Trump Administration Live Updates: Top Vaccine Official at F.D.A. Resigns, and Criticizes Kennedy

New York Times

29-03-2025

Skip to contentSkip to site index
The American Embassy in France said the companies that received the letter must certify 'that they do not operate any programs promoting D.E.I.' Credit... Chesnot/Getty Images
For months, French businesses have been bracing for the fallout of trade wars and tariff threats from the United States as the effects of President Trump's 'America First' policies ripple out. But this past week, the French corporate world was roiled by another type of Trump missive.
In a terse three-paragraph letter sent by the American Embassy in France to French companies, executives were told that President Trump's moves to eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion policies would apply to any firm doing business with the U.S. government. It said it was giving them five days to sign a form indicating that they would comply.
An executive order that Mr. Trump signed the day after taking office instructs federal contractors not to engage in D.E.I., which the order described as 'illegal discrimination.' The letter to French businesses said the order 'applies to all suppliers and contractors of the U.S. government, regardless of their nationality and the country in which they operate.'
'If you do not agree to sign this document, we would appreciate it if you could provide detailed reasons, which we will forward to our legal services,' the letter said. The accompanying form added that companies must certify 'that they do not operate any programs promoting D.E.I.'
The notice caused a sensation in the French corporate world and drew a curt reply from the French government.
'This practice reflects the values ​​of the new American government. They are not ours,' the economy ministry said in a statement late Friday. France's economy minister, Eric Lombard, 'will remind his counterparts within the American government of this,' the statement said.
It was not immediately clear how many companies received the letter or how enforceable it was. But several members of the French Association of Private Enterprises, which include French CAC-40 listed companies and dozens of other major French firms, expressed their dismay over it during a meeting with French government officials this week.
Mr. Trump's D.E.I.-quashing orders have sown fear and confusion among corporate leaders in the United States and led companies such as Google, as well as American law firms and some universities, to roll back diversity goals. But the Trump administration's efforts to impose its policies on Europe-based workforces have been met with resistance in places like Italy that have long had strong labor laws favoring workers' rights.
In France, companies have worked for years to increase the presence of women, members of minority groups and employees with disabilities, generally broadening their workforces to reflect the makeup of French society.
Unlike in the United States, French diversity policies officially bar the consideration of race in hiring. Even so, French companies have moved in practice to increase employee diversity and communicate their efforts to shareholders. In addition, companies with more than 250 employees are legally required to have more than 40 percent of women on their executive boards.
A spokesperson for the French Association of Private Enterprises said the group was waiting for the government to make a 'coordinated response' to the Trump administration's letter.
Catherine Porter contributed reporting.

The White House has spent the week trying to downplay the revelation that top national security officials discussed plans for U.S. strikes in Yemen on Houthi militants over Signal, a commercial messaging app.
In a stunning breach of national security, the Defense Secretary, Pete Hegseth, disclosed specific operational details before the attacks in the group chat — which inadvertently included The Atlantic's editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg. Michael Waltz, the national security adviser who added Mr. Goldberg to the chat, said he took 'full responsibility' for the leak.
Several Democrats called for Mr. Hegseth to step down. But the Trump administration has tried to divert or sidestep the issues. (Mr. Trump said the scandal was a 'witch hunt.')
As part of a regular check-in over the course of Mr. Trump's first 100 days back in office, The New York Times asked five voters what they thought of the administration's response. Credit... Brittany Greeson for The New York Times
Dave Abdallah wasn't happy with the way Mr. Trump and those around him kept downplaying the Signal chat security breach.
They 'are totally wrong,' Mr. Adballah said.
The breach, he added, could have cost U.S. soldiers their lives. 'This is a serious, serious mistake,' he said of the entire affair.
Mr. Abdallah, a real estate broker who immigrated to the United States from Lebanon as a child, voted for the Green Party candidate Jill Stein in the 2024 election. It was a protest over the Biden administration's handling of the war in Gaza and concerns that Mr. Trump would not help the situation. Still, Mr. Abdallah hoped Mr. Trump's foreign policy might bring peace and stability to the region.
So far, he has been disappointed.
Fighting recently resumed between Israel and Hamas. Now, Mr. Abdallah believes that Mr. Trump, his administration and backers are proving to be hypocritical as they face backlash for the Signal affair.
