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Agencies https://www.washingtonsun.com/agencies Agencies en-US Sat, 12 Sep 2026 16:42:44 GMT Federal Judge Says DHS Acted ‘Capriciously’ When Halving FEMA’s Staff https://www.washingtonsun.com/courts/trump-dhs-halved-fema-staff-violation-law Angie Orellana Hernandez The department gutted the contracts for CORE employees earlier this year without using “reasoned decisionmaking,” the judge wrote. Sat, 12 Sep 2026 16:42:44 GMT https://www.washingtonsun.com/courts/trump-dhs-halved-fema-staff-violation-law FEMA headquarters

Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call via AP Images

A federal judge in California sided with a labor union on Friday in its lawsuit against the Trump administration, saying the Department of Homeland Security “arbitrarily” moved to slash the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s staff by 50% earlier this year.

U.S. District Judge Susan Illston ruled that DHS acted “capriciously” when it revoked FEMA’s long-standing authority to renew contracts for its Cadre of On-Call Response/Recovery, or CORE employees. CORE employees are on-the-ground contacts who are dispatched across the country and remain in communities years after a disaster.

CORE employees have traditionally comprised around 40% of FEMA’s staff. Several workers previously told The Washington Sun that gutting the office would compromise essential recovery efforts in the aftermath of a disaster.

Illston said in her ruling that the government didn’t present any evidence that suggested DHS had used “reasoned decisionmaking” when conducting the mass firings.

“The record instead reflects that DHS was exempt from the President’s hiring freeze but then interpreted ‘new hires’ under the hiring freeze to include FEMA CORE term renewals,” Illston, a Clinton appointee, wrote. “The record also reflects that revoking FEMA’s CORE renewal authority impeded FEMA’s ability to perform its functions.”

Illston wrote that evidence in the case appeared to show the staffing cuts were helmed by former DHS leaders Joseph Guy and Kara Voorhies, as well as Karen Evans, who recently returned to the department to lead a fraud task force. Voorhies, who left her position as a FEMA contractor in the spring, has been under scrutiny by lawmakers from both parties for allegedly having an outsized role in managing FEMA contracts.

The court also found that Guy, Voorhies and Evans improperly used auto-delete features on the secure messaging application Signal to discuss staffing reductions.

DHS did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Illston’s ruling.
]]> Two Former DHS Chiefs Call for an Agencywide ‘Reset’ https://www.washingtonsun.com/agencies/dhs-counterterrorism-agency-reset Angie Orellana Hernandez Under the Trump administration, the department has diverted a large segment of its resources toward immigration enforcement and domestic operations. Fri, 11 Sep 2026 20:20:11 GMT https://www.washingtonsun.com/agencies/dhs-counterterrorism-agency-reset The seal of the Department of Homeland Security.

The seal of the Department of Homeland Security.

President George W. Bush established the Department of Homeland Security through passage of the Homeland Security Act in 2002, following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. (Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call via AP Images)

Two former Cabinet secretaries called for the federal government to “rethink and reimagine” the Department of Homeland Security, arguing that it may be abandoning its counterterrorism efforts as President Donald Trump reshapes the agency to carry out his immigration crackdown.

Michael Chertoff and Jeh Johnson, who served as DHS secretaries under presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, respectively, said in a joint interview with NBC News Thursday that the federal government must pursue a balance between enforcing domestic immigration laws and protecting the country from threats.

“I get concerned sometimes when I think that we’re spending most of our time worrying about gardeners and home health aides and getting them thrown out of the country, as opposed to focusing on people that actually are doing a lot of damage,” Chertoff said.

The Trump administration has redirected a massive amount of resources toward immigration and deportation operations, including State Department funds for countering foreign election interference and a DHS budget focused on weapons of mass destruction. Former DHS officials and Democratic lawmakers have said the massive boost toward immigration enforcement is deviating the department from Congress’ original intention.

Johnson added in the interview that the Trump administration’s laser focus on immigration has become “more than a distraction.”

“I think it has overwhelmed the Department of Homeland Security,” he said. “I fear in many communities DHS has become a pariah, radioactive, the department of mass deportations, heartless, locking up kids, and that is one of the reasons why I think we need a reset.”

The department said in a statement to The Washington Sun that its focus on immigration only served to bolster its counterterrorism operations and blamed former President Joe Biden for endangering public safety through lax immigration enforcement.

“Counterterrorism and immigration enforcement go hand in hand,” the statement said. “Child exploitation, trafficking, terrorism, scams, and smuggling all have a nexus to illegal immigration.”

Bush established DHS through passage of the Homeland Security Act in 2002, following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The law unified 22 federal departments and agencies into one Cabinet agency, largely emphasizing in its language that the goal was to “prevent terrorist attacks within the United States.”

Chertoff acknowledged that technology has drastically changed in the last few decades, which has provided greater capabilities to detect explosives or other weapons being brought onto a plane. Johnson said that terrorist threats have also evolved since then, too, and questioned whether DHS was in a position to navigate those changes.

“I always tell people,” Johnson said, “you’re safe until the moment you’re not.”]]> DOJ Directs States to Preserve 2024 Election Records As It Seeks Their Voter Data https://www.washingtonsun.com/agencies/doj-election-records-preserve-voter-data-states Associated Press The department warned election officials that failure to comply could prompt "civil and criminal sanctions." Thu, 10 Sep 2026 22:54:37 GMT https://www.washingtonsun.com/agencies/doj-election-records-preserve-voter-data-states Ballot Security AP-24299553984077

Judges have repeatedly dismissed the Justice Department's lawsuits seeking access to the detailed state voter information. (Matt Slocum/AP)

By Josh Kelety, Alanna Durkin Richer and Gary Fields

The Trump administration is ordering officials in more than two dozen states to preserve records from the 2024 election as part of a campaign to force states to turn over detailed voter records despite repeated court losses.

