to guard against Trump’s reprisals.
President Biden granted a wave of pre-emptive pardons in his final hours in office on Monday to guard members of his own family and other high-profile figures from a promised campaign of “retribution” by his incoming successor, Donald J. Trump.
In an extraordinary effort by an outgoing president to derail political prosecutions by an incoming president, Mr. Biden pardoned five members of his family, including his brothers James B. Biden and Francis W. Biden, as well as others targeted by Mr. Trump like Gen. Mark A. Milley, Dr. Anthony S. Fauci and former Representative Liz Cheney.
“I believe in the rule of law, and I am optimistic that the strength of our legal institutions will ultimately prevail over politics,” Mr. Biden said in a statement. “But these are exceptional circumstances, and I cannot in good conscience do nothing. Baseless and politically motivated investigations wreak havoc on the lives, safety and financial security of targeted individuals and their families.
“Even when individuals have done nothing wrong — and in fact have done the right thing — and will ultimately be exonerated, the mere fact of being investigated or prosecuted can irreparably damage reputations and finances,” he added.
In addition to his brothers, Mr. Biden pardoned his sister, Valerie Biden Owens, and her husband, John T. Owens, as well as Sara Jones Biden, the wife of James Biden. He pardoned all the members of the bipartisan House committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol by a mob of Trump supporters, as well as their staff and the police officers who testified during their inquiry.
In issuing the pre-emptive pardons, Mr. Biden effectively turned the president’s constitutional power of forgiveness into a protective shield against what he maintained would be politically motivated vengeance. No other president has employed executive clemency in such a broad and overt way to thwart a successor he believes would abuse his power, and no other president, not even Mr. Trump, has pardoned so many members of his own family.
The White House announced the family pardons with less than 20 minutes left in Mr. Biden’s presidency, after he had already walked into the Capitol Rotunda to witness the swearing-in of Mr. Trump. The pardons were a remarkable coda to Mr. Biden’s half-century political career, underscoring the mistrust and anger that the president feels about Mr. Trump, the man who preceded and will succeed him in office.
His action offered a dramatic testament to how radically power shifted in Washington when Mr. Trump took the oath to succeed Mr. Biden. At the start of the day, the outgoing president used his pardon authority to protect those who investigated the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. At the end of the day, the incoming president pardoned about 1,500 people charged or convicted in the attack and commuted sentences for 14 others.
“Innocent people are being pardoned in the morning, and guilty people are being pardoned in the afternoon,” Representative Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland, and a member of the Jan. 6 committee, said in an interview. “It is strange to receive a pardon simply for doing your job and upholding your constitutional oath of office. But the incoming administration has been consistently leveling threats.”
Mr. Biden emphasized that he did not issue the pardons because any of the recipients actually committed crimes. “The issuance of these pardons should not be mistaken as an acknowledgment that any individual engaged in any wrongdoing, nor should acceptance be misconstrued as an admission of guilt for any offense,” he said.
Mr. Trump reacted with indignation during remarks to lawmakers at a Capitol Hill luncheon, accusing Mr. Biden of issuing “pardons of people that were very, very guilty of very bad crimes, like the unselect committee of political thugs,” referring to members of the Jan. 6 committee like Ms. Cheney.
He called Ms. Cheney a “crying lunatic” and asked, “Why are we trying to help a guy like Milley?”
Mr. Biden’s use of the pardon power to immunize people who have not even come under investigation, much less been charged with or convicted of a crime, has no clear precedent. But some legal scholars have said that he is within the boundaries of his authority.
The closest precedent might be President Gerald R. Ford’s pardon of his disgraced predecessor, Richard M. Nixon, in 1974 even though he had not been charged with any crimes. But Mr. Nixon faced a real threat of prosecution from a special counsel investigating the Watergate scandal that forced his resignation, and Mr. Ford was not acting to thwart a future president the way Mr. Biden is.
Throughout his campaign last year, Mr. Trump threatened to prosecute Democrats, election workers, law enforcement officials, intelligence officials, reporters, former members of his own staff and Republicans who do not support him, often without identifying any specific criminal activity.
Mr. Trump has said he would “appoint a real special prosecutor to go after” Mr. Biden and his family. Mr. Biden previously issued a pardon to his son Hunter that covered any possible crimes over an 11-year period. The president did not include himself in the pre-emptive pardons announced on Monday, but he may be able to count on the immunity conferred by the Supreme Court on presidents last year in a case brought by Mr. Trump to avoid prosecution.
Mr. Trump has said on social media that Ms. Cheney, a Republican from Wyoming who helped lead the Jan. 6 committee, “should be prosecuted for what she has done to our country” and that the whole committee “should be prosecuted for their lies and, quite frankly, TREASON!” He has suggested that General Milley, who was Mr. Trump’s chosen chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, deserved execution because General Milley called a Chinese counterpart after Jan. 6 to warn Beijing against taking advantage of the crisis in Washington.