He recalled seeing a recent TikTok video that showed old clips of Republicans criticizing Hillary Clinton for using a private computer server when she was the secretary of state during the Obama administration. The video then showed images of the same critics, now backers of Mr. Trump, shrugging off the Signal chat as no big deal and making excuses.
Such excuses struck Mr. Abdallah as insincere. 'I just can't comprehend it,' he said of the Signal chat. 'So it definitely should be on the table to get rid of somebody.'
— Kurt Streeter Credit... David Kasnic for The New York Times
When Perry Hunter first heard that Trump officials accidentally included a journalist in the Signal chat, he thought it was a significant error by the administration and that there needed to be consequences.
But, just as he had done in response to many Trump-related news events since the inauguration, Mr. Hunter said he took time to learn the details before deciding what he thought of the situation. This time, he ended up thinking that the scandal was not much of a scandal at all, saying that the chat included no specific war plans, echoing the White House's description. That rendered the messages benign to his eye. (Defense experts have been shocked by the level of detail in the chat.)
'Somebody made a mistake, for sure,' he said, adding, 'I don't think anybody should be fired over this because it's not as serious as a lot of people think that it is.'
Mr. Hunter, a high school teacher, would have thought differently, he said, if Americans had been killed because of information shared in the chat. In that case, he said, 'then, yes, somebody should lose their job and somebody should go to jail.' He added, 'I think it's one of those things that they got lucky and they better learn from it.'
Hearing Democrats criticize the administration over the breach, he said it was hypocritical of them to be so upset. He compared the breach to mistakes made by officials involved in the Biden administration's withdrawal from Afghanistan, or in Mrs. Clinton's use of a private email server for official communications.
'No one that we know of was held accountable in those situations,' Mr. Hunter said. 'And there was failure, big-time failure, in all of those situations.'
— Juliet Macur Credit... Mark Abramson for The New York Times
'I have to tell you, I was in shock,' said Tali Jackont, an educator. 'There is stuff that cannot happen, and it happened.'
Ms. Jackont compared it with how closely military secrets are kept in Israel, her home country. When Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service, conducts an operation, no one claims responsibility even if it seems obvious, she said. 'No one will tell you, until they tell you,' she said.
She was not eager for anyone involved to be fired at this point, 'but there has to be better attention,' she said.
Has the administration learned its lesson? 'Time will tell,' Ms. Jackont said. For now it looked as though they were mostly brushing this under the rug, she said, but mused about what conversations might be going on behind closed doors.
'If it happens again, even in one or two or three years, then no one learned anything,' she said. 'And it will be, I don't want to use the word disaster, but a big shame.'
— Campbell Robertson Credit... Jordan Vonderhaar for The New York Times
As the mayor of a small border town, Jaime Escobar Jr., knew how important it was to protect sensitive government information. So when he read the news about the Signal chat, he worried that the officials in question were trying to brush off the matter too quickly.
'That's just very, it's a hard pill to swallow,' he said of the issue. 'There has to be a strong message. We can't allow this to happen. Imagine somebody from another country with malicious intentions, they take that information and hurt us and our military.'
Mr. Escobar, who voted for Mr. Trump after years as a Democrat, remained troubled that the officials failed to check something as simple as who was receiving the information, like a journalist.
'That is a big mistake, and they just have to be extra careful about it,' he said. 'It's a lesson that needs to be learned very quickly and just cannot be repeated.'
At the same time, he felt satisfied that Mr. Waltz, who admitted to creating the group chat, accepted responsibility.
'He took it on, whether it was his fault or not, he's like, 'Well, I'm the guy in charge of national security,'' he said. As for further consequences? 'Well, that's going to have to be up to the president.'
— Edgar Sandoval Credit... Caroline Gutman for The New York Times
When Isaiah Thompson learned that Trump senior officials shared sensitive war details on Signal, he immediately wondered how any member of the federal government could make such a mistake. Then he wondered how Democrats — rather than Republicans — would react.
'The left hasn't had much to fight with or defend themselves with. It would seem like this could give them a foothold or something to push back on,' he said. 'I don't know how the federal government could have gotten something like this so wrong.'
