Sunday, August 31, 2025
In Trump’s Federal Work Force Cuts, Black Women Are Among the Hardest Hit - The New York Times
In Trump’s Federal Work Force Cuts, Black Women Are Among the Hardest Hit
"President Trump has cut hundreds of thousands of jobs from the federal work force, disproportionately affecting Black employees.
Erica L. Green covers the White House. She reported from Washington.
When President Trump started dismantling federal agencies and dismissing rank-and-file civil servants, Peggy Carr, the chief statistician at the Education Department, immediately started to make a calculation.
She was the first Black person and the first woman to hold the prestigious post of commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics. As a political appointee, she knew there was a risk of becoming a target.
But her 35-year- career at the department spanned a half dozen administrations, including Mr. Trump’s first term, and she had earned the respect of officials from both parties. Surely, she thought, the office tasked with tracking the achievement of the nation’s students could not fall under the president’s definition of “divisive and harmful” or “woke.”
But for the first time in her career, Dr. Carr’s data points didn’t add up.
On a February afternoon, a security guard showed up to her office just as she was preparing to hold a staff meeting. Fifteen minutes later, the staff watched in tears and disbelief as she was escorted out of the building.
“It was like being prosecuted in front of my family — my work family,” Dr. Carr said in an interview. “It was like I was being taken out like the trash, the only difference is I was being taken out the front door rather than the back door.”
While tens of thousands of employees have lost their jobs in Mr. Trump’s slash-and-burn approach to shrinking the federal work force, experts say the cuts disproportionately affect Black employees — and Black women in particular. Black women make up 12 percent of the federal work force, nearly double their share of the labor force overall.
For generations, the federal government has served as a ladder to the middle class for Black Americans who were shut out of jobs because of discrimination. The federal government has historically offered the population more job stability, pay equity and career advancement than the private sector. Following the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the federal government aggressively enforced affirmative action in hiring and anti-discrimination rules that Mr. Trump has sought to roll back.
The White House has defended Mr. Trump’s overhaul of the federal government as an effort to right-size the work force and to restore a merit-based approach to advancement. In July, the Supreme Court ruled that Mr. Trump could continue with mass firings across the federal government.
In a statement, Harrison Fields, a White House spokesman, said that Mr. Trump was “ushering in an economy that will empower all Americans, just as it did during his first term.” He added that “the obsession with divisive D.E.I. initiatives reverses years of strides toward genuine equality.”
“The policies of the past that artificially bloated the public sector with wasteful jobs are over,” he said. “The Trump administration is committed to advancing policies that improve the lives of all Americans.”
But economists say that Black women are being hit especially hard by Mr. Trump’s policies, which are also rippling through the private sector as corporations have abandoned their diversity, equity and inclusion practices and related jobs, many of which were held by Black women.
The most recent labor statistics show that nationwide, Black women lost 319,000 jobs in the public and private sectors between February and July of this year, the only major female demographic to experience significant job losses during this five-month period, according to an analysis by Katica Roy, a gender economist.
Experts attribute those job losses, in large part, to Mr. Trump’s cuts to federal agencies where Black women are highly concentrated.
White women saw a job increase of 142,000, and Hispanic women of 176,000, over the same time period. White men saw the largest increase among groups, 365,000, over the same time period.
Ms. Roy said that with the exception of the pandemic, Black women have never seen such staggering losses in employment. And over the last decade, the experiences of that population have consistently signaled what is to come for others.
“Black women are the canaries in the coal mine, the exclusion happens to them first,” Ms. Roy said. “And if any other cohort thinks it’s not coming for them, they’re wrong. This is a warning, and it’s a stark one.”
‘Wiped Out in One Day’
During the first two weeks of Mr. Trump’s second term, the Education Department began its first wave of firings. It was a preview of what would unfold across the government in the following months.
The department, more than a quarter of whose work force was Black women, suspended dozens of people whose job titles and official duties had no connection to D.E.I. Their only apparent exposure to D.E.I. initiatives came in the form of trainings encouraged by their managers — including Mr. Trump’s former education secretary, Betsy DeVos.
Denise Joseph, who worked in the Office of Postsecondary Education, was in the first group of people notified on Jan. 29 that they had been placed on administrative leave. She was devastated. “I know my worth is more than D.E.I.,” she said. “I know I’m more than what they’re saying.”
