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Trump Administration Live Updates: President Praises Musk, Who Will Stay a ‘Friend and Adviser’
President Trump celebrated Elon Musk, the billionaire who slashed through government agencies and who is stepping away from his official role.
Where Things Stand
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Musk’s exit: President Trump went to great lengths to praise Elon Musk, the billionaire who slashed his way through the government via his Department of Government Efficiency, in a news conference on Friday. Mr. Musk is leaving government service with a bruised reputation even as he planted seeds of his cost-cutting effort across the bureaucracy, but said he hoped to continue to be a “friend and adviser” to Mr. Trump. Read more ›
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Tariffs: President Trump said that he would double the tariffs he had levied on foreign steel, increasing them to 50 percent in an effort to further protect the domestic industry. Mr. Trump said foreign countries had been able to circumvent the 25 percent tariff he put in place this year. Read more ›
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H.I.V. research: The Trump administration has dealt a sharp blow to work on H.I.V. vaccines, terminating a $258 million program whose work was instrumental to the search for a vaccine. Officials from the H.I.V. division of the National Institutes of Health delivered the news on Friday to the program’s two leaders, at Duke University and the Scripps Research Institute. Read more ›
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Migrants ruling: The Supreme Court allowed the Trump administration, for now, to revoke a Biden-era humanitarian program intended to give temporary residency to more than 500,000 immigrants from countries facing war and political turmoil. Read more ›
A panel of judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit denied the Trump Administration’s request to overrule a lower court judge and allow the government to proceed with massive layoffs of federal workers.
Last week, a federal judge in San Francisco ordered a long-term pause in the administration’s plans to fire thousands of employees across 23 agencies while the case proceeds. The administration has also asked the Supreme Court, in an emergency application, to overrule the pause as well. The case, brought by labor unions and organizations, is over whether the president can make substantial changes to the government without congressional approval.
Trump administration ends program critical to search for an H.I.V. vaccine.
The Trump administration has dealt a sharp blow to work on H.I.V. vaccines, terminating a $258 million program whose work was instrumental to the search for a vaccine.
Officials from the H.I.V. division of the National Institutes of Health delivered the news on Friday to the program’s two leaders, at Duke University and the Scripps Research Institute.
Both teams were collaborating with numerous other research partners. The work was broadly applicable to a wide range of treatments for other illnesses, from Covid drugs to snake antivenom and therapies for autoimmune diseases.
“The consortia for H.I.V./AIDS vaccine development and immunology was reviewed by N.I.H. leadership, which does not support it moving forward,” said a senior official at the agency who was not authorized to speak on the matter and asked not to be identified.
“N.I.H. expects to be shifting its focus toward using currently available approaches to eliminate H.I.V./AIDS,” the official said.
The program’s elimination is the latest in a series of cuts to H.I.V.-related initiatives, and to prevention of the disease in particular. Separately, the N.I.H. also paused funding for a clinical trial of an H.I.V. vaccine made by Moderna.
“I find it very disappointing that, at this critical juncture, the funding for highly successful H.I.V. vaccine research programs should be pulled,” said Dennis Burton, an immunologist who led the program at Scripps.
The cuts will derail hard-won progress against H.I.V. over the past few decades, public health experts said. Already, many African countries have reported serious disruptions in their efforts to curb the epidemic.
“It’s just inconceivable how shortsighted this is,” said Mitchell Warren, executive director of the H.I.V. prevention organization AVAC.
The number of new H.I.V. infections had been declining steadily since 2010. Still, in 2023, the World Health Organization reported 1.3 million new cases, including about 120,000 children.
“The H.I.V. pandemic will never be ended without a vaccine, so killing research on one will end up killing people,” said John Moore, an H.I.V. researcher at Weill Cornell Medical in New York.
“The N.I.H.’s multiyear investment in advanced vaccine technologies shouldn’t be abandoned on a whim like this,” he said.
In his first term, President Trump embraced initiatives to end the H.I.V. epidemic in the United States. But his second administration has slashed federal support of such efforts. The N.I.H. terminated several grants related to PrEP, the regimen of preventive drugs that are highly effective in thwarting H.I.V. infection.
The Trump administration also shut down the H.I.V. prevention division of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which provided funds to states and territories for H.I.V. prevention and for detecting and responding to H.I.V. outbreaks. Officials at the health department have said some of the work will be shifted to the yet to be formed federal Administration for a Healthy America, but no details have been provided.
The Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the C.D.C., N.I.H. and other federal health agencies, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
In January, the Trump administration halted disbursement of funds from the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, known as Pepfar, a $7.5 billion program that supplied most of the treatment for H.I.V. in Africa and developing countries worldwide.
The State Department later issued waivers to allow treatments to resume but did not restore funding for H.I.V. prevention.
Trial after trial has failed to produce an H.I.V. vaccine, leading some experts to question whether it is possible to design a traditional vaccine at all against the wily virus. The Scripps and Duke teams had taken a different tack, studying the body’s immune response to the virus.
With funding from seven-year awards made in 2019, they focused on so-called broadly neutralizing antibodies, which have been shown in animal studies to provide long-lasting protection against exposure to multiple H.I.V. strains.
The clinical trials based on their work may continue, as long as N.I.H. funding for the H.I.V. Vaccine Trial Network is maintained.
But ending the research programs now means that in a few years, there will be no new candidates in trials, Mr. Warren said.