Mr. Thompson, a college student who voted for Kamala Harris but supports the Green Party, said the Signal chat was just another example of the lack of accountability or checks and balances in the Trump administration. Still, he hesitates to support the firing of Mr. Hegseth or Mr. Waltz over their roles in the Signal scandal — at least not yet.
'There needs to be a deep investigation before anybody is fired or asked to resign,' said Mr. Thompson. 'But the president is not treating this seriously enough. This was a national security breach.'
— Audra D. S. Burch The U.S. Naval Academy campus in Annapolis, Md. Credit... Patrick Semansky/Associated Press
The Pentagon and U.S. Naval Academy are proceeding with actions in support of the Trump administration's push to eliminate 'woke' initiatives throughout the federal government.
The U.S. Naval Academy said it had ended its use of affirmative action in admissions, reversing a policy it previously defended as essential for diversity and national security, according to a federal court filing on Friday. And Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's office has ordered the Naval Academy to identify books related to so-called diversity, equity and inclusion themes that are housed in the school's Nimitz Library, and to remove them from circulation.
This week, according to a defense official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss policy decisions, Mr. Hegseth's office became aware that the nation's military service academies did not believe that President Trump's Jan. 29 executive order to end 'radical indoctrination' in kindergarten through 12th-grade classrooms applied to them, as they are colleges. The defense secretary's office informed the Naval Academy that Mr. Hegseth's intent was for the order to apply to the academies, and that the secretary expected compliance.
'The U.S. Naval Academy is fully committed to executing and implementing all directives outlined in executive orders issued by the president and is currently reviewing the Nimitz Library collection to ensure compliance,' said Cmdr. Tim Hawkins, a Navy spokesman. 'The Navy is carrying out these actions with utmost professionalism, efficiency, and in alignment with national security objectives.'
The academy's library in Annapolis, Md., houses roughly 590,000 print books, 322 databases, and more than 5,000 print journals and magazines, Commander Hawkins said.
The court filing on the admissions policy, submitted by the Naval Academy, the Department of Defense, Mr. Hegseth and other officials, states that the Naval Academy changed its admissions policy in February in response to federal directives prohibiting the practice of considering race, ethnicity and sex during the admissions process.
The Naval Academy superintendent issued revised internal guidance on Feb. 14, stating that would not be happening, according to the filing. The superintendent, Vice Admiral Yvette M. David, reaffirmed this change on Wednesday, when she testified before a subcommittee of the Senate Armed Services Committee.
'At no time are race, sex or ethnicity considered in the qualification of a candidate,' she said. The Naval Academy did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the admissions policy on Friday.
Thus far, the review of Nimitz Library's holdings has identified 900 books that may run afoul of the defense secretary's verbal order. According to a second defense official, they include 'The Autobiography of Martin Luther King Jr.,' 'Einstein on Race and Racism,' and a biography on Jackie Robinson.
Mr. Hegseth is scheduled to visit the Naval Academy on Tuesday and to speak to the Brigade of Midshipmen. It is unclear whether the secretary expects the books to be removed before his arrival.
Defense officials said they were unaware whether the United States Military Academy at West Point, the United States Air Force Academy or the United States Coast Guard Academy had received similar orders, or whether the military's graduate schools, such as the Naval War College and the Army's Command and General Staff College, were expected to comply.
The U.S. Agency for International Development office in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, last week. Credit... Issouf Sanogo/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
A federal appeals court on Friday allowed Elon Musk and his team of analysts to resume their work in helping to dismantle the U.S. Agency for International Development, clearing the way for them to continue while the government appeals the earlier ruling.
The decision by a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit came as the Trump administration was taking its final steps to effectively eliminate the agency after steadily chipping away at its staff and grant programs for weeks.
The appeals court panel said that whatever influence Mr. Musk and his team in the so-called Department of Government Efficiency had over the process, it was ultimately agency officials who had signed off on the various moves to gut the agency and reconfigure it as a minor office under the control of the State Department.
Earlier this month, Judge Theodore D. Chuang of U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland wrote that Mr. Musk, in his capacity as a special adviser to President Trump who was never confirmed by the Senate, lacked the authority to carry out what Mr. Musk himself described as a campaign to shut down the agency.
Judge Chuang pointed to public statements by Mr. Musk in which he described directing the engineers and analysts on his team, known as DOGE, to do away with U.S.A.I.D., previewing his plans and announcing their progress along the way.