Dr. Joseph had spent a decade at the Education Department, helping to support grantmaking for minority-serving institutions. She worked her way up to a six-figure pay grade and was often the only Black person in leadership meetings.
“My career is an extension of who I am,” she said. “And it was all wiped out in one day.”
Kissy Chapman-Thaw, who also worked in the Office of Postsecondary Education, believes she too was caught in the dragnet of employees placed on leave for participating in the department’s “diversity change agent” class years ago.
She has no regrets. She found the class valuable in understanding her colleagues, and the concepts that Mr. Trump has determined were insulting to white people.
“I saw white privilege from my side,” she said. “But I never understood it from their side.”
Ms. Chapman-Thaw, who has multiple sclerosis, joined the department after her 12-year teaching career became untenable because of her health.
During her time at the department, she struggled with mounting medical bills. She struggled to braid her daughter’s hair. But she never struggled to do her job. The fact that the department came to the conclusion that she could not, perhaps because of her race or her disability, has left her bewildered some days.
“The assumption, that’s what hurts,” she said. “I have so many things I can check off, it’s hard for me to know which one they can use against me.”
The Education Department denied that its cuts targeted any particular group.
“The department’s staffing decisions, including its organizational restructuring, were made without regard to employees’ race, gender or political affiliation,” Madi Biedermann, deputy assistant secretary for communications, said in a statement. “Suggestions otherwise are unfounded and only serve to sow division.”
As Mr. Trump has tried to eliminate what he sees as a bloated bureaucracy full of deep-state dissidents and “D.E.I. hires,” the Office of Personnel Management has taken steps to erase publicly available demographic data for the federal work force.
In a May memo titled “Merit Hiring Plan,” the head of O.P.M. told agencies to “cease disseminating information regarding the composition of the agency’s work force based on race, sex, color, religion or national origin.” The office, which is the government’s human resources arm, said it would still collect the data for litigation and other statutorily required reports.
The data, advocates say, has been invaluable to providing insight into whether the work force reflects the country, as well as granular data like pay and promotion disparities for different groups. Without that information, they said, the full impact of Mr. Trump’s work force cuts won’t be known for years.
But a report published by the National Women’s Law Center, which compiled and analyzed the now-deleted O.P.M. data, showed that government agencies that were targeted for the deepest cuts had employed the highest percentages of women and people of color. Both populations also made up large portions of independent agencies, like the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, that Mr. Trump has targeted, the report found.
According to a New York Times tracker of Mr. Trump’s cuts, agencies where minorities and women were the majority of the work force, such as the Department of Education and U.S.A.I.D., were targeted for the largest work force reductions or complete elimination. Black women made up nearly a quarter of the work force in agencies such as the Internal Revenue Service that also saw deep reductions, according to a Times analysis.
In his second term, Mr. Trump has been aggressive in removing high-profile leaders of color, in particular, often disparaging them as incompetent, corrupt or D.E.I. hires.
Among the Black female leaders the Trump administration has targeted are Lisa Cook, the first Black woman to serve on the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve; Carla Hayden, the first Black and female librarian of Congress; and Gwynne Wilcox, the first Black woman to serve as a member of the National Labor Relations Board.
“This will be a model for what happens across this nation,” said Sheria Smith, president of the American Federation of Government Employees Local 252, which represents Education Department employees. “If the model employer, the federal government, is unilaterally terminating high-performing Black employees, what hope is there?”
A complaint filed with the Merit Systems Protection Board against Mr. Trump was more pointed. The A.C.L.U. and a group of employment attorneys alleged that among other things, the dismissals “disproportionately singled out federal workers who were not male or white,” in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.
Kelly Dermody, one of the lawyers representing the plaintiffs, said that of the workers who sought legal help to challenge their dismissals, 80 percent were people of color, and the majority were Black women.
“When an organization goes after really, really highly competent, singularly great, Black women — the message it sends, the terror it sends to every other professional woman, person of color, really is so profound,” she said.
She came to a clear conclusion:
“This is an attack on Black women — fully,” she said.
Shock, Followed by Forced Retirement
On a rainy day in April, Dr. Carr was still coming to terms with her forced retirement.
She recalled there was one person who preserved her dignity on the day she was placed on administrative leave. The security guard, a young Black man, was “polite” as he escorted her out, she said. He referred to her as “Dr. Carr,” in a show of respect.