“Almost everything in the field is hinged on work that those two programs are doing,” he said. “The pipeline just got clogged.”
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Bipartisan duo of senators condemned the cancellation of temporary legal status for Afghans.
Senator Lisa Murkowski, Republican of Alaska, and Senator Jeanne Shaheen, Democrat of New Hampshire, condemned the Trump administration’s decision to end temporary protected status for Afghan immigrants.
In a joint letter to the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, and the homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, the senators asked for the reinstatement of the program that allowed the Afghans a work permit and legal status in the United States.
“This decision endangers thousands of lives, including Afghans who stood by the United States,” they wrote in the letter, sent on Friday. “This decision represents a historic betrayal of promises made and undermines the values we fought for far more than 20 years in Afghanistan.”
President Trump has also canceled the protected status of Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans who fled instability and political violence back home, potentially leaving them vulnerable to deportation.
In his first week in office in January, the president revoked the legal status given to Afghan citizens who helped the American war effort in their country and some Ukrainians displaced by Russia’s full-scale invasion.
In asking Mr. Trump to reconsider his decision, the senators wrote in their letter: “Beyond the moral and humanitarian obligation, doing so reaffirms to our allies and partners around the world that the United States stands by those who stand with us.”
Ms. Murkowski, a moderate Republican, has routinely broken with her party to criticize Mr. Trump, and she said last month that “we are all afraid” to criticize the White House as the president seeks retribution against his political foes.
Economic policy reporter
In a post on Truth Social, President Trump said that the 50 percent tariffs on steel imports would also apply to aluminum imports. The tariffs, which will take effect on Wednesday, will provide a “big jolt” to American steel and aluminum workers, the president said.
News Analysis
Trump, bashing the Federalist Society, asserts autonomy on judge picks.
President Trump appears to be declaring independence from outside constraints on how he nominates judges, signaling that he is looking for loyalists who will uphold his agenda and denouncing the conservative legal network that helped him remake the federal judiciary in his first term.
Late Thursday, after a ruling struck down his tariffs on most imported goods, Mr. Trump attacked the Federalist Society, leaders of which heavily influenced his selection of judges during his first presidency.
“I am so disappointed in The Federalist Society because of the bad advice they gave me on numerous Judicial Nominations,” Mr. Trump asserted on social media. “This is something that cannot be forgotten!”
Hours earlier Thursday, the Justice Department severely undercut the traditional role of the American Bar Association in vetting judicial nominees. A day before, Mr. Trump picked a loyalist who has no deep ties to the conservative legal movement for a life-tenured appeals court seat, explaining that his pick could be counted on to rule in ways aligned with his agenda.
Together, the moves suggest that Mr. Trump may be pivoting toward greater personal involvement and a more idiosyncratic process for selecting future nominees. Such a shift would fit with his second-term pattern of steamrolling the guardrails that sometimes constrained how he exercised power during his first presidency.
But it could also give pause to judges who may be weighing taking senior status, giving Mr. Trump an opportunity to fill their seats. Conservatives have been eyeing in particular the seats of the Supreme Court justices Clarence Thomas, who will turn 77 next month, and Samuel A. Alito, 75.
“Conservative judges are going to be much more open to stepping down if they’re confident that their replacements will be high quality,” said Ed Whelan, a conservative legal commentator and former lawyer for the Bush administration. “Trump’s bizarre attack on his judicial appointments in his first term doesn’t inspire confidence.”
Mr. Trump and his allies have expressed increasing anger at the federal judiciary as courts have blocked his actions, including his aggressive claim to wartime powers to deport migrants without due process and his efforts to freeze grants and dismantle agencies without going through Congress.
On Thursday, the U.S. Court of International Trade handed Mr. Trump his latest defeat. A three-judge panel unanimously struck down his invocation of emergency powers to impose import taxes on goods imported from nearly every country in the world. Two of the three judges were Republican appointees, one named to the bench by Mr. Trump. (A higher court has temporarily paused the ruling.)
Notably, the Trump appointee on the trade court was not a Federalist Society archetype. Congress structured the court to require a partisan balance, so presidents make sets of nominees from both parties. The judge had worked for a Democratic lawmaker before becoming an aide to one of Mr. Trump’s first-term trade officials.
Yet Mr. Trump lashed out at the Federalist Society, blaming it for bad advice on whom to appoint to judgeships. He singled out Leonard Leo, a former longtime leader of the Federalist Society who helped recommend his first-term nominees and who exemplifies the conservative legal movement.
“I was new to Washington, and it was suggested that I use the Federalist Society as a recommending source on judges,” the president wrote. “I did so, openly and freely, but then realized that they were under the thumb of a real ‘sleazebag’ named Leonard Leo, a bad person who, in his own way, probably hates America, and obviously has his own separate ambitions.”
Mr. Leo and Mr. Trump had a falling out in 2020, but the personal attack was a sharp escalation. In a statement, Mr. Leo said, “I’m very grateful for President Trump transforming the federal courts, and it was a privilege being involved.”
Still, Mr. Trump’s tirade strained an already uneasy relationship with traditional legal conservatives.
Many share the president’s goals of strengthening border security, curbing the administrative state and ending “diversity, equity and inclusion” programs, said John Yoo, a conservative law professor. But, he added, they dislike some of Mr. Trump’s methods, whether that is prolifically invoking emergency powers or insulting judges who rule against his administration.