On X, the social media platform he owns, Mr. Musk wrote in February that it was time for U.S.A.I.D. to 'die,' that his team was in the process of shutting the agency down, and at one point that he had 'spent the weekend feeding U.S.A.I.D. into the wood chipper.'
Judge Chuang reasoned that the central role that Mr. Musk's task force had appeared to have played in shrinking the agency violated the Constitution, which requires that anyone exercising the level of authority Mr. Musk had claimed for himself must be confirmed by the Senate.
In its opinion on Friday, the appeals court took issue with the district court judge's finding.
In essence, the opinion stated that the way the Trump administration had adopted Mr. Musk's recommendations but put in place the changes on its own made it impossible to conclude that Mr. Musk had unilaterally closed the agency or subverted Congress.
'While defendants' role and actions related to U.S.A.I.D. are not conventional, unconventional does not necessarily equal unconstitutional,' Judge A. Marvin Quattlebaum Jr., a Trump appointee, wrote in an opinion joined by another judge.
'The question is whether Musk both directed those decisions and did so without the approval or ratification of U.S.A.I.D. officials,' Judge Quattlebaum added. 'And no record evidence shows that he did.'
Even so, the appeals court judges left open the larger constitutional questions that the DOGE operation has stirred in recent months, especially in light of public statements by Mr. Trump, the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who have all publicly thanked Mr. Musk for helping dismantle the agency, and credited his team with bringing about that result.
On Friday, the agency's remaining employees received an email titled 'U.S.A.I.D.'s Final Mission,' informing them of a final round of planned layoffs that would reduce the agency's work force from around 10,000 workers before Mr. Trump took office to around 15 legally required positions. The email was sent by Jeremy Lewin, a DOGE staffer who had led the effort to analyze the agency and was since named one of its official leaders in a formal governmental capacity.
In a separate opinion agreeing with the court's decision but not the reasoning behind it, Judge Roger Gregory, a Clinton appointee, wrote that the lawsuit's problem was that it too narrowly targeted Mr. Musk, and missed the bigger picture.
'Because plaintiffs failed to include the proper defendants, I am forced to concur in the majority's grant of defendants' request for a stay pending appeal,' he wrote. 'But I write separately to make clear that my concurrence today should not be seen as an endorsement of the executive's likely unconstitutional actions in closing U.S.A.I.D., effectively dissolving a 'creature of statute' that can only be created or destroyed by Congress.'
Judge Gregory added that the agency's cuts, which an agency official estimated this month could cause tens of millions of disease infections and hundreds of thousands of deaths worldwide, were most likely all unlawful in his view, as Congress never approved them.
He added that while the lawsuit had failed to resolve some of the most urgent questions about the separation of powers or clarify murky details about DOGE, the lawsuit would have needed to include Mr. Rubio or other officials who oversaw the cuts in order to block them from eliminating programs funded by Congress or direct them to reverse those actions.
'We may never know how many lives will be lost or cut short by the defendants' decision to abruptly cancel billions of dollars in congressionally appropriated foreign aid. We may never know the lasting effect of defendants' actions on our national aspirations and goals,' he wrote. 'But those are not the questions before the court today.' The Food and Drug Administration's top vaccine official, Dr. Peter Marks, resigned Friday. Credit... Greg Nash
The Food and Drug Administration's top vaccine official, Dr. Peter Marks, resigned under pressure Friday and said that Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s aggressive stance on vaccines was irresponsible and posed a danger to the public.
'It has become clear that truth and transparency are not desired by the secretary, but rather he wishes subservient confirmation of his misinformation and lies,' Dr. Marks wrote to Sara Brenner, the agency's acting commissioner. He reiterated the sentiments in an interview, saying: 'This man doesn't care about the truth. He cares about what is making him followers.'
Dr. Marks resigned after he was summoned to the Department of Health and Human Services Friday afternoon and told that he could either quit or be fired, according to a person familiar with the matter.
Dr. Marks led the agency's Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, which authorized and monitored the safety of vaccines and a wide array of other treatments, including cell and gene therapies. He was viewed as a steady hand by many during the Covid pandemic but had come under criticism for being overly generous to companies that sought approvals for therapies with mixed evidence of a benefit.