The Justice Department sent letters to 29 states and the District of Columbia instructing election officials not to destroy the records. Those are places the Trump administration has sued in a bid to gain access to voter registration information that contains addresses, dates of birth, driver's license numbers and partial Social Security numbers.

In one letter obtained by The Associated Press, a Justice Department official told Utah Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson, a Republican, that she is “under investigation" and subject to ongoing litigation over the state’s failure to turn over statewide voter registration lists. The Justice Department declined to elaborate Thursday on the nature of the investigation.

“The purpose of this letter is to notify you of your obligations to take reasonable steps to conduct a litigation hold and preserve and retain all hard copy documents and electronically stored information,” wrote Eric Neff, acting chief of the Civil Rights Division's Voting Section.

The letter warns election officials that their “failure to preserve relevant data may constitute spoliation of evidence," which could subject them to “civil and criminal sanctions.”

In a social media post Thursday, Harmeet Dhillon, the head of the Civil Rights Division, said the Justice Department sent the letters to ensure states do not destroy election records related to the lawsuits that seek to compel election officials to hand over voter registration lists.

“This is standard litigation practice, not a ‘threat,’” Dhillon said in a post on X.

Henderson, Utah's top elections official, said in an interview that her office received the letter Friday.

“No letter — and we’ve gotten a lot of letters from the Department of Justice over the past year — not a single one of them said that we were under investigation for anything,” Henderson said. “It was a little bit alarming at first to see those words.”

Henderson said her office understands the need to hold onto records during litigation.

“What’s not helpful is the constant barrage of attacks and harassment and accusations, baseless accusations, that do nothing to help secure our elections,” she said.

Her office also received a letter from the DOJ in July asserting that election officials could be prosecuted if votes from noncitizens are counted in their vote tallies.

Other election offices, including the secretaries of state for Arizona and Minnesota, confirmed they also received the letter.

“Our office will follow the law,” said Calli Jones, spokesperson for the Arizona office. “Any implication from this letter or others that implies we are not following the law is disrespectful to the work that election administrators do across Arizona and the country.”

Minnesota Secretary of State spokesperson Cassondra Knudson said the office will comply with the Justice Department's request but noted that it goes beyond the federal requirement of maintaining records for 22 months following an election.

Justice Department is in long-running conflict with states over voter data

The preservation demand could set the stage for the Justice Department to seek access to the states' election records as part of the administration’s hunt for fraud. The FBI has already obtained records or election equipment related to either the 2020 or 2024 elections from the most populous counties in the battleground states of Arizona, Georgia and Michigan without saying what it was searching for.

The letters escalate a fight between the Trump administration over access to the sensitive voter information. Federal officials have said they need the voter data to ensure that states are complying with federal election laws related to maintaining voter registration lists, even though states already have detailed processes to do that.

Some election officials have raised concerns that the request conflicts with state privacy laws. They also are concerned that federal officials will use the sensitive data for other purposes, such as searching for potential noncitizens. In one case, a Justice Department attorney acknowledged the department was seeking unredacted voter roll information so it could be shared with the Department of Homeland Security to check citizenship status.

Judges have repeatedly dismissed the Justice Department's lawsuits seeking access to the detailed state voter information, and Attorney General Todd Blanche has suggested the administration might take the fight to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The letters come as the administration continues to raise concerns about the potential for voter fraud — in particular, noncitizen voting. While voter fraud and voting by noncitizens does occur, it's rare and gets prosecuted. There has been no evidence of widespread fraud marring American elections.

Trump issued an executive order earlier this year that sought to create a federal voter list and directly involve the U.S. Postal Service in election operations in a way that would limit mail voting. A challenge to that order is now before the Supreme Court. The president also has pushed Congress to pass a bill requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote and have it take effect for the midterms.]]> DHS Deletes AI Immigration Post After Backlash https://www.washingtonsun.com/immigration/dhs-ai-post-deleted-optimus-prime Torrie Herrington The post, which urged a bearded man with a turban to “self-deport,” was part of the department’s messaging campaign against immigrant commercial drivers. Thu, 10 Sep 2026 21:18:04 GMT https://www.washingtonsun.com/immigration/dhs-ai-post-deleted-optimus-prime DHS logo

The Department of Homeland Security told The Washington Sun that criticism of the post was “nonsensical drivel” and “faux outrage.” (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)

The Department of Homeland Security deleted a social media post featuring a Sikh man and an Optimus Prime-like character after the graphic drew accusations that the Trump administration was using a racial stereotype to promote its immigration crackdown.

The post, which appeared Wednesday on DHS’ official X account, showed the “Transformers” character confronting a bearded man wearing a turban. The AI-generated image included the message “Self-deport or find out” and told “Mr. Singh” — one of the most common surnames among Sikh men — to get off American roads because he did not “know how to drive.”

DHS has launched a broader campaign this year targeting immigrants working as commercial drivers, claiming it wants to tighten enforcement against people who are undocumented or unlicensed. The department has highlighted fatal crashes involving immigrant truck drivers as part of its push and even opened a tip line asking Americans to report any truck driver they suspect of being undocumented.

In a statement to The Washington Sun, DHS said its post depicted Harjinder Singh, an Indian truck driver accused of causing a fatal crash in Florida last year when his 18-wheeler collided with a minivan on the highway, killing three people in the other vehicle. Singh has pleaded not guilty to vehicular homicide and manslaughter charges.

DHS told The Sun that criticism of the post was “nonsensical drivel” and “faux outrage.” The department has said Singh, who obtained a work permit and driver’s license in California, was not in the U.S. legally after he entered the country in 2018.

“Harjinder Singh is an illegal alien from India who should never have been in our country,” the DHS statement said.

The Sikh Coalition said Wednesday’s post amounted to racial profiling and pointed to a long history of Sikhs in the United States, including in the trucking industry. The Hindu American Foundation also condemned the graphic as racist and anti-Indian.