And Professor Yoo, who wrote memos advancing sweeping theories of presidential power as a Bush administration lawyer, said Mr. Trump’s attacks on Mr. Leo were “outrageous.”
“Calling for the impeachment of judges, attacking Leonard Leo personally and basically calling him as traitor as far as I can tell — Trump is basically turning his back on one of his biggest achievements of his first term,” he added, referring to the reshaping of the federal judiciary.
Earlier on Thursday, Attorney General Pam Bondi notified the American Bar Association that the administration would impede its traditional role in vetting judicial nominees. That work involves interviewing their colleagues, reviewing their cases and writings, and rating them for integrity, professional competence and judicial temperament.
The bar group says it does not consider politics in such vetting, but conservatives have long accused it of liberal bias. (It rated all three of Mr. Trump’s Supreme Court nominees as well qualified, and deemed only three of his 54 appeals court nominees to be not qualified for the positions.)
In 2017, the first Trump administration stopped the bar group from assessing potential nominees before any final decision. But it permitted the group to vet them after their names went to the Senate. Nominees signed waivers so the group could have access to nonpublic bar information, filled out A.B.A. questionnaires and sat for interviews.
In a significant escalation, Ms. Bondi said in her letter that Mr. Trump’s second-term nominees would not be instructed to sign waivers, nor would they fill out questionnaires or sit for interviews. The A.B.A. declined to comment on the move.
While Mr. Trump was out of power, a schism emerged between traditional legal conservatives and MAGA-style lawyers. The latter decided that politically appointed executive branch lawyers had constrained Mr. Trump in his first term, and began making plans to appoint a more aggressive breed of lawyer. But that conversation was largely about selecting executive branch lawyers, not judges.
During the 2016 campaign, Mr. Trump had essentially made a deal with the conservative legal movement. In exchange for its support, he would outsource his judicial selections, like the Supreme Court seat left vacant by the death of Justice Antonin Scalia, to movement adherents.
Throughout his first term, Mr. Trump nominated appellate judges and Supreme Court justices cut from the mold of the conservative legal movement. He accepted the recommendations of his first White House counsel, Donald F. McGahn II, a Federalist Society stalwart, with significant input from Mr. Leo.
This month, Mr. Trump announced the first appellate nomination of his second term, Whitney Hermandorfer, a lawyer in the Tennessee attorney general’s office, for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. A former Supreme Court clerk to Justices Alito and Amy Coney Barrett, she appeared cut from the same cloth as his first-term selections.
According to people briefed on the selection process, Trump officials including Stephen Kenny, a lawyer working for the White House counsel; Stephen Miller, Mr. Trump’s deputy chief of staff; and Sergio Gor, the director of the White House personnel office, were involved in those deliberations. Mr. McGahn, now in private practice, is also said to have weighed in on Ms. Hermandorfer.
But Mr. Trump’s second appellate pick, announced on Wednesday as the nominee to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, was different: Emil Bove III, a Justice Department official and former criminal defense lawyer for Mr. Trump.
Mr. Bove does not fit the mold of the sort of lawyer who has spent years frequenting Federalist Society conventions to discuss judicial restraint and originalism. But he has shown a willingness to aggressively use power in ways that Mr. Trump likes, including carrying out politically charged purges.
Mr. Bove also forced out an interim U.S. attorney after she balked at his demand to drop a corruption case against New York’s mayor, Eric Adams, when the administration wanted his help for mass deportations. The prosecutor, Danielle Sassoon, a Federalist Society member who had clerked for Justice Scalia, portrayed the request as unethical.
In naming Mr. Bove, the president put forward an openly politicized and outcome-based rationale. His nominee, he said on social media, would “do anything else that is necessary to, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN. Emil Bove will never let you down!”
The choice has set off a debate among conservative legal circles.
Mr. Whelan said a “very conservative appellate judge” had told him that he would not retire because of concerns over whom Mr. Trump would pick as a successor. In National Review, he warned of the “danger that Bove, if confirmed, would leap to the top of Trump’s list for the next Supreme Court vacancy.”
But Mike Davis, a former Republican nominations counsel for the Senate Judiciary Committee, predicted and welcomed similar picks ahead. “President Trump will pick even more bold and fearless judges in his second term,” he wrote on social media. “And Emil Bove is one of the most bold and fearless of them all.”
Michael A. Fragoso, a former nominations counsel to Senator Mitch McConnell, defended Mr. Bove’s credentials. But he also said that “regardless of what Mr. Trump is saying, the pool of candidates that he is picking from, and should be picking from, is still Federalist Society people.”
Professor Yoo said the purpose of the conservative legal movement was to get presidents to stop treating judicial appointments as patronage and instead advance ideological goals. If Mr. Trump deviated from that path, he cautioned, the president risked the revolt President George W. Bush faced when he tried to appoint his friend and the White House counsel Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court two decades ago. Mr. Bush ultimately backed down.
No matter the shared goals of the conservative legal movement, Professor Yoo added, its members had a limit.
He said they would not support “him calling for the impeachment of judges or wanting to appoint judges who are not the best and the brightest, but instead are people getting personal rewards from the president — which is how it was before the Federalist Society.”
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Zolan Kanno-YoungsAlan RappeportAna Swanson and
Trump said he would double tariffs on foreign steel to 50%.
President Trump said on Friday that he would double the tariffs he had levied on foreign steel and aluminum to 50 percent, a move that he claimed would further protect the industry.