His continued oversight of the F.D.A.'s vaccine program clearly put him at odds with the new health secretary. Since Mr. Kennedy was sworn in on Feb. 13, he has issued a series of directives on vaccine policy that have signaled his willingness to unravel decades of vaccine safety policies. He has rattled people who fear he will use his powerful government authority to further his decades-long campaign of claiming that vaccines are singularly harmful, despite vast evidence of their role in saving millions of lives worldwide.
'Undermining confidence in well-established vaccines that have met the high standards for quality, safety and effectiveness that have been in place for decades at F.D.A. is irresponsible, detrimental to public health, and a clear danger to our nation's health, safety and security,' Dr. Marks wrote.
Mr. Kennedy has, for example, promoted the value of vitamin A as a treatment during the major measles outbreak in Texas while downplaying the value of vaccines. He has installed an analyst with deep ties to the anti-vaccine movement to work on a study examining the long-debunked theory that vaccines are linked to autism.
And on Thursday, Mr. Kennedy said on NewsNation that he planned to create a vaccine injury agency within the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. He said the effort was a priority for him and would help bring 'gold-standard science' to the federal government.
An H.H.S. spokesman said in a statement Friday night that Dr. Marks had no place at the F.D.A. if he was not committed to transparency.
In his letter, Dr. Marks mentioned the deadly toll of measles in light of Mr. Kennedy's tepid advice on the need for immunization during the outbreak among many unvaccinated people in Texas and other states.
Dr. Marks wrote that measles, 'which killed more than 100,000 unvaccinated children last year in Africa and Asia,' because of complications, 'had been eliminated from our shores' through the widespread availability of vaccines.
Dr. Marks added that he had been willing to address Mr. Kennedy's concerns about vaccine safety and transparency with public meetings and by working with the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, but was rebuffed.
'I did everything I possibly could for this administration to work with them in an effort to restore confidence in vaccines,' Dr. Marks said in the interview. 'It became clear that's not what they wanted.'
Leaving the F.D.A., Dr. Marks added, was a 'weight lifted from me, because I was in an environment where it was spiraling deeper and deeper into danger.'
Ellen V. Sigal, founder of the advocacy group Friends of Cancer Research and a close ally of Dr. Marks's, said his 'leadership has been instrumental in driving medical innovation and ensuring that lifesaving treatments reach patients who need them most.' His departure, she said, 'will create a significant void.'
Dr. Marks steered the F.D.A.'s vaccine program during the tumultuous years of the coronavirus pandemic, guiding the agency and its outside advisers through a number of decisions about the kind of evidence needed to grant emergency authorization for the vaccines produced under the Trump administration's Operation Warp Speed initiative, which Dr. Marks helped start up.
In June 2022, he pleaded with a committee of outside experts to consider the danger the virus posed to children younger than 5; the panel voted later that day to recommend vaccines for that age group.
'We have to be careful that we don't become numb to the number of pediatric deaths because of the overwhelming number of older deaths here,' Dr. Marks said at the time.
Dr. Peter Hotez, a vaccine expert from Baylor College of Medicine, said he had spoken with Dr. Marks regularly during the pandemic. 'He was extraordinarily committed to using science to help the American people,' he said. 'He was one of the heroes of the pandemic, so I'm sorry to see him go.'
Dr. Marks was viewed skeptically by some at the F.D.A., including former members of his own vaccine team. The two most senior regulators in the agency's vaccine office resigned in 2021 in part because of a Biden administration effort to expedite the licensing of Pfizer's coronavirus shot and the authorization of Covid booster shots.
While Mr. Kennedy has been pressing for more study of vaccine injuries, Dr. Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, said such research had already been a priority for decades.
'I fear this is a way to emphasize vaccine injuries in a way that's completely disproportionate to what the real risk is,' he said.
Dr. Marks clearly shared those concerns. In his letter, he expressed a desire that damage caused by the current administration be limited.
'My hope,' he wrote, 'is that during the coming years, the unprecedented assault on scientific truth that has adversely impacted public health in our nation comes to an end so that the citizens of our country can fully benefit from the breadth of advances in medical science.'
'Judicial independence is critical to everyone's freedom, because arbitrary power is just that,' Justice Sonia Sotomayor said at Georgetown University on Friday. Credit... Tierney L. Cross for The New York Times
Justice Sonia Sotomayor, the senior member of the Supreme Court's liberal wing, said on Friday that judges must remain 'fearlessly independent' if the rule of law is to survive.