Dr. Fauci, who served in government for half a century and as the nation’s top infectious disease expert for 38 years under presidents from Ronald Reagan to Mr. Biden, was targeted by Mr. Trump’s far-right allies for his handling of the coronavirus pandemic. Stephen K. Bannon, Mr. Trump’s former strategist, has said that Dr. Fauci, General Milley and others should be prosecuted. “You deserve what we call a rough Roman justice, and we’re prepared to give it to you,” Mr. Bannon said on election night.
Some of those who received the pardons offered public gratitude.
“After forty-three years of faithful service in uniform to our Nation, protecting and defending the Constitution, I do not wish to spend whatever remaining time the Lord grants me fighting those who unjustly might seek retribution for perceived slights,” General Milley said in a statement. “I do not want to put my family, my friends, and those with whom I served through the resulting distraction, expense, and anxiety.”
Dr. Fauci likewise pointed to his long career in public service and noted that he had been the subject of politically motivated threats of prosecution. “There is absolutely no basis for these threats,” he said in his own statement. “Let me be perfectly clear: I have committed no crime and there are no possible grounds for any allegation or threat of criminal investigation or prosecution of me.
“The fact is, however, that the mere articulation of these baseless threats, and the potential that they will be acted upon, create immeasurable and intolerable distress for me and my family,” he added.
In recent days, some of those covered by the pardons had said they did not want them, including former Representative Adam Kinzinger, Republican of Illinois, and Senator Adam B. Schiff, Democrat of California, both of whom served on the Jan. 6 committee with Ms. Cheney.
“As soon as you take a pardon, it looks like you are guilty of something,” Mr. Kinzinger said on CNN this month. Mr. Schiff said in a separate CNN interview that it would set a bad precedent. “I don’t want to see each president hereafter on their way out the door giving a broad category of pardons to members of their administration,” he said.
But since the pardon for the committee members was issued to a category of people rather than to named individuals, it did not require recipients to accept them. The committee members issued a statement in the name of their chairman, Representative Bennie G. Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi, thanking Mr. Biden. “We have been pardoned today not for breaking the law but for upholding it,” Thompson said.
Other members of the Jan. 6 committee covered by Mr. Biden’s pardon include Representatives Zoe Lofgren and Pete Aguilar of California and former Representatives Stephanie Murphy of Florida and Elaine Luria of Virginia, all Democrats.
Michael Fanone, one of the police officers covered by the pardon, said he did not want a pardon and never spoke with anyone from the White House about it, but expressed anger and dismay that Mr. Biden felt compelled to grant him clemency.
Mr. Fanone, who engaged in hand-to-hand combat with rioters on Jan. 6, said it was “insane that we live in a country where the president of the United States feels the need to offer a pre-emptive pardon to American citizens who testified in an investigation regarding an insurrection which was incited by the incoming president because he’s promised to enact, or exact, vengeance on those participants and the body that investigated them.”
Lawyers for Harry Dunn and Aquilino Gonnell, two police officers who have been outspoken about the Jan. 6 attack, said the pardons for them “were never sought, nor was there any consultation with the White House.”
Their lawyers, Mark S. Zaid and David H. Laufman, called it “disturbing” that the “continuing threats and attacks by the extreme right, along with the rewriting of the truth surrounding that day’s events, sadly justifies the decision.”
Of the Biden relatives who were pardoned, James Biden has attracted the most scrutiny from Republicans. In June, congressional Republicans formally requested that the Biden Justice Department charge James Biden and Hunter Biden with lying to Congress in sworn testimony delivered as part of the Republican impeachment inquiry into President Biden.
Last week, Representative James R. Comer, chairman of the House Oversight Committee, requested that Mr. Trump’s pick for attorney general, Pam Bondi, take up the matter. James Biden was involved in some of Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings, which were a subject of the impeachment inquiry and were scrutinized by the F.B.I. and the I.R.S. But he has not been charged with any crimes.
Mr. Biden’s pardons did not extend to a variety of other potential Trump targets, including the federal and state prosecutors who indicted the incoming president for trying to overturn the 2020 election and mishandling classified documents and convicted him for covering up hush money payment to an adult film star who claimed she had a fling with Mr. Trump.
Mr. Biden also commuted the life sentence for Leonard Peltier, a Native American activist who was convicted of killing two F.B.I. agents in 1975 on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. Mr. Biden said Mr. Peltier, who is 80 years old, could serve the remainder of his time in home confinement.
The outgoing president also pardoned two Democratic politicians, Ernest William Cromartie, a former city councilman in South Carolina, and Gerald G. Lundergan, a state legislator from Kentucky.
Helene Cooper, Michael S. Schmidt, Devlin Barrett, Kenneth P. Vogel and Luke Broadwater contributed reporting.
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