The announcement came as Mr. Trump traveled to a U.S. Steel factory outside Pittsburgh to hail a “planned partnership” that he helped broker between U.S. Steel and Nippon Steel — a corporate merger that he opposed last year as a presidential candidate. Although the details of the U.S. Steel deal are still murky, the president used the moment to cast himself as a champion of the embattled industry.
Speaking to a crowd of steel workers, Mr. Trump claimed that foreign countries had been able to circumvent the 25 percent tariff he put in place this year. The higher tariffs would “even further secure the steel industry in the United States,” Mr. Trump said.
It is not clear how much doubling the tariff rate would actually bolster the domestic steel sector, but the move gave Mr. Trump the opportunity to wield tariffs at a time when his other import taxes have proven to be vulnerable to legal challenges.
In a post on Truth Social, Mr. Trump said that the tariffs would take effect on June 4 and that they would provide a “big jolt” to American steel and aluminum workers.
Mr. Trump has in recent weeks announced large tariffs only to quickly reverse himself and pause them. Analysts suggested on Friday that Mr. Trump could be seeking new ways to gain leverage over trading partners as the pace of negotiations has proved to be painfully slow.
This week, many of Mr. Trump’s tariffs have come under legal threat. A court ruled on Wednesday that Mr. Trump’s taxes on imports from China, Canada, Mexico and other nations were unlawful, although an appeals court paused that decision.
The levies on steel, aluminum and cars were issued through a separate law pertaining to national security, so they are not affected by those court cases. Mr. Trump also bristled at accusations this week that he had “chickened out” on tariffs by repeatedly backing down on threats made against major trading partners.
“Trump is clearly determined to use any available avenue to deploy tariffs as a tool to, as he sees it, protect and even revive American smokestack manufacturing,” said Eswar Prasad, a trade policy professor at Cornell University.
Nippon Steel, a Japanese company, had been interested in acquiring U.S. Steel in part to gain greater access to the American market.
On Friday, the president reassured employees of U.S. Steel that they would “continue to be controlled by the U.S.A.” He did not provide any details about whether Nippon is acquiring the American steel maker, as it originally proposed, or if a deal may take some other form.
His appearance in Pennsylvania was the latest twist in a two-year saga about the fate of U.S. Steel, an iconic American company. During the campaign last year, Mr. Trump, President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Vice President Kamala Harris all expressed opposition to U.S. Steel’s being sold to a foreign company.
The fact that the company is based in the swing state of Pennsylvania and that the deal faced resistance from the powerful United Steelworkers union further complicated the transaction.
It remains unclear if the deal is essentially being repackaged or fundamentally restructured. Neither company has publicly elaborated on Mr. Trump’s remarks, nor confirmed the ownership structure attached to the investment he described.
That may be because the companies do not know the details — or are hesitant to underline the fact that the parties are going through with an acquisition that Mr. Trump previously said he would block, said Stephen Heifetz, a partner at the law firm Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati.
“The problem, of course, is that the deal that the parties seemingly are willing to agree to is not really an investment — it’s an acquisition,” said Mr. Heifetz, who previously served as an official on the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States and worked at the Justice Department. “So that leaves folks in a muddle, because the president is saying — and seeming like it’s very important to him — it’s an investment.”
Neither company has said publicly that the agreement has cleared the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, an interagency panel that vets transactions like this one. However, Mr. Trump’s public support of the agreement essentially paves the way for its ultimate approval.
Last week, Mr. Trump announced what he called a “partnership” between the two steel makers, prompting Nippon Steel officials to believe Mr. Trump had endorsed their bid.
But on Thursday, Peter Navarro, a senior White House trade adviser, rejected the idea that Nippon would have ownership of the American steel maker.
“U.S. Steel owns the company,” Mr. Navarro told reporters at the White House on Thursday. “Nippon Steel’s going to have some involvement, but no control.”
During the presidential campaign, Mr. Trump pledged to block the Japanese company’s $14 billion bid for the Pittsburgh-based industrial giant. The potential purchase incited bipartisan backlash. Union leaders expressed concern about job security and the future of American steel.
But when Mr. Trump came into office, his aides discussed potential options for a deal with Nippon Steel. In one option, the United States would acquire so-called golden shares in the transaction, which would grant even a minority shareholder veto power over significant corporate decisions. That could give the U.S. government some say over major decisions like prospective plant closures or large layoffs, even if the acquisition went through.
“This will be a planned partnership between United States Steel and Nippon Steel, which will create at least 70,000 jobs, and add $14 Billion Dollars to the U.S. Economy,” Mr. Trump wrote on social media last week.
Senator David McCormick, Republican of Pennsylvania, has indicated that Nippon Steel would sign off on granting the United States the golden shares.
The approval of the deal had bipartisan support in Pennsylvania. Gov. Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, said at an event this week that he had worked with both Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump to find a way forward for the agreement. He lamented that steel jobs had been leaving the state in recent decades and praised the investment that Nippon Steel was preparing to make.
“I’ve been working really hard to make sure that we can protect our great legacy but grow for the future of steel making in Pennsylvania,” Mr. Shapiro said.
Despite Mr. Trump’s backing, officials continued to express concerns on Friday.
“Whatever the deal structure, our primary concern remains with the impact that this merger of U.S. Steel into a foreign competitor will have on national security, our members and the communities where we live and work,” said David McCall, president of the United Steelworkers union.