Her remarks, made in a packed auditorium at Georgetown University Law Center, were at once cautious and forceful. She did not address particular controversies arising from the Trump administration's actions testing the conventional understanding of presidential power, many of which appear likely to land at the Supreme Court. But she made plain that her observations about the fragility of the justice system addressed current events.
She bemoaned, for instance, 'the fact that some of our public leaders are lawyers making statements challenging the rule of law.'
She was interviewed by the law school's dean, William M. Treanor, who interspersed his questions with ones that had been submitted by students. He started the conversation by characterizing those questions, alluding to recent efforts by the Trump administration to punish major law firms and its battles with courts over its blitz of executive orders.
'As our students prepare to join the legal profession, they are confronting genuine unsettling questions about the durability of that profession and of the law itself,' he said. 'The most commonly asked question was the role of courts in safeguarding the rule of law.'
Justice Sotomayor answered in general terms, citing reference works and experts. She said she had consulted with Justice Rosalie Silberman Abella, a former member of the Supreme Court of Canada, about judges' obligations, quoting her response: 'They need to remain fearlessly independent, protective of rights and ensure that the state is respectful of both.'
Justice Sotomayor said she 'couldn't think of a better answer than that.'
Dean Treanor said those comments were timely, and the justice agreed.
She returned to the role of judges in curbing excesses.
'Judicial independence is critical to everyone's freedom, because arbitrary power is just that,' she said. 'And it means that anyone is going to be subject to unfairness at someone else's whim.'
Justice Sotomayor's remarks came in a charged setting. Georgetown's law school was the subject of an unusual inquiry from Ed Martin, the interim U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia. In a letter to Dean Treanor, Mr. Martin demanded that the law school end all efforts at achieving diversity, equity and inclusion.
'It has come to my attention reliably that Georgetown Law School continues to teach and promote D.E.I.,' Mr. Martin wrote. 'This is unacceptable.'
He said he had started an inquiry and asked the dean two questions: 'First, have you eliminated all D.E.I. from your school and its curriculum? Second, if D.E.I. is found in your courses or teaching in any way, will you move swiftly to remove it?'
In the meantime, Mr. Martin indicated that his office would not hire students and others affiliated with the law school.
Dean Treanor, a constitutional scholar and former Justice Department official, responded by letter that the Constitution 'guarantees that the government cannot direct what Georgetown and its faculty teach and how to teach it.'
Indeed, he wrote, 'given the First Amendment's protection of a university's freedom to determine its own curriculum and how to deliver it, the constitutional violation behind this threat is clear, as is the attack on the university's mission as a Jesuit and Catholic institution.'
Justice Sotomayor did not discuss that exchange or President Trump's executive orders retaliating against prominent law firms, stripping their lawyers of security clearances, barring them from entering federal buildings and discouraging federal officials from interacting with the firms.
Justice Sotomayor was once a summer associate at one of those firms, Paul Weiss, which struck a deal with the administration, prompting criticism that it had sacrificed its principles to protect its bottom line.
She was also the first beneficiary of affirmative action to defend the practice from the Supreme Court bench, citing that experience when she summarized in emphatic and impassioned tones her dissent from a 2014 ruling upholding Michigan's ban on using race in admissions decisions at the state's public universities.
'Race matters,' she wrote, 'because of the slights, the snickers, the silent judgments that reinforce that most crippling of thoughts: 'I do not belong here.''
Justice Sotomayor, 70, was appointed by President Barack Obama in 2009. She said on Friday that the court has taken some wrong turns over the years, singling out Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, the 2022 decision that overturned the constitutional right to abortion established by Roe v. Wade in 1973.
'We've never had, except for Dobbs, another precedent where we took away a constitutional right that we granted before,' she said, adding that 'people believe in the stability of the law.'
Justice Sotomayor concluded by musing, again, on judicial power.
'Those who judge should be sensitive about how our rulings affect people, because that is what we are doing,' she said. 'Putting it in a colloquial term, we're messing with your lives.' President Trump fired Gwynne A. Wilcox, left, of the National Labor Relations Board in January, and Cathy Harris of the Merit Systems Protection Board in February.