“Millions of Sikhs in the United States have the last name Singh, which means lion. We remain fearless in identifying as Sikhs—even when our government portrays us as enemies,” the Sikh Coalition posted on X.

The department has faced growing criticism over its use of AI-generated imagery and pop-culture references in its immigration messaging.

In a separate post that is still available on the official X profile, the department used AI to create a video that featured Transformer-like creatures targeting several truck drivers officials said were in the country illegally — including Singh, who was dressed similarly to the man depicted in the now-deleted post.

“We will defend ourselves. We will defend Americanism. We will defend our home,” the caption for the video reads.

Hasbro, which owns the Transformers franchise, said in a statement that the administration was using the likeness of its characters without permission.

“Optimus Prime is a beloved character who represents humility, leadership, compassion and justice,” Hasbro said. “These posts were done without permission and do not represent the Transformers brand or Hasbro.”]]> Appeals Court Compares ICE Detention to Japanese Internment in Scathing Ruling https://www.washingtonsun.com/immigration/appeals-court-ice-detention-japanese-internment-ruling Jenna Monnin The Trump administration’s policy of holding undocumented immigrants without bond faced its ninth appeals court loss on Thursday. Thu, 10 Sep 2026 17:02:46 GMT https://www.washingtonsun.com/immigration/appeals-court-ice-detention-japanese-internment-ruling A passenger van waits to exit the sally port at Bluebonnet Detention Center

A passenger van waits to exit the sally port at Bluebonnet Detention Center

None of the immigrants in ICE detention — more than 65,000 individuals as of July, according to a public data portal — are currently allowed bond hearings. (Eli Hartman/AP)

A federal appeals court compared the Trump administration’s no-bond immigrant detention policy to the mass internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, in a scathing decision on Thursday.

In the 2-1 ruling, 4th Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Nicole Berner argued that the administration had asked the court to “interpret certain amendments” made to federal immigration laws in 1996 in order to eliminate bond hearings for individuals in Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention.

“Mass detention of marginalized individuals without due process harkens back to some of the darkest moments in our country’s history,” Berner wrote, comparing the ICE detentions to the unconstitutional detainment of Chinese immigrants in the 1890s and the internment of thousands of Japanese people in camps in the 1940s.

Prior to Trump’s interpretation of the federal immigration law, noncitizens were generally released from ICE detention on bond “unless one or more of the following circumstances applied: the noncitizen had committed a certain crime, the noncitizen was considered a flight risk, or the noncitizen posed a danger to his community.”

None of the immigrants in ICE detention — more than 65,000 individuals as of July, according to the public data portal TRAC Immigration — are currently allowed bond hearings, after ICE issued internal guidance in July 2025 to move away from the previous legal standard for detainees.

Thursday’s ruling added to several other appeals courts’ decisions to block the policy, marking the ninth such loss for the administration.

“Those shameful and abhorrent past detentions were limited in scope in comparison to the mandatory detention that the Government urges us today to find that Congress established thirty years ago in an ambiguously worded statutory provision,” Berner, a Joe Biden appointee, wrote. “We decline to do so.”

Berner described the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown as a “tsunami” and noted that an “overwhelming majority—over five hundred” federal district courts have rejected the government's interpretation of the law.

“Five presidential administrations, including the first Trump Administration, acted in accordance with this interpretation of the statute,” Berner wrote, adding that the previous precedent for allowing immigrants to be released on bond “provides weighty evidence” in support of the petitioners' claim that “they should be provided a bond hearing.”

The Trump administration has lost nine of the 11 appeals court rulings on the issue, and the Supreme Court is likely to pick up the case in its next term.

In her dissent, Judge Allison Jones Rushing, a Trump appointee, argued that the Trump administration’s preference for the “rigidity” found in some federal immigration codes versus the “flexibility” found in other statutes deployed by previous administrations does not mean that the government’s current posture on enforcement is inherently illegal.
]]> ICE Opens a Tip Line to Report Undocumented Truck Drivers https://www.washingtonsun.com/immigration/ice-truck-driver-tip-line Gavin J. Quinton DHS has pushed to get noncitizen commercial drivers off the road, despite data indicating they comprise a small number of fatal trucking accidents. Wed, 09 Sep 2026 22:47:59 GMT https://www.washingtonsun.com/immigration/ice-truck-driver-tip-line

The new tip line asks Americans to report any truck driver they suspect of being undocumented. (Yuki Iwamura/AP)

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin launched a new tip line Wednesday for reporting individuals who have fraudulently applied for a commercial driver’s license.

The new tip line, run by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, asks Americans to report any truck driver they suspect of being undocumented. It’s the latest move in the Trump administration’s crackdown on fraudulent commercial driver’s license holders following a number of high-profile crashes involving foreign-born drivers.

“Too many American lives have been lost or permanently changed because illegal aliens who have no business being on our roads have been granted CDLs,” Mullin said.

In March, some 200,000 truck drivers began losing their commercial licenses after the Department of Homeland Security announced that asylum seekers, refugees and recipients of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program would no longer be eligible to obtain or renew CDLs, which are required to operate buses, semitrucks and tractor-trailers.

And though Homeland Security pointed to a series of fatal accidents around the country, federal data does not indicate that noncitizen commercial drivers cause a disproportionate share of fatal crashes, and the Transportation Department has previously said there is not enough data to establish a relationship between immigrant truckers and fatal crashes.

At a March congressional hearing, Rep. Josh Brecheen (R-Oklahoma) said at least 17 of a total 5,134 fatal crashes in 2025 involved undocumented immigrants driving commercial vehicles.

A social media post from DHS featuring a 30-second animation made in the style of a vintage cartoon called “Fraud Roadsters” garnered thousands of views on X, with many republishing the video and calling for action.

“I'm going to drive on I-35 tomorrow for however long it takes to find and report at least 10 foreigners,” one user said on X.