During an interview at her home in Maryland, she pointed out the things that remind her of perseverance. A photo of her ancestors, who dressed up for a photo outside their slave house. Intricate pieces of art by her sister, who helped integrate her town’s school in North Carolina. A prominent photo of her late mother, who protested at lunch counters during the civil rights movement.
“Gaining equality has always driven our family,” she said.
Dr. Carr said she makes no apologies for bringing an equity lens to her work. It helped identify growth among the lowest-performing students, and pinpoint persistent gaps in the “Nation’s Report Card,” considered the “gold standard” of education data. When she delivered the often sobering news about the country’s academic performance to each secretary, they all shared the same concerns.
“What we do is about mission,” Dr. Carr said, “it is not about party.”
The department declined to comment specifically on why Dr. Carr had been relieved of her duties. She was given no reason other than that she served at the pleasure of the president, and it was Mr. Trump’s prerogative to terminate her.
In a statement, the department said that it had conducted a review of contracts and grants in the office, and determined that contractors were being overpaid. Officials said they had reduced the cost of the National Assessment of Educational Progress by more than 25 percent, which it said would save nearly $185 million over five years.
Less than two weeks after she was dismissed, she saw that the department had fired nearly all of her staff at the National Center for Education Statistics. She’s now less concerned about how she lost her job, and more about the nation losing track of how students are faring.
Dr. Carr never dwelled much on being the first Black female commissioner. But she has accepted that she will now add another first to her résumé. Dr. Carr is the first-ever commissioner in the history of the office to be pushed out by a president.
Erica L. Green is a White House correspondent for The Times, covering President Trump and his administration."
Friday, August 29, 2025
Thursday, August 28, 2025
Kennedy Sought to Fire C.D.C. Director Over Vaccine Policy
Kennedy Sought to Fire C.D.C. Director Over Vaccine Policy
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. demanded that CDC Director Susan Monarez fire agency leaders and support his vaccine advisory panel’s recommendations, or risk being fired. Monarez refused, leading to her dismissal and the resignation of three top CDC officials. The standoff has raised concerns about the CDC’s ability to handle future health crises, with public health experts fearing the agency’s weakened leadership.
“The director, Susan Monarez, declined to fire agency leaders or to accept all recommendations from a vaccine advisory panel made over by Mr. Kennedy, according to people with knowledge of the events.
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. summoned Susan Monarez, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, to his office in Washington earlier this week to deliver an ultimatum.
She needed to fire career agency officials and commit to backing his advisers if they recommended restricting access to proven vaccines — or risk being fired herself, according to people familiar with the events.
Dr. Monarez’s refusal to do so led to an extraordinary standoff on Thursday that paralyzed the nation’s health agency, which is still reeling from mass layoffs and a shooting this month that killed a police officer and terrified employees.
Top officials have quit, Dr. Monarez’s future is in doubt and President Trump has yet to publicly back his health secretary.
The White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said Mr. Trump had fired Dr. Monarez. “The secretary asked her to resign,” Ms. Leavitt said. “She said she would, and then she said she wouldn’t, so the president fired her, which he has every right to do.”
Lawyers for Dr. Monarez insisted that, because she had been confirmed by the Senate and served at the pleasure of the president, she would leave only if Mr. Trump personally instructed her to do so. They said she had chosen “protecting the public over serving a political agenda.”
The president himself was silent.
Dr. Monarez, who had been sworn in just one month earlier, had lost access to her agency email. Three other high-ranking officials, who had resigned in protest on Wednesday, were escorted out of the agency’s Atlanta headquarters. A new chief operating officer was installed.
And Mr. Kennedy, who had tried unsuccessfully to fire Dr. Monarez himself, fumed at a news briefing in Texas that the C.D.C. — an agency he has previously described as “a cesspool of corruption” — needed an overhaul.
“There’s a lot of trouble at C.D.C., and it’s going to require getting rid of some people over the long term in order for us to change the institutional culture,” he said.
Public health leaders said the health of all Americans was at stake.
With Dr. Monarez facing an uncertain future, and the agency’s top ranks depleted, leading public health experts wondered aloud on Thursday whether the C.D.C. could recover — and what might happen should a pandemic or other health crisis arise.
They said they fear the United States will be unable to handle a future pandemic or other health crisis.