While describing a new tie-up between U.S. Steel and Nippon Steel, President Trump said that U.S. Steel would “continue to be controlled by the U.S.A.” without getting into any details about the ownership structure. A big question about the deal has been whether it is an acquisition, as Nippon originally proposed, or some other sort of deal.
Takeaways from Trump’s Oval Office goodbye to Elon Musk.
Elon Musk is leaving Washington after a tenure in government marked by controversy.
He clashed with cabinet secretaries. He took a chain-saw approach to slashing government jobs. He never came close to cutting $1 trillion from the federal budget, like he had promised.
On Friday, President Trump gave him a send-off in the Oval Office that was meant to give him a boost as he turns his focus back to his businesses.
Mr. Musk, dressed in black and sporting a black eye, stood next to the president during a joint news conference. Here are six takeaways:
Trump is standing by Musk.
Mr. Trump wanted to send the message that he still supports his billionaire benefactor, who donated about $275 million to help him win the presidency.
The president presented Mr. Musk with a golden key and portrayed him as a victim of unfair scrutiny.
“He had to go through the slings and the arrows, which is a shame,” Mr. Trump said.
Tesla, Mr. Musk’s carmaker, has faced protests, vandalism and plummeting stock prices as the billionaire deepened his involvement with right-wing politics.
The relationship between the two men started out rocky. Mr. Musk once suggested Mr. Trump shouldn’t run for office, and the president brushed him off.
“I could have said, ‘Drop to your knees and beg,’ and he would have done it,” Mr. Trump said on social media in 2022.
But they formed an alliance that helped Mr. Trump return to the presidency. Mr. Musk lavished the president with campaign donations and compliments and he, in turn, was given free rein to inject himself into any federal agency.
Musk once said it was easy to cut government. Now he says it’s ‘hard.’
While Mr. Musk seemed to delight in inflicting pain on government workers — celebrating layoffs and cuts to the federal government by wielding a chain saw — his so-called Department of Government Efficiency never came close to achieving his goal of cutting $1 trillion from the federal budget.
Along the way, he changed his tune on how difficult it was to find the massive cuts in the federal government that he had promised.
In February, Mr. Musk leaped onstage at the Conservative Political Action Conference with a chain saw and remarked “how easy” it was to “save billions of dollars sometimes in, in an hour.”
But on Friday, he cast the work of vetting government spending as extraordinarily time-consuming and difficult, scrutinizing line items in a tedious and painstaking manner.
“It’s mostly just a lot of hard work,” he said.
DOGE will live on.
Despite Mr. Musk’s departure, DOGE isn’t going anywhere, both men said.
The president said Mr. Musk had “installed geniuses with an engineering mind-set and unbelievably talented people in computers” in various agencies.
“Elon is really not leaving,” Mr. Trump said. “He’s going to be back and forth. I have a feeling it’s his baby.”
Mr. Musk promised the $1 trillion in savings would eventually be found. The DOGE website currently claims $175 billion in cuts. But Mr. Musk’s team has repeatedly inflated its cost-saving efforts, at times posting erroneous claims that they later deleted.
“This is not the end of DOGE, but really the beginning,” he said, before comparing DOGE to Buddhism and saying “it’s like a way of life.”
Musk dodged questions about his drug use.
Mr. Musk refused to answer a reporter’s question regarding The New York Times’s report that he had been using drugs far more intensely than previously known.
He did not address the contents of the report, but attacked the paper’s credibility, before saying, “Let’s move on,” as Mr. Trump watched silently.
What about that black eye?
Mr. Musk appeared to be sporting a black eye. When a reporter asked about it, he explained that he had been “horsing around” with his 5-year-old son, X.
“I said, ‘Go ahead, punch me in the face,’” Mr. Musk recalled. “And he did.”
Musk fades into the background.
Friday’s news conference was meant to honor Mr. Musk, but he was not the center of attention.
Members of the media allowed into the Oval Office directed a majority of their questions to the president, and Mr. Musk at times looked distracted, admiring the office’s ceiling and fidgeting as Mr. Trump held court on a variety of topics, including his signature spending bill and his desire to do away with the debt ceiling restraint on federal spending.
“I think you should get rid of it. It’s too catastrophic,” Mr. Trump said.
Mr. Musk did jump back into the question-and-answer portion of the news conference to express his displeasure with federal judges who have upheld limits on the administration’s power.
Trump officials have intensified their attacks on judges as the administration’s court losses have mounted, and Mr. Musk seemed to enjoy getting in some final shots against the judiciary.
He accused judges of “immense judicial overreach that is unconstitutional.”
“It needs to stop,” he said. “It’s gone too far.”
A correction was made on
May 30, 2025
:
An earlier version of this article gave an incorrect quotation from Elon Musk at the White House on Friday. He accused judges of “immense judicial overreach that is unconstitutional,” not “constitutional.”
When we learn of a mistake, we acknowledge it with a correction. If you spot an error, please let us know at [email protected].Learn more
Fact Check
Fact-checking Trump’s send-off for Elon Musk.
President Trump celebrated Elon Musk on Friday as the billionaire’s tenure as the White House’s chief cost cutter was ending.
The gathering, styled as a news conference in the Oval Office, signaled an end to a remarkable period of upheaval across the federal bureaucracy, supervised by Mr. Musk and the initiative he led, the Department of Government Efficiency.