A federal appeals court sided on Friday with President Trump's drive to bring agencies with some independence more directly under his control, ruling that the president was within his rights to fire the heads of two administrative boards that review employment actions and labor disputes.
The decision cripples one of the bodies that might stand in Mr. Trump's way as he slashes and reshapes the government, an agency known as the Merit Systems Protection Board that reviews federal employment disputes, just as it is deluged with cases from the firings of thousands of federal workers.
It also effectively paralyzes the other body, the National Labor Relations Board, in another blow to unions the day after Mr. Trump moved to end collective bargaining agreements for hundreds of thousands of federal workers.
More broadly, the decision was an endorsement of Mr. Trump's expansive view of executive powers in a case that many legal observers believe is headed for the Supreme Court. A final ruling there could put agencies across the government that Congress intended to be separate from the White House under the president's control.
By a 2-to-1 vote, the ruling on Friday from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit reversed two district court decisions that had reinstated Cathy Harris of the Merit Systems Protection Board and Gwynne A. Wilcox of the National Labor Relations Board while their cases play out. Mr. Trump fired Ms. Wilcox in January and Ms. Harris in February. Both women argued that they had been improperly terminated.
'The government contends that the president suffers irreversible harm each day the district courts' injunctions remain in effect because he is deprived of the constitutional authority vested in him alone. I agree,' Judge Justin Walker wrote in the opinion. Judge Walker was appointed by Mr. Trump in 2020. Judge Karen L. Henderson, who was appointed by President George H.W. Bush, also sided with the government.
Late Friday, Ms. Harris filed a motion asking the panel to hold off on removing her from her position until the full appellate court in the District of Columbia can consider the appeal.
Removing Ms. Wilcox and Ms. Harris from their positions will debilitate each board. The labor board requires a minimum of three members to act. Without Ms. Wilcox, there are just two. The merit protections board requires two members to act, and without Ms. Harris, there will be only one member left.
'The decision will give the administration more running room in its campaign to weaken labor regulation and to remake the civil service,' said Donald F. Kettl, an emeritus professor at the University of Maryland who studies the civil service. 'That will allow it to move even more quickly to make progress on its goals.'
Earlier this month, Ms. Harris ordered the reinstatement of thousands of probationary employees who were fired in February as part of Mr. Trump's grand plan to shrink the size of the federal government.
Mr. Trump also fired the head of the Office of Special Counsel, the government's independent watchdog agency. The head of that office, Hampton Dellinger, was investigating the probationary firings.
As with Ms. Wilcox and Ms. Harris, a district judge ordered that Mr. Dellinger be reinstated while his challenge to his termination proceeds. And the same panel of appellate judges in the District of Columbia Circuit reversed the lower court's decision. Mr. Dellinger dropped his challenge to the firing after the appeals court decision.
The head of the Office of Special Counsel and members of the labor and merit protections boards are nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate.
In a dissenting opinion, Judge Patricia A. Millett, an Obama appointee, said that the prevailing opinions are in direct conflict with at least two other circuit courts.
The decision, she wrote, 'also marks the first time in history that a court of appeals, or the Supreme Court, has licensed the termination of members of multimember adjudicatory boards statutorily protected by the very type of removal restriction the Supreme Court has twice unanimously upheld.'
She described the other judges' decisions as a 'hurried and preliminary first-look' that traps 'in legal limbo millions of employees and employers whom the law says must go to these boards for the resolution of their employment disputes.'
In termination letters, the Trump administration told fired probationary employees that they may have limited grounds to take their appeals to the Merit Systems Protection Board.
Government lawyers have also argued that fired employees and labor unions that represent the fired workers do not have standing to bring a case to a district court because Congress designed the merit protections board and similar bodies to handle those matters.
Judge William H. Alsup in the Northern District of California recently questioned how the administration could do that after the 'cannibalization' of the Office of Special Counsel and the Merit Systems Protection Board.
Judge Alsup is presiding over a case brought by several labor unions challenging the firing of thousands of probationary employees.
If the merit protections board does not have enough members to make decisions, 'these employees will have no recourse,' Judge Alsup said during a March 13 hearing.
Rebecca Davis O'Brien contributed reporting. See more on: Donald Trump, Elon Musk
© 2025 The New York Times Company Manage Privacy Preferences