“I think this is quite a negative and potentially catastrophic step for the country,” said Adm. Brett Giroir, a physician who helped lead the response to the coronavirus pandemic during Mr. Trump’s first term and advised Mr. Kennedy during the latest transition.
“I don’t know who’s in charge, honestly, and that’s frightening because the No. 1 thing you need is somebody in charge,” he added.
The Monday meeting was just the beginning of a tense back-and-forth between Dr. Monarez and her boss, the health secretary, according to people familiar with the events.
In addition to firing top C.D.C. leaders, Mr. Kennedy insisted that Dr. Monarez agree to accept whatever recommendations were made by the Advisory Committee on Immunization Policy, they said. The expert panel was recently reconstituted by Mr. Kennedy with new members who have questioned the safety of vaccines.
The committee is scheduled to meet again on Sept. 18 and 19, and may consider recommendations for a wide array of vaccines, including those for hepatitis B, Covid and respiratory syncytial virus, as well as a combination vaccine for measles, mumps, rubella and varicella, according to an agenda posted on the Federal Register.
After Dr. Monarez refused Mr. Kennedy’s demands, she called Senator Bill Cassidy, Republican of Louisiana and chair of the Senate health committee. He called Mr. Kennedy, which angered the health secretary, according to an administration official familiar with the events.
Mr. Kennedy summoned her back on Tuesday and reiterated his demands. On Wednesday, Dr. Monarez received a phone call from the White House personnel office telling her that she was being fired.
Dr. Richard Besser, chief executive of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and a former acting director of the C.D.C., said that he called Dr. Monarez on Wednesday, just by chance, to see how they could cooperate on public health matters.
He said she told him she did not expect to be long in her job — and that there were two things she would never do to keep it.
“One was anything that was deemed illegal, and the second was anything that she felt flew in the face of science,” he said. Dr. Monarez said she had been asked to do both, he continued — to fire agency leadership and “to rubber stamp A.C.I.P. recommendations that flew in the face of science.”
In Washington, senators from both parties expressed dismay at the events unfolding at the C.D.C. Mr. Cassidy, a physician who voted for Mr. Kennedy’s confirmation as health secretary after publicly agonizing over it, said on social media late Wednesday that the “high profile departures will require oversight” by his panel.
On Thursday, Mr. Cassidy called for a delay in the upcoming vaccine advisory committee meeting. Mr. Cassidy said that said if the meeting proceeds, “any recommendations made should be rejected as lacking legitimacy” given concerns about the panel “and the current turmoil in C.D.C. leadership.”
Senator Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent and ranking member of the health panel, said the attempt to fire Dr. Monarez was “outrageous” and called for a hearing. His colleague on the committee, Senator Patty Murray, Democrat of Washington, demanded Mr. Kennedy’s “immediate termination.”
Ms. Murray, who voted against Dr. Monarez’s confirmation, said in a statement that she once had “serious doubts about Director Monarez’s willingness to stand up against R.F.K. Jr.’s personal mission to destroy public health in America.”
She added: “I’m glad to say that I was wrong.”
The three officials who were ushered out the door by security on Thursday had coordinated their resignations. C.D.C. employees had planned to gather at agency headquarters in Atlanta. for a “clap-out” send-off to honor them, but the officials were forced to leave earlier. Still, hundreds of C.D.C. employees, including many in service uniforms, gathered at the agency to celebrate them.
The C.D.C. officials had decades of government experience, and all influenced vaccine policy.
Dr. Debra Houry, the C.D.C.’s chief medical officer, coordinated the various arms of the agency. Dr. Demetre Daskalakis ran the center that oversees respiratory illnesses and issues vaccine recommendations. Dr. Daniel Jernigan supervised the center that oversees emerging diseases and vaccine safety.
A fourth official, Dr. Jennifer Layden, who resigned a day earlier, led the office of public health data.
Dr. Jernigan said he had heard from Dr. Monarez that Mr. Kennedy’s office felt his position “was not needed anymore.” He decided to resign before his job could be eliminated, he said, in part hoping that would allow Dr. Monarez to continue as the director.
“If we were the problem, and she had the opportunity to actually stay, removing us as a problem I think was something that we were willing to do,” he said, adding that it was “important to have a strong, scientifically driven director.”
