Education department ‘will be much smaller’ under Trump order, but continue some functions, White House says
The White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt told reporters that the Department of Education will be dramatically downsized by the executive order Donald Trump will sign today, but continue administering student loans and Pell grants, as well as enforcing some civil rights laws.
Abolishing the department, as Trump and his conservative allies say they want to do, will require an act of Congress. Its unclear if the president will push for that, or if there are the votes to make it happen.
“The Department of Education will be much smaller than it is today,” Leavitt said. “When it comes to student loans and Pell grants, those will still be run out of the Department of Education. But we don’t need to be spending more than $3tn over the course of a few decades on a department that’s clearly failing in its initial intention to educate our students.”
She added that “any critical functions of the department … will remain”, such as enforcing laws against discrimination and providing funding for low-income students and special education.
Key events
Justice department charges three individuals over attacks on Tesla cars and charging stations
The justice department has brought charges against three unnamed individuals for using or planning to use molotov cocktails to attack Tesla automobiles and dealerships.
The attacks occurred in Salem, Oregon; Charleston, South Carolina; and Loveland, Colorado, and came as the electric car company led by Elon Musk faces a public backlash for his embrace of Donald Trump, and efforts to dismantle parts of the US government.
“The days of committing crimes without consequence have ended,” said attorney general Pamela Bondi said in a statement. “Let this be a warning: if you join this wave of domestic terrorism against Tesla properties, the Department of Justice will put you behind bars.”
The charges were not specified, but Bondi said the defendants face a minimum of five years in prison and a maximum of 20 years. Here are the details shared by the justice department of the attacks:
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One defendant, also armed with a suppressed AR-15 rifle, was arrested after throwing approximately eight Molotov cocktails at a Tesla dealership located in Salem, Oregon.
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Another was arrested in Loveland, Colorado, after attempting to light Teslas on fire with molotov cocktails. The defendant was later found in possession of materials used to produce additional incendiary weapons.
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In Charleston, South Carolina, a third defendant wrote profane messages against Donald Trump around Tesla charging stations before lighting the charging stations on fire with molotov cocktails.
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The Republican Alabama representative Mike Rogers, chair of the House armed services committee, and the Republican Mississippi senator Roger Wicker, chair of the Senate armed services committee, have released a joint statement on reports of changes of the US combatant command structure across the defense department.
Together, the lawmakers said:
US combatant commands are the tip of the American warfighting spear. Therefore, we are very concerned about reports that claim DoD is considering unilateral changes on major strategic issues, including significant reductions to US forces stationed abroad, absent coordination with the White House and Congress.
We support president Trump’s efforts to ensure our allies and partners increase their contributions to strengthen our alliance structure, and we support continuing America’s leadership abroad.
As such, we will not accept significant changes to our warfighting structure that are made without a rigorous interagency process, coordination with combatant commanders and the Joint Staff, and collaboration with Congress. Such moves risk undermining American deterrence around the globe and detracting from our negotiating positions with America’s adversaries.”
Rachel Leingang
A Minnesota state lawmaker who is accused of trying to buy sex from an underage girl resigned from the state senate on Thursday before his colleagues were set to vote to expel him.
Justin Eichorn, a Republican, was charged with a felony in federal court Wednesday for attempted coercion and enticement of a minor after responding to online sex ads and trying to arrange a meetup with a 17-year-old.
Eichorn, 40, was arrested on Tuesday. The charges include details about Eichorn’s alleged conduct. A similar state charge filed on Wednesday was dropped in favor of the federal charge.
Police in Bloomington, Minnesota, carried out a sex sting operation, placing ads, including photos, posing as a young woman on two websites known for human trafficking, according to an affidavit from FBI special agent Matthew Vogel. The ad claimed the woman was 18 and said: “cum $pend time with me.”
For the full story, click here:
The day so far
Donald Trump is gearing up to at 4pm ET sign an executive order to begin the closure of the Department of Education. The agency was created by Congress, and can’t be done away with without its approval, but White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said the order will result in the department becoming “much smaller”. Meanwhile, we expect further court filings in the legal battle over the suspected Venezuelan gang members deported to El Salvador. The judge handling the case set a noon deadline, which has now passed, for the government to offer details of their deportations, or invoke a national security exemption. We’ll let you know if anything new about this case is made public.