“REPORT EVERYONE THAT LOOKS LIKE THEY’RE NOT AN AMERICAN,” wrote another.

Several civil rights groups have opposed the crackdown, aiming to reverse what they call discriminatory license cancellations. They have accused the Trump administration of using isolated crashes to portray immigrant drivers broadly as a safety threat and drumming up profiling incidents of immigrant drivers.

In a July court filing, a coalition that included the Sikh Coalition, the Asian Law Caucus, United Sikhs, Stop AAPI Hate and Truckers Movement for Justice said the administration was using immigration status as a proxy for safety. The groups asserted that the Trump administration’s policy has exposed immigrant drivers to a greater number of commercial-vehicle inspections as “a pretext for immigration arrests.”]]> Trump Wants the Census to Stop Collecting Race and Ethnicity Data https://www.washingtonsun.com/trump-white-house/trump-census-stop-collecting-race-ethnicity-data Natalie Alms The administration wants to stop collecting data widely seen as fundamental to public policy, scientific study, market research and more. Wed, 09 Sep 2026 21:33:36 GMT https://www.washingtonsun.com/trump-white-house/trump-census-stop-collecting-race-ethnicity-data Census Metros Growth

The Census Bureau proposed adding a citizenship question to the 2020 census, an effort the Supreme Court blocked. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke, File) Matt Rourke/AP

For the first time, the federal government wants to stop collecting race and ethnicity information about Americans as part of the nation’s census, a move that could undercut market research, public policy, scientific study, civil rights enforcement and more.

In a proposal published Wednesday, the Census Bureau argued that collecting demographic data doesn’t advance the “fundamental” purpose of the decennial census to dole out seats in the House of Representatives.

Among its citations for the planned change is the Supreme Court decision that limited states’ ability to draw minority-majority districts by gutting a key section of the Voting Rights Act.

The census proposal confirmed researchers’ fears that President Donald Trump would target race and ethnicity data collection as an extension of the administration's efforts to systematically scrub LGBTQ+ data from government datasets, as The Washington Sun has previously reported.

“The census is our nation’s denominator,” Denice Ross, the U.S. chief data scientist in the Biden administration, told The Sun. It’s the “foundation for all analyses about demographics.”

Prohibiting questions in the decennial census about race, ethnicity or sexual orientation is one half of a sweeping, two-part proposal. The Census Bureau is also proposing to exclude noncitizens without a green card from the population count.

Both changes would have massive implications for the American public.

The removal of many non-U.S. citizens from apportionment data — which would probably be challenged in court — would affect how seats are allocated in the House of Representatives and how Electoral College votes are distributed.

Many states also use federal census data for redistricting, and race and ethnicity data is used to inform public policy, market research and more.

Race and ethnicity breakdowns in maternal mortality data, for example, are difficult to interpret without the baseline provided by the decennial census, said Ross, who now works on federal data policy at the Federation of American Scientists. She worries that other federal agencies will now also stop collecting race and ethnicity data in forms and surveys.

“There’s no substitute for the census data on this,” said Howard Fienberg, the senior vice president for advocacy at the Insights Association, which represents the market research industry.

That industry, he said, relies on demographic data from the census to benchmark studies.

“That’s trillions of dollars in the economy that’s being put at risk if they don’t have the decision-making tools that we’re able to provide,” Fienberg said. “Procter and Gamble is not going to figure out this new breakfast cereal by talking to every single person in the country.”

Scientists also use the race and ethnicity data collected in the census to study things like population aging, adolescent development and more, said MaryJo Mitchell, the director of government affairs for the Population Association of America, which represents researchers like demographers, economists and epidemiologists.

Demographic data from the census is fundamental to even getting started by creating a representative sample, she said.

“We're looking at undoing centuries of standard census practices that have really defined what it means to have a decennial census,” she told The Washington Sun of the proposed changes. Every decennial census, which began in 1790, has included questions on race.

The other half of the new proposal resurrects failed attempts from the first Trump administration to change who is counted in the census.

The Census Bureau proposed adding a citizenship question to the 2020 census, an effort the Supreme Court blocked. Trump also tried in his first term to remove immigrants without lawful status from the apportionment count, although that effort was ultimately not implemented.

The latest proposal would mean that people such as refugees, people seeking asylum, undocumented immigrants and people in the U.S. with work or student visas would not be included in the data used to divide up seats in the House among the states.

How exactly the Census Bureau plans to exclude certain people from its products is unclear.

The Census Bureau says it is considering drawing on records across the government, including information housed at the Department of Homeland Security, as well as commercial data to determine people’s legal status.

Accurately linking up different datasets is extremely difficult, however, said Beth Jarosz, the vice president of the Association of Public Data Users, meaning that U.S. citizens could be flagged as noncitizens if the Census Bureau undertakes this data-matching exercise.

“They would absolutely, in essence, disenfranchise people accidentally,” Jarosz said.

The proposal also says the Census Bureau “could” add a question about legal status on the census questionnaire itself.

Research has found that adding a citizenship question to the decennial census would reduce the number of respondents and disproportionately affect populations that are already hard to count, like those without documentation.]]> How Trump Unleashed an Existential Fight Over America's Dinosaurs https://www.washingtonsun.com/climate-environment/grand-staircase-escalante-dinosaurs-trump-national-monument Anna Kramer In Utah, Trump resurfaced a decades-long dispute over how to protect some of the country’s crown jewels. Wed, 09 Sep 2026 09:47:00 GMT https://www.washingtonsun.com/climate-environment/grand-staircase-escalante-dinosaurs-trump-national-monument

Katja Knoll, a paleontology technician, recovers fossils from an excavation site inside Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in 2020. (Courtesy of Christian Venhuizen/Bureau of Land Management Utah)

Seventy five million years ago, a long-necked creature resembling an oversized ostrich curled into a ball to die.