Dr. Jernigan said he was also increasingly uncomfortable with the things he was being asked to do, including providing data for a new analysis of vaccine safety data for potential links to autism, even though dozens of studies have already examined that claim and not found a connection.
Mr. Kennedy has hired David Geier, a discredited vaccine skeptic, to reanalyze the data, but Mr. Geier seemed to already have a conclusion in mind, Dr. Jernigan said.
“That approach to having a desire of what you want out of the data, and then looking at the data in order to find it — that, to me, is not the right way to ask scientific questions,” he added.
In an interview on Thursday morning, Dr. Houry and Dr. Daskalakis said there was no single move that pushed them to resign.
Rather, it was “death by a thousand paper cuts,” Dr. Houry said. “We had so many of these instances where we just couldn’t take it.”
The three had been contemplating leaving the agency for weeks, they said. But their distress escalated sharply after the new members of the vaccine advisory panel said that they would revisit the childhood and adolescent immunization schedules when they met again in the fall.
One vaccine that protects against hepatitis B was added to the committee’s agenda for its next meeting in September. Mr. Kennedy has long been critical of the vaccine.
Hepatitis B is a highly transmissible and dangerous pathogen that can be spread through sexual contact, needle stick injuries or from an infected mother to child, said Dr. Sean O’Leary, chair of the infectious disease committee for the American Academy of Pediatrics.
The vaccine has been shown to be safe and is given at birth to ensure that no cases are missed, he said. Any attempt to remove it from the immunization schedule would most likely face opposition, including from Senator Cassidy, he added.
Other recent moves also influenced the resignations.
Last week, Mr. Kennedy named Retsef Levi, a health analytics expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, to lead the Covid vaccine working group, which was given a broad mandate.
Dr. Levi has called for the Covid vaccines to be pulled from the market. Last week, a spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services defended the choice, saying the group’s members would work with federal experts and be receptive to diverse perspectives.
Dr. Daskalakis criticized the selection of Dr. Levi, saying he had no expertise in vaccines, “is frankly riddled with bias” and was assigned specifically to prevent the C.D.C.’s input to the discussion.
“That was, for me, one of the brightest red lines,” he said.
Mr. Kennedy signaled his intention to transform immunization policies when he fired all 17 independent scientific advisers to the C.D.C. and replaced them with eight people of his own choosing. (One later dropped out because of financial conflicts of interest.)
This week’s high-profile resignations are only the latest in a series of exits at the agency since Mr. Kennedy took office. In April, as the C.D.C. and other agencies were sharply pared down, some C.D.C. leaders were placed on administrative leave and a few took early retirement.
Two experts in vaccine policy left the agency in June, saying they feared for the lives of Americans if Mr. Kennedy were to continue unchecked.
Dr. Lakshmi Panagiotakopoulos oversaw the Covid vaccine working group before she resigned in June.
“It’s heartbreaking to witness such important, nuanced work being led by someone who has shown publicly at the A.C.I.P. meeting that he not only doesn’t understand the data, but is also dedicated to baseless conspiracy theories,” she said of Dr. Levi on Thursday.
The newest resignations are a sign of “how dire things are at the agency,” she said.
Sheryl Gay Stolberg covers health policy for The Times from Washington. A former congressional and White House correspondent, she focuses on the intersection of health policy and politics.
Apoorva Mandavilli reports on science and global health for The Times, with a focus on infectious diseases and pandemics and the public health agencies that try to manage them.
Christina Jewett covers the Food and Drug Administration, which means keeping a close eye on drugs, medical devices, food safety and tobacco policy.“
Wednesday, August 27, 2025
Opinion | Where’s Your Evidence, Mr. President? - The New York Times
Where’s Your Evidence, Mr. President?
"The editorial board is a group of opinion journalists whose views are informed by expertise, research, debate and certain longstanding values. It is separate from the newsroom.
President Trump’s attempt to fire the Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook is a grab for power in defiance of the nation’s laws, and if it succeeds, it will be to the detriment of the nation’s interests.
When Congress created the Fed in 1913, it gave the president the power to appoint the central bank’s governors, but it did not grant the power to remove them at will. Mr. Trump does not appear to regard that law as a binding constraint. He has made clear that he wants to replace the Fed’s leaders because they have resisted his demands to lower interest rates. In pursuit of this goal, he now says he is firing Ms. Cook because of “potentially criminal” behavior.