Here’s what else has happened today so far:
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Immigration agents arrested Badar Khan Suri, an Indian national with a valid visa doing research at Georgetown University, and are trying to deport him for alleged support of Hamas.
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Tim Walz, who Kamala Harris picked as her running mate, sees an ominous future for the country under Trump, but also opportunities for Democrats to regain their popular support.
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Trump pushed the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates, something presidents typically do not do. Yesterday, the central bank held rates steady while forecasting weaker economic growth.
Education department ‘will be much smaller’ under Trump order, but continue some functions, White House says
The White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt told reporters that the Department of Education will be dramatically downsized by the executive order Donald Trump will sign today, but continue administering student loans and Pell grants, as well as enforcing some civil rights laws.
Abolishing the department, as Trump and his conservative allies say they want to do, will require an act of Congress. Its unclear if the president will push for that, or if there are the votes to make it happen.
“The Department of Education will be much smaller than it is today,” Leavitt said. “When it comes to student loans and Pell grants, those will still be run out of the Department of Education. But we don’t need to be spending more than $3tn over the course of a few decades on a department that’s clearly failing in its initial intention to educate our students.”
She added that “any critical functions of the department … will remain”, such as enforcing laws against discrimination and providing funding for low-income students and special education.
After underperforming in the November elections, leading Democrats are looking for ways to regain the support of crucial voting groups across the country, including Tim Walz, who ran alongside Kamala Harris and is now touring Republican-held House districts.
In an interview with CNN, the Minnesota governor shared some of his worries of what Donald Trump may do over the next four years:
‘It’s going to get very dark,’ Walz said, running through speculation that ranged from Trump soon ordering the arrest of a political opponent to trying to anoint a son as his successor in the White House.
While the administration denies it defied a judge’s order halting deportation flights to El Salvador over the weekend, the episode is proof to Walz that judges are set to be ignored and impeached going forward. Tuesday’s statement from supreme court Chief Justice John Roberts rebuking the president’s rhetoric on impeaching judges, without naming Trump, tells Walz that Roberts is also ‘scared of where things are going’.
‘I’m a pretty low-key, middle of the road guy on this stuff. And I’m telling you, this is real,’ Walz said. ‘My one skill set is to see over the horizon a little bit of what’s coming, and this is what’s coming.’
He also recounted how he quickly realized on election night that he would not be the next vice-president:
Walz knew they lost early on election night. Sitting around a table in a suite at the Mayflower Hotel that he had walked into thinking he’d be leaving as the vice-president-elect, he could feel the mood shift among his staff as soon as the Virginia results started coming in soft for Harris.
They wanted to fly back that night. Gwen Walz, the governor’s wife, told CNN that one of the things that sticks with her is that the Harris-Walz logo was already off the charter plane by the time they got to the airport.
These days, Walz said that thinking they were going to win ‘feels like an unforgivable sin’.
‘I’m a little bit jaded now, knowing how tough this is because of that,’ he said, then hearing the noise of the crowd waiting inside, said: ‘We’ll see how these folks are.’
But Walz sees opportunities for Democrats to regain some of their mojo, if they clinch victory in special elections in the months to come:
If Democrats win in Wisconsin and then in the Virginia governor’s race in November, Walz claimed, Trump’s power will begin to erode as Republicans distance themselves. How that will happen when Trump is barely into a four-year term and already exerting executive power in unprecedented ways, and how Democrats keep their spirits up when even their chance at getting more power in the midterms is 18 months away, Walz is not sure.
‘I don’t think there’s any limit to where he goes. The limit will be what the American public will put up with and when they push back,’ Walz said. ‘This has happened everywhere when these authoritarians have come in. One day it looks like they’re absolutely infallible and in total power, and the next day they and their entire families are gone.’
Not much new from Donald Trump at the Digital Asset Summit, where he delivered what appeared to be a pre-recorded address touting his policies towards cryptocurrencies.