In June, the dinosaur’s still-curled body took flight over the barren, jagged rocks of southeastern Utah, suspended from the base of a double-rotored military helicopter usually used to airlift tanks.

It was the second helicopter called upon to pull the ornithomimid into the sky. First came a Black Hawk, which struggled to lift the nearly 5,000 pounds of rock and bones. When it failed, state officials sent the far more powerful Chinook, armed with a cadre of soldiers on loan from the National Guard.

Few could see the camouflaged helicopter carrying its bobbing white package for what it was: an animal that once lived among tyrannosaurs and hadrosaurs, set free. Its once marshy wetlands had long since been subsumed by the cliffs that Americans knew until very recently as the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument.

“Nearly all of the dinosaurs and other fossils preserved in the region have been found nowhere else,” said Joe Sertich, a paleontologist who has studied in Utah for more than a decade.
IMG_3215 copy.jpg (1200x1500, AR: 0.80)Dangling hundreds of feet in the air that summer day was a perfect capsule of that land before time.

Then, just a few weeks after the ornithomimid flew, President Donald Trump declared the dinosaur fossils of Grand Staircase-Escalante “common” and “not unique,” stripping protections from the place where this particular creature had slept for millennia.

***

Trump shrank the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument by more than 90% on July 13, removing almost 900,000 acres of geologic layers home to unusually complete dinosaur fossils.

Utah Gov. Spencer Cox and the entirety of the state’s congressional delegation stood behind him in the Oval Office as he signed the proclamation. They applauded, smiled and posed for photographs.

Back home, the scientists and paleontologists who have worked on that land for years sat in disbelief.

“It’s just an absolute distortion of reality to say that the fossils of Grand Staircase are common and can be found anywhere, and therefore don't need any special consideration or protection,” said Alan Titus, who served as Grand Staircase-Escalante’s official monument paleontologist for the Bureau of Land Management until the fall of 2025.

“I so vehemently disagree with that perspective, and I can guarantee the people that wrote it did not talk to a qualified paleontologist about it,” Titus said.

Most of the region’s local leaders disagree with Titus. They love dinosaurs, they say, but the national monument has been a burden. Trump’s order was a long-fought victory, finally giving them more control over the future of both the land — and dinosaurs — they see as theirs.

“The fossils don’t disappear because the boundaries change. That basin is still one of the richest Late Cretaceous ecosystems ever discovered,” said Kaden Figgins, Garfield County’s planning and economic development director.

Figgins believes both that the dinosaurs are an extraordinary resource and that the dramatic cuts to the national monument are a boon for his community.

There are indisputable facts. The fossilized bodies found in Grand Staircase-Escalante are unique. They have inspired massive movie franchises and even amusement parks. The most recent “Jurassic World” featured dinosaurs only known to scientists because of excavations there. Dinosaur species have been found for the first time in this desert.

For the last 15 years, paleontologists and local leaders have been working in tandem to bring that Hollywood attention to their backyard. They want to make Utah a dinosaur capital and build a world-class dinosaur museum — an international destination for scientists and tourists alike.

Trump (8640x5760, AR: 1.50)

Monumental Day of Action: Utah based public land rally (4800x3202, AR: 1.50)Then there is the debate. Trump’s proclamation has brought to the surface in Utah a long-simmering and existential disagreement about the future of this land, what it holds and who should control it. The same people who for so long have been united in their belief that the dinosaurs are among the nation’s greatest crown jewels are now fundamentally at odds with each other over what is required to protect them.

In his order, the president did not just dismiss the value of the monument’s scientific resources. He went further, suggesting that the lands could be opened for mining minerals and coal, perhaps helping make the U.S. less dependent on foreign sources of critical minerals.

While the local leaders are excited about what comes with the shrinking of Grand Staircase-Escalante’s boundaries, the researchers are warning that its still-pristine time capsule could be disrupted by industrial development. The dinosaur bones themselves are at greater risk of being stolen and sold on the black market. And without the prestige of a national monument, money for research, a museum or scientific infrastructure will be far harder to secure, they said.

“There needs to be a national dialogue about public lands, and what we want to do with them,” Titus said. “Is this really what we want to do with our public lands? Open them all up to extraction? Or do we want to balance this with conservation, protection, and scientific research?”

Paleontologists believe that this remote corner of southern Utah could be home to the next great undiscovered dinosaur — and the next, and the one after that.

That faith is so strong that one local official is willing to break publicly with his leaders.

State Paleontologist James Kirkland found himself at a loss for words when first asked about Trump’s presidential proclamation. He said that Democrats have sometimes gone too far in their defense of Grand Staircase-Escalante’s massive size. But for the president to attack the monument’s boundaries wholesale? That’s a decision so far beyond his personal red line that he’s willing to risk the consequences of speaking out.

“Yeah we need common sense, but we don’t want to just throw out the baby with the bathwater,” he said. “It’s just sad. We had so much to offer, and this is not going to help anybody.”

"We are talking gigantic dinosaurs,” he went on. “This is the story, the age of dinosaurs in Utah. It could be ground shaking."

***

President Bill Clinton designated Grand Staircase-Escalante as a national monument in 1996. Ever since, researchers in Utah have been discovering new dinosaurs at such a rapid pace they haven’t been able to name them all.

And every year, they dig out at least one especially well-preserved dinosaur. Last year’s dig produced the ornithomimid that scientists airlifted out this summer. The year before it was a tyrannosaur.

“It’s just every year we get something special, like a little baby hadrosaur covered in skin impressions,” said Titus, who retired last year, taking the early resignation offer the Trump administration used to dramatically cut the size of the federal workforce. “It always has a treasure every year. And you don't know what's out there until you go out and look for it.”

IMG_1271 (4032x2688, AR: 1.50)

51121918048_68f690813f_o copy.jpg (1620x1080, AR: 1.50)Unlike many of the better-known dinosaur hotspots in China, and even in North America, Grand Staircase-Escalante is still in the early stages of investigation, paleontologists said.