The law does allow the president to remove Fed governors “for cause,” and Mr. Trump has not presented any evidence of wrongdoing by Ms. Cook, an economist whom President Joe Biden appointed to the job three years ago. Mr. Trump has asserted that she “may have made false statements on one or more mortgage agreements.” We have two words for the president: Prove it.
In the absence of any finding of wrongdoing by a judge — or even presenting evidence to one — Mr. Trump is effectively asserting that the president gets to decide what counts as cause, which would render the standard meaningless. If the courts allow him to get away with it, the Fed will be stripped of its insulation from political pressure. Mr. Trump will be able to bully the central bank into delivering the economic sugar highs he craves, and we will all suffer the eventual consequences.
The Fed is charged with maintaining the health of the financial system and the stability of the broader economy. It tries to keep unemployment low and inflation steady. And it’s a thankless job. Maintaining a healthy economy can require the central bank to limit the pace of short-term growth, which inevitably incurs the anger of politicians.
To keep the Fed focused on the nation’s long-term interests, Congress created a board of seven members who are appointed to 14-year terms. Both the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 and the Banking Act of 1935 decreed that the president could fire members of the Federal Reserve Board only “for cause.” Adolph Miller, one of the first people appointed to the Fed’s board, insisted that this clause be restated in the 1935 bill, as he feared “political control” of the Fed. He believed the board should be independent, with members who considered their work as “a great public responsibility which runs to the public rather than to an official of the administration of the day.”
Those governors make mistakes. They have sometimes kept interest rates too high. They have sometimes kept rates too low. The president, along with every other American, is welcome to express his views on the current level of the Fed’s benchmark rate.
But Ms. Cook and her colleagues are the lawfully appointed representatives of the American people, experts performing the people’s business to the best of their ability. As we wrote last month, if Mr. Trump has an idea for a better system, he should speak it. But he must not be allowed to destroy the current system.
The Supreme Court deserves significant blame for this situation. In May the court issued a decision expanding the president’s authority to remove officials at independent agencies, such as the National Labor Relations Board, while carving out an exception for the Fed. Its independence, the justices said, remained intact. Yet the ruling was part of the court’s emergency docket, and the justices included scant justification for the exception.
Mr. Trump, as is his habit, has tried to take advantage of the court’s lack of a clear, definitive standard. By attempting to fire Ms. Cook, he has set up a direct clash with the conservative court majority he helped create. The justices didn’t want this fight, but now the courts have to stand up for the ruling the Supreme Court just made — and for the rule of law.
The editorial board is a group of opinion journalists whose views are informed by expertise, research, debate and certain longstanding values. It is separate from the newsroom."
Prosecutors Fail to Secure Indictment Against Man Who Threw Sandwich at Federal Agent - The New York Times
Prosecutors Fail to Secure Indictment Against Man Who Threw Sandwich at Federal Agent
"It was a sharp rebuke to the prosecutors who were assigned to bring charges against those arrested after President Trump’s deployment of National Guard troops and federal agents to Washington.
Federal prosecutors on Tuesday were unable to persuade a grand jury to approve a felony indictment against a man who threw a sandwich at a federal agent on the streets of Washington this month, according to two people familiar with the matter.
The grand jury’s rejection of the felony charge was a remarkable failure by the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington and the second time in recent days that a majority of grand jurors refused to vote to indict a person accused of felony assault on a federal agent. It also amounted to a sharp rebuke by a panel of ordinary citizens against the prosecutors assigned to bring charges against people arrested after President Trump’s deployment of National Guard troops and federal agents to fight crime and patrol the city’s streets.
The rejection by grand jurors was particularly noteworthy given the attention paid to the case of the man who threw the sandwich, Sean C. Dunn. Video of the episode went viral on social media, senior officials talked about the case, and the administration posted footage of a large group of heavily armed law enforcement officers going to Mr. Dunn’s apartment.
It remained unclear if prosecutors planned to try again to obtain an indictment against Mr. Dunn, 37, a former Justice Department paralegal. They could also forgo seeking felony charges and refile his case as a misdemeanor, which does not require an indictment to move forward.
Mr. Dunn was initially charged on Aug. 13 in a criminal complaint accusing him of throwing a submarine sandwich at a Customs and Border Protection officer who was on patrol with other federal agents near the corner of 14th and U Streets in the northwest section of the capital, a popular part of the city filled with bars and restaurants.