“It’s an honor to speak with you about how the United States is going to dominate crypto and the next generation of financial technologies,” he began, before taking a swipe at the Joe Biden’s cautious approach towards the assets:
I signed an order creating the brand new strategic bitcoin reserve and the US digital asset stockpile, which will allow the federal government to maximize the value of its holdings instead of foolishly selling them for a fraction of their long term value, which is exactly what Biden did. He got a fraction of their value.
We expect to hear more from Trump at 4pm, when he is scheduled to sign his executive order to close the Department of Education.
No sign yet of Donald Trump at the crypto conference. Meanwhile, the Guardian’s Dan Milmo and Ashifa Kassam report that Tesla’s investors are growing worried that Elon Musk is spending too much of his time gutting the US government and not enough time navigating the challenges facing the electric vehicle manufacturer:
Tesla and Elon Musk are embroiled in a “brand tornado crisis moment” and the electric carmaker’s chief executive needs to cut back on his work for Donald Trump to stem the damage, one of the company’s biggest supporters has said.
The warning came as Tesla announced a recall of 46,000 Cybertrucks in the US on Thursday to fix an exterior panel that could detach while driving.
It came as protesters announced on Wednesday they were planning what they described as their biggest day of action yet against the EV maker, with 500 demonstrations expected at Tesla showrooms around the world on 29 March.
It also emerged that the Vancouver International Auto Show has removed Tesla from its event hours, citing security concerns.
Tesla shares have lost a third of their value over the past month because of a number of investor concerns including the impact on sales from Musk’s high-profile involvement with the Trump administration, including gutting the public sector through his “department of government efficiency” (Doge).
Trump to address crypto summit
A White House spokesperson just announced that Donald Trump will speak at the cryptocurrency focused Digital Asset Summit, in just a few minutes.
Since taking office, Trump has embraced the cryptocurrency industry, which spent big to help his campaign. Here’s more on that:
Trump aims to return ‘authority to the states’ by closing Department of Education – report
USA Today has details of the executive order Donald Trump will sign at 4pm ET to dismantle the Department of Education, including that the president envisions states taking a greater role in determining their own policies around schooling.
The order will direct education secretary Linda McMahon to take “all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education and return education authority to the States”, while ensuring “uninterrupted delivery of services, programs, and benefits on which Americans rely”.
However, Trump can’t order the department dismantled unilaterally, as it was created by an act of Congress and requires their approval. It’s unclear if the GOP has the votes for that.
Here’s more on what we can expect from the president later today, from USA Today:
Although Trump has reduced the agency’s workforce dramatically in recent weeks, the agency still exists and continues to oversee vital federal funding programs for schools.
Harrison Fields, White House principal deputy press secretary, said in a statement to USA TODAY the order “will empower parents, states, and communities to take control and improve outcomes for all students.” He said recent test scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress exam “reveal a national crisis ‒ our children are falling behind.”
A final copy of the order was not available Wednesday, but it is expected to closely resemble a draft that USA TODAY and other media outlets reported earlier this month was prepared for Trump.
The order takes aim at “regulations and paperwork” required by the Department of Education, arguing federal guidance in the form of “Dear Colleague” letters from the department “redirect resources toward complying with ideological initiatives, which diverts staff time and attention away from schools’ primary role of teaching,” according to the White House summary.
Federal funding for students with disabilities under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, Title I funding for low-income schools and federal student loan payments will remain unchanged under the order while McMahon works on a plan to “bring these funds closer to states, localities, and more importantly, students,” a White House official said.
Under the order, education programs or activities that receive “any remaining Department of Education funds” will not be allowed to advance diversity, equity and inclusion or gender ideology, according to the White House summary.
Donald Trump says his campaign to cut down government will save money, but Department of Education staffers who spoke to the Guardian’s Michael Sainato said dismantling the agency – as the president is set to order today – may instead cost taxpayers money:
The education secretary, Linda McMahon, presented sweeping reductions at the US Department of Education as an efficiency drive, hailing firings and funding cuts as a “significant step toward restoring the greatness” of the country’s schools system.
Staff inside the department disagree.
The Trump administration has axed many research programs which have yet to be completed, according to workers, putting years of work – on which the federal government spent tens of millions of dollars – to waste.