Even researchers from China — often credited with the most interesting dinosaurs yet known to man — have come to see the fossils of Grand Staircase-Escalante.

“The Chinese admit we have the best Mesozoic age of dinosaurs record anywhere in the world,” Kirkland said.

Discoveries have come thick and fast in recent years only because researchers finally had access to modern tools and transportation. The region, known as the Kaiparowits Plateau, is so remote that it was the last part of the contiguous United States reached by cartographers.

The Chinook that carried the ornithomimid in June was merely the most recent helicopter deputized for dinosaur transport. The fossils are so massive that in previous years, paleontologists have paid federal wildland firefighting teams to swing by with their helicopters at the end of a deployment to pick up bones.

“We’ll fly a camp deep into the backcountry and camp out there for two or three weeks,” Sertich said.

Because the digs are especially expensive, funding them has become increasingly difficult as research dollars grow scarce. Paleontologists have relied heavily on the Grand Staircase-Escalante name to help get the limited dollars flowing over the last two decades, they said. Without that monument status to attract attention, they predicted that resources that were already hard to tap will likely grow dry.

“The new executive order cuts us off at the knees in that effort” to make Utah a new epicenter for dinosaur study and tourism, Titus said. The Interior Department has not hired anyone to replace him as the monument paleontologist at the Bureau of Land Management.

A BLM spokesperson told The Washington Sun that paleontological resources and protection "is not limited to areas with monument designation.”

“BLM Utah will move forward with advertising the position as opportunity and funds become available,” the spokesperson said.

The region’s local leaders share Titus’ passion for the dinosaurs. Several told The Sun that no other place on Earth can compete with what’s been found in their backyards.

One official went so far as to say that the county’s great exports are twofold: “our children and our dinosaurs.”

But they don’t have Titus’ fear for the future. In fact, these local leaders said that they don’t believe there’s any risk at all in cutting the monument.

***

The contours of today’s fight trace back to at least 1976, when a group of power companies abandoned plans to build what at the time would have been the largest coal power plant in the country on the edge of the Kaiparowits Plateau. The plant would have been powered by coal blasted out of the same rocks that hold the fossils.

Back then, no one understood that there was an expansive dinosaur boneyard in those rocks. The plan fell apart because mining in the region was plagued with problems.

Mining the region was just as fraught in the 1990s, when another plan coalesced to build a coal mine in the middle of the plateau. But that time, the project died because Clinton established the national monument, effectively making it impossible to move forward. In the process, Utah Republicans grew increasingly angry with the federal government’s power over public lands; on the day of the monument designation ceremony, both Clinton and then-Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt were hung in effigy from lampposts in Escalante.
PRESIDENT CLINTON (1790x1430, AR: 1.25)Exactly 30 years after they sent black balloons into the sky and told The New York Times that “We’ve had it up to here with the federal government,” Utah’s local Republicans have freed the land from the monument.

But now they face a new challenge. The intervening three decades’ worth of research have irrevocably altered understanding of what’s inside those rocks in Grand Staircase-Escalante. Even if mining the plateau today is economically justifiable and technically feasible — questions as yet unanswered — any new mining effort would have to confront what could be lying on top of a possible uranium deposit.

Federal laws like the National Paleontological Resource Preservation Act, which prohibits anyone from taking fossils with vertebrae from federal lands, will remain in effect. The Bureau of Land Management's “legal responsibilities for paleontological resources did not change with the monument’s boundaries,” the BLM spokesperson said. “Vertebrate fossils are protected across all BLM‑administered lands, regardless of monument designation,”

But those laws are rarely enforced, Titus and Sertich said.

It is the land’s monument status, and the special protections that come with it — like the complete prohibition on taking anything out of the monument — that do far more to guarantee the safety of the dinosaurs in the long term, Sertich insisted.

Utah’s local leaders who advocated shrinking the monument say the dinosaurs aren’t at all at risk; if anything, they say, Trump’s order will boost their push for a regional museum.

“We hope it does bring attention to what’s there,” said Dave Dodds, the Garfield County public works director, arguing that shrinking the monument would lead to greater focus on what remains. “We hope that this can focus in on the dinosaurs down there.”

Garfield County Commissioner Jerry Taylor has been trying to get the museum off the ground for a long time; he had a feasibility study commissioned, he consulted experts who helped design North America’s most famous dinosaur museums, and he even recently persuaded the Utah State Legislature to provide a small amount of seed funding.

The presence of the monument has not helped advance those efforts, Dodds and Figgins said.

“We’ve never received federal funding for this, and we’ve been begging for 20 years,” Figgins said. “The museum does not exist because it was the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. The museum exists because it’s one of the most significant dinosaur discovery regions in North America.”

The Bureau of Land Management said the government’s existing partnerships with universities and museums, and its work to “expand statewide capacity for preparation, curation, and research,” would be “unaffected by monument boundary changes.”

The government currently has partnerships with Utah State University Eastern’s Prehistoric Museum and the Natural History Museum of Utah.

***

The most legendary dinosaur quarry in Grand Staircase-Escalante is called “Rainbows and Unicorns.”

It’s there that in 2014 Titus discovered a family of tyrannosaurs that drowned in a flood together, all of them unusually intact. Paleontologists are still studying these massive creatures, hoping to answer the many questions that arose from their discovery more than a decade ago: Were tyrannosaurs actually social creatures, traveling in groups with their relatives? Are these fossils an entirely new species of tyrannosaur?

Rainbows and Unicorns is the single fossil-rich area that Trump protected when he shrank the monument in July, calling it “a globally important paleontological resource.”

IMG_1167.JPG (4032x2863, AR: 1.41)

IMG_0388.JPG (4032x3024, AR: 1.33)There was a deep irony in that for Sertich: The president kept protections for the one place where the most impressive fossils had already been found and largely removed from the site.