“Elon has worked tirelessly, helping lead the most sweeping and consequential government reform program in generations,” Mr. Trump said, omitting that Mr. Musk fell far short of an oft-stated goal of achieving $1 trillion in savings.
Here’s a fact-check of some of their claims.
What Was Said
“We’ll remember you as we announce billions of dollars of extra waste, fraud and abuse.”
— Mr. Trump
This is exaggerated. In listing a litany of contracts and grants canceled by the cost-cutting initiative, Mr. Trump misrepresented several of them and omitted context about others.
He repeated the misleading claim that the Department of Government Efficiency eliminated a payment of “$59 million to a hotel in New York City” to house unauthorized migrants. The figure is the amount for a federal grant awarded to the city in the 2024 fiscal year, not the amount paid to one hotel.
He cited $45 million for diversity, equity and inclusion scholarships in Burma, using the former name for Myanmar. That was a 2024 initiative the United States Agency for International Development started after the 2021 military coup in the Southeast Asian country.
The scholarships funded Burmese students studying at universities in the Philippines and online at the University of Arizona. Though the total award was $45 million over five years, about $17 million had been obligated when the Department of Government Efficiency canceled the program.
Mr. Trump also mentioned “$42 million for social and behavioral change in Uganda,” likely referring to a $38 million contract awarded to Johns Hopkins University in 2020 to improve health outcomes in the country. Behaviors listed in the award included the correct use of mosquito nets and medicines to treat H.I.V. infections. When the Department of Government Efficiency canceled the contract in March, most of the money, about $36 million, had already been spent.
The “$40 million for social and economic inclusion of sedentary migrants” Mr. Trump noted referred to a contract to help Venezuelans who migrated to Colombia.
He again overstated the link between a $1.9 billion environmental grant and Stacey Abrams, the former Democratic candidate for governor in Georgia. A coalition of five groups received the grant, funded by the Inflation Reduction Act, to decarbonize houses in low-income neighborhoods. Ms. Abrams served for one year as a senior adviser to one of the groups, and did not lead the organization.
Mr. Trump also again cited “$20 million for Arab Sesame Street in the Middle East,” adding wrongly that “nobody knows what that’s all about.” The award to Sesame Workshop was not to create a program, but to tailor an existing children’s show called “Ahlan Simsim” for local audiences, as well as to establish educational material for training and use in child care centers. Thousands of Iraqi children viewed the programming and participated in the training.
And he again described a body of research grants as “$8 million for making mice transgender.” In March, the White House published a list of about $8.3 million in research grants that aimed to study the efficacy of different medications on transgender people through experiments with mice receiving different hormones. None of the studies specifically sought to “make mice transgender.”
What Was Said
“So, I think the judge just ruled against New York Times for their lies about the Russiagate hoax, and that they might have to give back that Pulitzer Prize.”
— Mr. Musk
False. Mr. Musk dismissed new reporting by The New York Times on his drug use and tumultuous personal life by incorrectly describing a legal proceeding and the circumstances of a lawsuit.
The court in question did not, as Mr. Musk suggested, rule that The New York Times “lied” in its reporting about Russia. The New York Times is not a litigant in the lawsuit.
In 2021, Mr. Trump demanded that the board that awards the Pulitzer Prizes revoke its awards to The New York Times and The Washington Post for their coverage of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. When the board refused, Mr. Trump sued it for defamation.
In 2024, a state judge in Florida rejected the board’s move to dismiss the lawsuit. The board later tried to pause proceedings, arguing that because Mr. Trump was the president, the lawsuit could prompt a constitutional conflict. But a state court ruled this week that the lawsuit could proceed.
What Was Said
“It’s an unbelievable bill. It cuts your deficits.”
— Mr. Trump
False. The Congressional Budget Office and a number of independent analysts have estimated that the Republican domestic policy bill, passed by the House this month, would balloon federal deficits by more than $1 trillion, even when economic growth is factored in.
The Congressional Budget Office estimated an increase in the deficit of $3.8 trillion; the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimated $3.1 trillion, including interest; the Penn Wharton Budget Model estimated $2.8 trillion; and the Tax Foundation estimated $1.7 trillion when factoring in economic growth.
“Quite the opposite, this would be an incredibly large deficit increaser, adding $3 trillion to our nation’s borrowing and $5 trillion if the expiring policies are extended,” said Maya MacGuineas, the president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.
Reporting from Washington
About $18 billion in budget cuts to the National Institutes of Health drew condemnation Friday evening. They included a $2.7 billion slice out of the National Cancer Institute, or more than one-third of its budget. “For the past 50 years, every significant medical breakthrough, especially in the treatment of cancer, has been linked to sustained federal investment in research,” in the institute, according to a statement from the American Cancer Society Action Network. “This commitment has contributed to the remarkable statistic of over 18 million cancer survivors currently living in the U.S. today.”
Economic policy reporter
Trump says he is increasing steel tariffs from 25 percent to 50 percent. Trump says that countries were able to circumvent the 25 percent tariff and that the higher rate will further protect the domestic industry. This comes as many of other tariffs are being held up in the courts.
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A federal judge in Washington on Friday ordered the Trump administration to deliver $12 million that had been approved by Congress yet withheld from Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, a federally funded news organization that serves countries with limited press freedom, like Russia and Iran. The court had previously ordered the administration not to shut down the organization, but the administration had kept withholding funds, saying it was negotiating with the media outlet on changes it would have to make before receiving the funds.