Before he threw the sandwich, the complaint asserts, Mr. Dunn stood within inches of the officer, calling him and his colleagues “fascists” and shouting, “I don’t want you in my city!”
Mr. Dunn’s lawyer, Sabrina Shroff, declined to comment.
It is extremely unusual for prosecutors to come out of a grand jury without obtaining an indictment because they are in control of the information that grand jurors hear about a case and defendants are not allowed to have their lawyers in the room as evidence is presented.
But Mr. Trump’s decision to flood the streets of Washington with federal agents and military personnel who are generally not trained in conducting routine police stops has resulted in a flurry of defendants being charged with federal crimes that would typically be handled at the local court level, if they were filed at all.
It has also led to an increasing number of embarrassments for federal prosecutors, who have had to dismiss weak cases or reduce the charges that defendants were facing in recent days.
On Monday, for instance, prosecutors refiled a felony assault charge as a misdemeanor in the case of a woman who was accused of injuring an F.B.I. agent during a protest last month against immigration officials at the local jail in Washington.
The charges were reduced against the woman, Sidney Lori Reid, after prosecutors failed not just once but three times to obtain an indictment in the case.
That same day, at the request of prosecutors, a federal magistrate judge dismissed all charges against a man who was arrested at a Trader Joe’s grocery store last week for what the police said was possession of two handguns in his bag.
At a hearing, the magistrate judge, Zia M. Faruqui, lambasted prosecutors for having charged the man, Torez Riley, in an apparent violation of his constitutional rights.
“Lawlessness cannot come from the government,” Judge Faruqui said, according to HuffPost. “We’re pushing the boundaries here.”
Mr. Dunn is scheduled to appear next week in Federal District Court in Washington for a preliminary hearing where another magistrate judge, G. Michael Harvey, will determine if there is probable cause that a crime was committed during the sandwich-throwing incident.
Prosecutors typically have 30 days to secure an indictment after a defendant is arrested. If they fail to do so within that window, they either have to reduce the charges to a misdemeanor or dismiss the case altogether.
Alan Feuer covers extremism and political violence for The Times, focusing on the criminal cases involving the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and against former President Donald J. Trump.
Devlin Barrett covers the Justice Department and the F.B.I. for The Times.
William K. Rashbaum is a Times reporter covering municipal and political corruption, the courts and broader law enforcement topics in New York."
Trump Again Escalates Power Grabs in Bid to Fire Fed Member - The New York Times
Trump Again Escalates Power Grabs in Bid to Fire Fed Member
"President Trump claimed he has cause to remove a member of the independent board who has not obeyed his demands to vote for lower interest rates.
Charlie Savage has been writing about presidential power and legal policy for more than two decades.
President Trump’s bid to fire a member of the Federal Reserve board is a new escalation of his efforts to amass more power over American government and society: Congress generations ago structured the agency, crucial to the health of the economy, to be independent of White House control.
In purporting to fire the board member, Lisa D. Cook, Mr. Trump is setting up another test of how far the Republican-appointed supermajority on the Supreme Court will let him go in eroding the checks and balances Congress has long imposed on executive power.
His attempt to fire Ms. Cook presents a new twist. It raises the question of whether he alone can decide whether there is cause to fire an official at an independent agency whose leaders are protected by law from arbitrary removal — or whether courts will be willing and able to intervene if judges believe his justification is a pretext.
But the move to oust Ms. Cook, whom the Senate confirmed for a term that ends in 2038, also fits into a now familiar arc, joining the various ways Mr. Trump has systematically accumulated greater authority.
Mr. Trump has stretched the bounds of some legal authorities, like prolifically declaring emergencies to unlock more expansive power, sending troops into the streets of American cities, unilaterally raising import taxes and blocking spending Congress had directed. In this case, he is pushing at the limits of a statute that says Fed board members serve 14-year terms unless removed “for cause” by a president.
Mr. Trump has also openly weaponized government power in ways that post-Watergate norms had forbidden, including directing the Justice Department to investigate perceived foes. In this case, a loyalist he installed atop the Federal Housing Finance Agency has scrutinized mortgage documents associated with various people Mr. Trump does not like, apparently finding a discrepancy in two loan applications Ms. Cook submitted in 2021.