Nearly 50% of staff at the US Department of Education was fired last week, with more than 1,300 employees given termination notices and nearly 600 workers taking voluntary resignation offers. Offices covering research, data and statistics were decimated.
A Department of Education employee who survived the cuts likened the experience to a funeral. “People were crying, breaking down at the human toll,” they told the Guardian. “These people are not bureaucratic bloat: they’re vital to helping improve educational outcomes for our nation’s children, and to ensuring states comply with the law. It’s death by a thousand cuts.”
The Trump administration insists that the Venezuelans deported to El Salvador over the weekend are gang members, but a relative of one of the deportees told the Guardian’s Tom Phillips and Clavel Rangel that is not the case:
Donald Trump’s White House has described the Venezuelan migrants deported to a notorious prison in El Salvador as “heinous monsters” and terrorists who “rape, maim and murder for sport”.
But relatives of Francisco Javier García Casique, a 24-year-old from the city of Maracay, say he was a hairdresser, not a crook.
“He has never been in prison, he is innocent, and he has always supported us with his work as a barber,” his younger brother, Sebastián García Casique, said from their family home in Venezuela.
Less than a week ago, the García brothers were preparing to be reunited, with Francisco telling relatives he expected to be deported from a US immigration detention facility to his South American homeland after being arrested by immigration officials on 2 March.
The flight was scheduled for last Friday. A family gathering was planned in Maracay. On Sunday those plans were shattered when El Salvador’s authoritarian president, Nayib Bukele, published a cinematographic propaganda video on social media showing scores of Venezuelan prisoners being frog-marched off planes and into custody in his country’s “terrorism confinement centre”.
“It’s him,” a shell-shocked Sebastián told their mother after spotting his sibling among those shackled men.
Meanwhile, we expect further updates today in the case of the suspected Venezuelan gang members flown by US immigration authorities to El Salvador over the weekend, possibly in violation of a judge’s order.
The judge overseeing the case, James Boasberg, has given the government until 12pm ET to either provide specific details of the planes’ itineraries and passengers, or invoke a national security exception to sharing the information. Boasberg has come under personal attack by the White House as he weighs the case, with Donald Trump suggesting he be impeached, and his press secretary Karoline Leavitt yesterday calling him a “Democrat activist”.
Trump administration detains researcher with valid visa, alleges Hamas support – report
Immigration agents earlier this week arrested Badar Khan Suri, an Indian national with a valid visa doing research at Georgetown University, and accused him of having ties to Hamas, Politico reports.
Suri now faces deportation, in a case similar to the arrest earlier this month of Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian activist and leader of protests on Columbia University’s campus. Khalil’s arrest prompted fears that the Trump administration will attempt to illegally deport foreigners in the country simply for speech they disapprove of, which appear to have been realized with Suri’s detention.
Here’s more on Suri’s case, from Politico:
Masked agents arrested Badar Khan Suri, an Indian national and postdoctoral fellow, outside his home in the Rosslyn neighborhood of Arlington, Virginia, on Monday night, his lawyer said in a lawsuit fighting for his immediate release. The agents identified themselves as being with the Department of Homeland Security and told him the government had revoked his visa, the lawsuit says.
According to Suri’s petition for release, he was put in deportation proceedings under the same rarely used provision of immigration law that the government has invoked to try to deport Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia University graduate student and green card holder who led pro-Palestinian protests on campus. That provision gives the secretary of State the power to deport noncitizens if the secretary determines that their continued presence in the U.S. would threaten foreign policy.
Suri has no criminal record and has not been charged with a crime, his petition says. His detention and petition have not been previously reported.
Suri’s lawyer, Hassan Ahmad, argued in his petition that Suri is being punished because of the Palestinian heritage of his wife — who is a U.S. citizen — and because the government suspects that he and his wife oppose U.S. foreign policy toward Israel.
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Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin confirmed that Secretary of State Marco Rubio issued a determination on Saturday that Suri’s visa should be canceled for foreign policy reasons.
“Suri was a foreign exchange student at Georgetown University actively spreading Hamas propaganda and promoting antisemitism on social media,” McLaughlin wrote on X. “Suri has close connections to a known or suspected terrorist, who is a senior advisor to Hamas.”