White House reporter
President Trump is speaking at a U.S. Steel factory just outside of Pittsburgh. “There’s a lot of money coming your way,” Trump tells the scores of steel workers on hand. “You’re going to stay an American company, you know that?”
Trump has said Nippon Steel and U.S. Steel will be entering a “partnership,” but the details remain unclear.
Trump says he fired director of National Portrait Gallery, citing D.E.I.
President Trump posted on social media on Friday that he had fired the director of the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, calling her “a highly partisan person, and a strong supporter of DEI, which is totally inappropriate for her position.”
It is unclear if the president has legal grounds to fire the director, Kim Sajet, because the National Portrait Gallery is part of the Smithsonian Institution, which is independent of the federal government despite receiving nearly two-thirds of its budget from Congress.
The museum’s bylaws don’t have a provision for terminations, and some legal experts believe that the president would first need approval from the Smithsonian’s board of trustees, because he does not directly control the organization. However, this year he called on Vice President JD Vance, who is a member of the Smithsonian’s board, to work with Congress to overhaul the institution.
A Smithsonian official said the organization was caught off-guard by the president’s announcement but declined to comment further. The National Portrait Gallery did not respond to a request for comment.
Since returning to office in January, Mr. Trump has reshaped the capital’s arts scene, installing himself as chairman of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.
After he quickly signed an executive order banning diversity, equity and inclusion programs in federally funded institutions, organizations like the Smithsonian closed their diversity offices. The National Gallery of Art changed its mission statement by replacing “diversity, equity, access and inclusion” with “welcoming and accessible.”
Sajet, who has served as the National Portrait Gallery’s director for more than 12 years after a long career working in the arts sector, previously said that she has struggled with the question of who is and is not represented in the museum.
In 2022, she told The New York Times that the collection tilted toward “the wealthy, the pale and the male.” She attempted to bring more contemporary artists into the gallery, and some of their work has commented on political issues like immigration and race.
“The question is how do you show the presence of absence?” Sajet said at the time. “How do we actually signal that there are a whole lot of people and voices and opinions missing?”
Suse Anderson, a museum studies professor at George Washington University, said the administration’s scrutiny of a Smithsonian museum would have far-reaching implications.
She said the president’s announcement on Friday “continues and escalates the attacks on institutions of history and culture that we’ve seen since the start of this administration.”
“It is designed,” she continued, “to disempower and discredit those who are working within these institutions to tell a more complete and complex American story.”
Founded by congressional decree nearly 60 years ago, the National Portrait Gallery has a mission to showcase “individuals who have made significant contributions to the history, development and culture of the people of the United States.” The gallery has a federal budget of about $23 million, according to the Smithsonian’s website, and a collection of nearly 26,000 objects that attract about two million visitors per year.
The museum is perhaps best known for hosting the nation’s only complete collection of presidential portraits outside of the White House. It drew large crowds in 2018 for the paintings of Barack and Michelle Obama by the artists Kehinde Wiley and Amy Sherald.
After Mr. Trump left office in 2021, the museum exhibited a photographed portrait of him that was taken by Matt McClain in 2017. The biographical description that was included caught the eye of some viewers.
“Impeached twice, on charges of abuse of power and incitement of insurrection after supporters attacked the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, he was acquitted by the Senate in both trials,” the text said in part. “After losing to Joe Biden in 2020, Trump mounted a historic comeback in the 2024 election.”
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Economic policy reporter
The White House on Friday unveiled the full details of President Trump’s budget for the 2026 fiscal year. The roughly 1,200-page submission offers more granular, agency-by-agency figures behind Trump’s earlier request to Congress, which called for slashing about $163 billion in spending across a vast set of climate, education, health and housing programs, including those that benefit the poor.
How did Elon Musk get a black eye?
It was like metaphor turned reality.
After 130 days spent fighting the federal government, Elon Musk turned up with a black eye at the White House on Friday for his last day as a “special government employee.” If you squinted, you could see it: His right eye socket was puffy and empurpled. No doubt about it, that was a big, fat shiner.
His project in Washington more or less finished, he never came close to cutting the $1 trillion from the federal government he had promised. His businesses and his public image got somewhat battered, and now, apparently, so had his face.
Did somebody beat him up?
The list of possible suspects seemed long. An abridged lineup of people and constituencies currently unhappy with Mr. Musk includes: at least two of the many women with whom he has fathered children; pretty much the entire federal bureaucracy; his neighbors in a suburb of Austin, Texas; Tesla shareholders; old friends of his; Republicans on Capitol Hill; his 20-year-old daughter; all those people who have lit Teslas on fire; and even some Trump voters.
But it wasn’t any of those people who gave him the black eye. It was, he said, his progeny X, age 5.
“I was just horsing around with little X, and I said, ‘Go ahead, punch me in the face,’ and he did,” Mr. Musk explained after a reporter asked him if he was OK.
It was an odd moment in a news conference that was quite odd to begin with. Moments earlier, Mr. Musk had angrily refused to engage with a question put to him about a new report in The New York Times detailing his drug use. Mr. Trump remained mostly mute as Mr. Musk batted back that question. Now the tech mogul was explaining why he looked beaten up.
The president seemed to find this rather amusing. “I didn’t notice,” he said as he turned in his seat to get a better look at Mr. Musk. “That was X that did that?”