“Of course there are still bones in the ground, but you know the important stuff has already been excavated and removed, so now they're preserving largely a hole in the ground,” he said.

There are hundreds of thousands of acres across the Kaiparowits Plateau with the potential for equally impressive finds, paleontologists said — and now they are no longer protected by monument status.

The researchers who have devoted their lives to this work have a nagging fear that if they don’t find and study these bones themselves, the fossils could end up one day on display in a private compound instead of a museum in Utah.

“We’ve cracked the door on the safe over the last 30 years, and now people want fossils for themselves. There’s a whole underground market for illegal fossils, and I see these things pop up on Instagram and eBay all the time. That’s going to become rampant,” Sertich said.

Enthusiasm for dinosaurs is exploding globally, with or without Utah riding along. A tyrannosaurus known as Gus sold for $50 million in an official auction in July, and the black market is growing quickly in response to the demand.

The Bureau of Land Management’s “law enforcement responsibilities remain in place,” the agency’s spokesperson said.

Titus has in the past been involved in efforts to prosecute the thieves. But in certain parts of the Western United States, black market collectors have grown systematic and organized in their dinosaur looting, Titus said.

That level of sophistication has not yet reached Grand Staircase-Escalante. Still, he wonders if that’s only a matter of time in a world increasingly obsessed with the best possible fossils.

“The bad guys know that now they can go out there and just pretend they are looking for clamshells,” he said.]]> Duffy Scolds Ford Over Deals With China in Urging More American Manufacturing https://www.washingtonsun.com/trump-white-house/transportation-duffy-ford-china-warning Gavin J. Quinton Ford called the transportation secretary’s letter a “wrongheaded attempt to capture headlines” and said it contains numerous factual errors. Wed, 09 Sep 2026 00:32:47 GMT https://www.washingtonsun.com/trump-white-house/transportation-duffy-ford-china-warning Earns Ford

Ford said it supports the Trump administration’s vision for advancing American innovation and manufacturing. (Charles Krupa/AP File)

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy has warned Ford Motor Company about maintaining “questionable foreign alliances” with Chinese companies amid calls from the Trump administration to reshore its manufacturing operations.

In a recent letter to Ford CEO Jim Farley, Duffy derided the company’s recent deals with China-backed auto manufacturers, and said Ford “fails to act as [a] reliable partner” to the American public.

“The company’s recent strategic decisions paint a troubling picture of a foundational American brand actively intertwining its future with Chinese state-backed enterprises,” Duffy wrote in the letter sent Sept. 3 and released publicly Tuesday.

Ford pushed back sharply in a statement to NOTUS on Tuesday, calling Duffy’s letter an error-filled and “wrongheaded attempt to capture headlines.”

The company said it produces more vehicles in the United States and employs more American workers than any other automaker.

Ford has been under continued pressure from the White House to return to domestic supply chains and manufacturing, and recently announced it would relocate manufacturing operations of its Lincoln models from China to the United States by 2030.

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick recently celebrated the announcement as a tariff success, but Duffy asserted the four-year timeline “leaves an unacceptable, multi-year window of reliance on Chinese manufacturing while depriving skilled American workers of vital manufacturing jobs.”

Duffy went on to highlight Ford’s dependence on licensed technology from Chinese battery manufacturer Contemporary Amperex Technology Co., Limited — a company that appears on the Defense Department’s list of banned companies. He also criticized Ford over a new deal with Chinese automotive company Geely Auto to build zero-emission vehicles at a Ford factory in Spain.

Ford defended its arrangement with Chinese battery makers, saying its Michigan battery hub is owned and operated by Ford and can’t be classified as a foreign-owned manufacturing operation. The company said Duffy’s assessment of its operations in Spain are also fraught.

“Ford supports the Trump administration’s vision for advancing American innovation and manufacturing,” Ford’s response states. “Had Secretary Duffy reached out before issuing his letter to the press, we would have been happy to share more details about Ford’s U.S. commitment.”]]> Trump Is Quietly Planning to Majorly Change How National Parks Are Run https://www.washingtonsun.com/agencies/trump-quietly-plan-national-parks-run Anna Kramer, Eric Katz All Interior Department bureaus are considering major shake-ups under an edict from leadership. Tue, 08 Sep 2026 14:31:02 GMT https://www.washingtonsun.com/agencies/trump-quietly-plan-national-parks-run Donald Trump,Chris Wright,Doug Burgum

The Interior Department intensified its reorganization process in early 2026, with upper management telling leadership at each bureau that the dramatic staffing reductions opened the door to rethink how they are organized. (Jacquelyn Martin/AP)

The Trump administration is planning to significantly reorganize the National Park Service and other bureaus of the Interior Department, the second major shake-up of the nation’s public lands infrastructure in less than two years.

The agency is looking to reshape its most public-facing offices, according to draft internal agency planning documents from late August obtained by NOTUS and confirmed by an Interior executive involved in the reorganizations who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

The reorganization plans across Interior were developed in a “very hush hush” manner, the executive said, noting that no one aside from the very top leadership of each subagency has been involved in the discussions. That secrecy has created a culture of fear and anxiety in the agency and among National Park advocates, who have been cautioning against another reorganization, as NOTUS reported last week.

The Interior Department has already lost more than 10,000 employees since President Donald Trump retook office, largely through voluntary resignation programs directed by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and the White House. Last year’s reorganization moved support staff into Burgum’s office.

In its draft documents, NPS said that it anticipated it would avoid layoffs “in the short term,” but in prepared talking points tells officials to “avoid categorical promises; explain notification process” if asked about staff reductions.

The country’s 430 park units would experience a significant change under the proposed plans. The documents describe transitioning the park service to a new “hub and spoke” model, with some “hub” parks given the power to manage priorities, leadership and direction for “spoke” parks that would report them, according to the documents.

Currently park superintendents report to regional leadership. While the regional system will remain in place, the draft documents indicate that Interior intends for power to be centralized in the “hub” parks: They would direct priorities and vision, while “spoke” parks would be responsible for implementation.