And Mr. Trump has unabashedly violated statutes in which Congress set limits on when various types of officials may be fired, while seeking rulings striking down those laws as unconstitutional constraints on his powers. The restrictions apply to an array of officials, including board members of other independent agencies, inspectors general and civil servants.
But in telling Ms. Cook he was firing her, Mr. Trump invoked a provision Congress wrote into the Federal Reserve Act that says Fed board members may only be removed before their terms are up for cause. He said he had determined that sufficient cause existed to remove her.
That provision does not define what counts as a sufficient reason. In general, such provisions have been understood to mean something like significant misconduct or neglect of office.
The moves come as the Federal Reserve remains in Mr. Trump’s cross hairs, with the president pressuring the central bank to lower interest rates. He has also repeatedly threatened to fire the Fed chairman, Jerome H. Powell, citing cost overruns in its project to renovate the headquarters.
Minutes from the board’s July meeting, which were made public last week, showed that the two Trump appointees on the seven-member board wanted to lower interest rates. But the rest, including Ms. Cook, thought they should be held steady among mixed economic data, including weakening job numbers and a still-elevated inflation rate.
Congress enacted the law forbidding presidents from firing Fed board members without cause, making it an independent agency, to shield it from political pressures. The idea is to allow the board to decide on consequential matters like raising and lowering interest rates based on the long-term health of the economy, not short-term political interests.
The conservative legal movement, whose adherents now control the Supreme Court, has long wanted to reinterpret the Constitution to eliminate Congress’s ability to restrain presidents seeking to fire officials who exercise executive power — the so-called unitary executive theory. But even many conservatives have recoiled at the prospect of ending the independence of the Federal Reserve.
In a decision in May allowing Mr. Trump to remove Democratic-appointed members of the National Labor Relations Board and the Merit Systems Protection Board before their terms were up, members of the Supreme Court’s majority appeared to signal that they did not want to mess with the Fed’s independence.
The majority, noting that the fired officials on those boards had argued that allowing Mr. Trump to dismiss them without cause would undermine similar laws protecting the independence of the Fed, wrote: “We disagree.”
The opinion explained that the Fed was different because it is “a uniquely structured, quasi-private entity” that followed from a distinct historical tradition dating back to the country’s first national bank, which Congress established in 1791.
But Mr. Trump is now moving against the Fed’s independence anyway — albeit in a slightly different way.
On paper at least, Mr. Trump is purporting to fire Ms. Cook for a cause. In a letter he posted to social media on Monday, he cited allegations that in 2021, before she became a member of the Fed board, she falsely called two different properties her primary residence. That status allows someone to secure better loan terms.
The allegation was put forward by a Trump loyalist leading the Federal Housing Finance Agency, William J. Pulte. He has also accused New York’s state attorney general, Letitia James, of similar misrepresentations on mortgage documents. Ms. James earlier won a civil fraud case against Mr. Trump for manipulating the values of his properties to mislead lenders and insurers.
In a statement, Ms. Cook’s lawyer, Abbe Lowell, said Mr. Trump’s move lacked “any proper process, basis or legal authority,” and vowed to “take whatever actions are needed to prevent his attempted illegal action.” And Ms. Cook said she did not recognize Mr. Trump’s effort to fire her as legitimate and would continue to serve in her position.
“President Trump purported to fire me ‘for cause’ when no cause exists under the law, and he has no authority to do so,” she said in a statement. “I will not resign.”
Should a courtroom fight emerge, the case appears likely to turn on two issues: First, whether what counts as sufficient cause is up to the president alone to decide or if courts can adjudicate whether the standard has been met.
If courts do declare they have the power to review whether there was sufficient cause, the second issue is whether they will reject Mr. Trump’s move against Ms. Cook as a pretext or whether they will say the specific allegations in this instance are good enough to defer to his view.
In his letter, Mr. Trump appeared to gesture toward the argument that his determinations cannot be second-guessed. He cited the provision of the Federal Reserve Act that says Fed board members may only be “removed for cause by the president” but added a phrase not in the statute, saying it was up to his discretion whether that standard was met.
“The Federal Reserve Act provides that you may be removed, at my discretion, for cause,” Mr. Trump wrote. “I have determined that there is sufficient cause to remove you from your position.”
Charlie Savage writes about national security and legal policy for The Times."