Mr. Trump has spent a considerable amount of time around the little slugger over these last 130 days. He and Mr. Musk have even brought the child to sit ringside with them at Ultimate Fighting Championship matches. Mr. Trump thought about the explanation that was being offered for the black eye. “X could do it,” he concluded, sounding almost impressed. “If you knew X, he could do it.” The way the president said this, you’d never guess he was talking about a 5-year-old.
And so, Mr. Musk left Washington, his eye as bruised as his ego.
“I didn’t really feel much at the time,” he said about being punched in the face, “but then I guess it bruises up.”
PBS sues Trump over order to cut funding.
PBS sued President Trump on Friday to block an executive order that would cut federal funding for public television and radio, arguing that it was unconstitutional.
The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Washington by PBS and a public TV station in Minnesota, says Mr. Trump’s order violates laws that “forbid the president from serving as the arbiter of the content of PBS’s programming, including by attempting to defund PBS.”
“The executive order makes no attempt to hide the fact that it is cutting off the flow of funds to PBS because of the content of PBS programming and out of a desire to alter the content of speech,” the lawsuit says. “That is blatant viewpoint discrimination.”
The White House had no immediate comment.
Mr. Trump signed an executive order this month demanding that the taxpayer-backed Corporation for Public Broadcasting cut federal funding from NPR and PBS, arguing that those organizations were politically biased. Both organizations pushed back vehemently: NPR sued to block the executive order this week, and Paula Kerger, the chief executive of PBS, called it “blatantly unlawful.”
The order, PBS says, will “upend public television,” which for decades has aired shows like “Sesame Street,” “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” and “Frontline.”
About 16 percent of PBS’s $373.4 million annual budget comes directly from grants from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which spends more than $500 million each year on public media. PBS’s lawsuit says Mr. Trump’s order also jeopardizes the roughly 61 percent of its budget that comes from local station dues, arguing that the White House ban on indirect funding of PBS would apply to local stations.
The Corporation for Public Broadcasting receives its funding from Congress two years in advance to insulate it from short-term political priorities.
A PBS spokesman said in a statement that the network “reached the conclusion that it was necessary to take legal action to safeguard public television’s editorial independence, and to protect the autonomy of PBS member stations.”
In its lawsuit, PBS argues that Congress — not Mr. Trump — has the power to fund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The lawsuit also says the First Amendment prohibits the president from deciding which organizations should receive funding based on the views they express.
Mr. Trump’s executive order is one of several efforts taken by Republicans to weaken public media. The White House has signaled that it will ask Congress to rescind funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and it has tried to fire members of the corporation’s board of directors. There are also efforts underway in Congress to pass bills that would take away funding for NPR and PBS.
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Robert Jimison and
Senators visit Ukraine, pushing for crippling sanctions on Russia.
A bipartisan pair of senators traveled to Ukraine on Friday to meet with President Volodymyr Zelensky, using the visit to champion a broadly supported push in Congress to impose sweeping sanctions on Russia.
Senators Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, and Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, surveyed damaged neighborhoods in Kyiv and buildings leveled amid the escalating violence, including the most intense bombardment since the war began, then made the case that there was an urgent need for the United States to act.
“The size and scope of the destruction is a different order of magnitude,” Mr. Blumenthal said in an interview. “The Russians are using ballistic missiles, using drones to carry much higher and more destructive munitions.”
The visit came just days before another round of talks is expected to begin in Istanbul, and as a growing number of Republicans in Washington are calling for a tougher stance against Russia, diverging sharply from President Trump’s so far hands-off approach.
The duo urged swift action from the United States and allies to cut off the Kremlin’s ability to sustain its war machine. Their legislation, which is supported by 82 senators split evenly between Democrats and Republicans, seeks to target the key lifeline of their war economy: energy exports.
“Russia is in a very perilous state already economically, because 40 percent of its economy is devoted to war production or compensation for soldiers,” Mr. Blumenthal said. “Its only real source of revenue is oil and gas and other similar energy products, which 70 percent is sold to India and China together.”
The two said they would continue on to France and Germany, where they planned to push allies to lower the oil price cap, which would require Group of 7 nations to only allow the transport of Russian oil sold at or below an agreed upon price — another move targeting the war economy.
Mr. Graham, a vocal critic of Mr. Putin, was direct in ascribing blame to Moscow for the stalled peace process.
“I don’t believe Putin is a willing partner,” he said, speaking to reporters in Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital. “Russia delays. They haven’t produced anything in terms of their demands for peace, and I don’t think they’re ever going to because they don’t want peace. They want more war.”
By contrast, he praised Ukraine’s continued engagement, saying they have, in his view, “done everything that President Trump and others have asked.”
Despite a notable increase in the heated rhetoric toward Mr. Putin, Mr. Trump has not yet made clear his position on the sanctions bill. Mr. Graham signaled that the president might soon come around.
“President Trump said that this next two-week period will be outcome determinative,” he said. “I see nothing about the meeting on Monday in Istanbul to give me any hope at all that Russia’s interested in peace. So when this two-week period is over, I think it’ll be pretty clear to everybody: Russia’s playing a game at the expense of the world, not just the United States.”
Mr. Graham also said that Republicans in the House were preparing to move forward with companion legislation to impose sanctions, a signal that there is growing consensus in the G.O.P. around punishing Russia and countries that are backing Moscow, even as the party has rejected calls for additional military funding for Ukraine.
“The game is about to change,” Mr. Graham said. “Enough of talking; it’s now time to act.”