The documents also indicate that the park service intends for resources to be shared more widely between the spoke and hub parks, with the hub carrying more responsibility for the management of those resources. (The draft plans included a visual representation of the reorganization created with Anthropic’s Claude AI tool, according to an internal note in one of the documents.)

The new organization is intended to “build a more efficient and effective operation, optimize resource sharing across parks and programs, and enhance accountability and supervision,” the draft documents read.

The Interior Department did not respond to a request for comment.

Details of the plan are still subject to change, according to the documents and people familiar with the plans. The Interior executive said last week a career official overseeing the effort introduced a new framework for bureaus to use to rearrange themselves. Previous deadlines were pushed back or removed altogether.

Rachel Borra, Interior’s human resources chief, who previously helped spearhead layoffs at the department last fall that were ultimately blocked in federal court, has been meeting with management in recent weeks to go over details of the various “realignments,” according to documents reviewed by NOTUS. She is scheduled to hold a progress meeting on realignment efforts on Tuesday.

Changes at National Parks could have disparate impacts, where functions range from the preservation of natural wonders in Yellowstone to the protection of rare ecosystems in Channel Islands to the preservation of historical and cultural memory at Valley Forge. While currently superintendents are largely responsible for ensuring that mission is met within their individual park, the new structure appears to centralize some management with the “hub” superintendent.

That centralization could come at the cost of each individual park’s needs, former officials said.

“It’s remarkable from A to Z how different units in the National Park Service are and how they have to adapt to location conditions, and that can drive people in D.C. crazy because they really like it when everything fits in neat boxes,” said Jeff Mow, the former superintendent of Glacier National Park and a 40-year veteran of the Park Service. “And there’s a whole lot about the National Park Service that doesn't fit into neat boxes.”

“Any time you see these top-down initiatives come through — almost never in my career did I ever see one that can encompass the diversity within the organization,” he continued.

Russell Galipeau, who served as superintendent of Channel Islands National Park for 15 years, said that it is already difficult for the country’s smaller and lesser-known parks to advocate on behalf of their needs and priorities.

“We want to reorganize. We want to make things more efficient. You know what? We can do all those things, but how is that actually helping us be a leader and setting an example of how we protect our nation's natural and cultural resources?” he asked.

The draft documents detailing the agency’s reorganization plans were not meant to be made public and stress the importance of delivering information to employees and stakeholders on the department’s own timeline.

While Interior in its internal communications insisted its plans represented common-sense solutions, declining to fully rule out layoffs, phrasing such as “reducing duplication” and demands that supervisors “not speculate about effects on specific employees,” coupled with previous efforts to slash staff and ongoing hiring restrictions, are likely to have staff and public lands advocates on edge about the administration’s intentions.

“National parks do not operate in a bubble, they are intrinsic parts of local communities. And if this proposed reorganization plan moves forward, it is going to jeopardize park relationships with communities, stakeholders, and partners,” said Emily Thompson, the executive director of the Coalition to Protect America’s National Parks.
America 250 Trump Roosevelt Library (4104x2736, AR: 1.50)The documents also lay out details of how individual offices within NPS are set to be restructured. The agency tentatively plans to remake its culture and science division into an office called Resource Stewardship. Employees have raised concerns that the administration would seek to de-emphasize its scientific and cultural work. A new Law Enforcement, Safety and Health Division would replace a Visitor and Resource Protection office.

The agency has been planning how to announce this reorganization since July 2026 but has not yet notified Congress of its intention to reorganize, according to the documents and a Senate aide. The Interior Department is legally obligated to notify Congress of any planned reorganization.

The secrecy of these plans have frustrated advocates, former officials and current staffers alike.

“This reorganization could fundamentally change how our national parks operate, without any clear communication about what ‘problem’ might be solved. It can't possibly be addressing budgets or efficiency,” Thompson said. “There are going to be countless issues and challenges involving park funding, travel and other logistics — this will waste taxpayer dollars and further contribute to the chaos that already exists.”

The implementation of the plan has already changed in at least one regard from the schedule laid out in documents obtained by NOTUS: While planning meetings were scheduled with senior officials for this week and superintendents for the middle of September, those meetings have been canceled, according to multiple sources familiar with the change. NPS planned to begin implementing the changes this year, though it is not clear if that timeline remains operative.

The Interior Department intensified its reorganization process in early 2026, with upper management telling leadership at each bureau that the dramatic staffing reductions opened the door to rethink how they are organized. At least at some bureaus, internal leadership maintained autonomy in developing plans and new organizational structures. They then worked with the Office of Personnel Management on implementation of those ideas.

Department officials made clear to individual bureau leadership that “This is the time to take a big swing,” the Interior executive said.

While Interior was on the verge of laying off thousands of employees at multiple points last year, they never took effect due to various court orders. The department still successfully upended some parts of its workforce. Last month, top agency officials reassigned more than two dozen of its top career executives, requiring many people to move into new jobs with limited relationship to their background and expertise.

The Park Service has already been “bleeding,” both because Burgum directed national park resources toward D.C. beautification efforts and because of last year’s reorganization, said one current employee. Bureaus across Interior are still paying Burgum’s office to house employees it subsumed as part of that reorganization, employees said.

Through the renewed reorganization efforts, Burgum is continuing to exert his influence over the shape of the department. He has already merged the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management and Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement, undoing a change under former President Barack Obama. The secretary has also merged all the department’s firefighters into a new component over some bipartisan reservations from Congress.

Between those changes and the staffing losses from the Trump administration’s push to reduce the federal workforce, advocates are already concerned what another round of changes will portend.

“We find a way to say it's more efficient, and what we end up doing is finding out we have less and less resources to work with,” Galipeau said.

“Perhaps reorganization wouldn’t be necessary if these unnecessary cuts weren’t made.”]]>