The Brief

Following a  complicated Supreme Court ruling in late August, the fate of billions of dollars of science research grants is now at the mercy of an obscure federal law known as the Tucker Act.

“I had never spent more than three minutes in class even mentioning the existence of the Tucker Act, and it would never have occurred to me to do so before this spring,” said David Marcus, a UCLA professor of law who specializes in civil procedure and federal courts.

The Tucker Act created the modern version of the Court of Federal Claims, in existence since before the Civil War. Until recently it was the venue for contract disputes with the federal government — think: a company hired to build a bridge sues Uncle Sam over missed pay.

But starting with a surprise, terse order in April followed by a zigzagging set of decisions last month that are stumping lawyers, the Supreme Court basically declared that this little-known court is now the venue for any university or state that wants to dispute the Trump administration’s cancellation of research grants.

The Supreme Court’s April ruling stated that grant disputes should be hashed out in the Court of Federal Claims. The ruling came in a case in which California and other states sought to recover tens of millions of dollars in education funding.

Then came the high court’s fractured August ruling, which saw two slim majority rulings in the same case. One was a 5-4 decision siding with Trump that said grant funding has to be settled at the Court of Federal Claims rather than in a traditional district court. The decision could help the Trump administration because it likely requires plaintiffs to seek the restoration of their funding in the Court of Federal Claims and then challenge the legality of the policy behind the grant cancellations in a district court — in effect extra work for researchers and campuses seeking their funding back.

But the other 5-4 decision benefitted research universities by indicating that the new federal rules prompting the grant cuts were probably illegal, partially upholding a lower court judge’s order. The case will now proceed in the lower courts.

The ambiguity of the “tricky, complicated ruling,” as one legal scholar called it, prolongs the despair of thousands of researchers and graduate students whose life’s work — and a key source of staff income — either remains defunded or is now at risk of being once again terminated.

Many of the grants were terminated because they ran afoul of Trump’s January executive orders banning so-called diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.

“It’s completely foreign to me” that the Court of Federal Claims is “now the place to handle these sort of basic, fundamental questions about the government's power to handle appropriations,” Marcus said.

It’s not clear if existing grants that were cancelled and then reinstated, such as the hundreds at the National Institutes of Health, will again be defunded. The University of California is the recipient of hundreds of these health science grants. Nationally, the grants paid for research into life-saving drugs, dementia, heart disease in rural areas, robotics education and a whole gamut of science inquiries.

But even before the court’s August ruling, the UC was warning of major slowdowns to its research apparatus. The grant terminations and other funding cuts “have already disrupted the entire biotech research ecosystem at the University of California,” Theresa A. Maldonado, UC’s vice president for research and innovation, told a state legislative hearing in August. In 2024, California programs won more than $5 billion in grants from the NIH and over $1 billion from the National Science Foundation, she told lawmakers. More than 1,000 startups have been founded based on UC patents, she added.

CalMatters reached out to the University of California and California Department of Justice about how they interpret the Supreme Court’s split decision and the role of the Court of Federal Claims. California’s attorney general is part of a multistate suit at the center of the Supreme Court’s August ruling. Both agencies are studying the implications of the ruling, spokespersons for each agency said.

“Cuts to NIH funding risk derailing vital discoveries, disrupting research teams, and undermining economic growth in California and across the country,” UC spokesperson Stett Holbrook told CalMatters in an email. “We are closely assessing the ruling’s impact across UC’s campuses and health systems and will continue to press for full restoration of this essential federal support.”

How we got here

The Supreme Court’s split set of decisions was a response to a June lower court decision in Massachusetts. Judge William G. Young found that the federal government illegally terminated the grants, in large part because the grants weren’t reviewed individually but cancelled en masse. He also said the cancellations were racially motivated and ordered the funding restored. The August Supreme Court decision says that questions about restoring grant funding should go before the Court of Federal Claims.

“There is no reasoned decision-making at all” about the NIH’s grant terminations,” Young wrote in his opinion expanding on his June decision. Instead, the cancellations were driven by “sparse pseudo-reasoning, and wholly unsupported statements,” he wrote.

Young also faulted the Trump administration for having no definition for what constitutes DEI.

Earlier this month Young apologized to the Supreme Court for seemingly misinterpreting its April order in which the justices for the first time said federal grants must be heard in the Court of Federal Claims, the New York Times reported. Young indicated he was unclear on what the high court’s April and September orders meant for other district judges. “I simply did not understand that orders on the emergency docket were precedent,” he said.

Other jurists said the Supreme Court’s use of the so-called “shadow docket” to issue rulings with little guidance or explanation is confusing. Because of the shadow docket decisions, lower court judges “must grapple with both existing precedent and interim guidance from the Supreme Court that appears to set that precedent aside without much explanation or consensus,” wrote one judge in a September opinion.

The April decision commits one sentence to why the Court of Federal Claims is the right venue for government grant disputes. The five-judge majority in August in effect pointed to the April decision to support their ruling.

Neither the April nor the August Supreme Court rulings “seriously engages with the scope of the Tucker Act and the Court of Federal Claims jurisdiction,” Marcus said. “It's just astonishing.”

Ten of the 21 judges on the Court of Federal Claims were appointed by President Donald Trump, and a majority were appointed by Republican presidents, giving the Trump administration a likely advantage. However, the appeals court overseeing the Court of Federal Claims contains a majority of judges appointed by Democrats. The U.S. Supreme Court can review decisions by the appeals court.

At least $14 billion in grants affected by ruling

Parts of the Supreme Court decision “raise foundational questions” about grant termination lawsuits in federal district courts, Scott Delaney, a former environmental health research scientist at Harvard University, told CalMatters in an email.

"That means that it'll be much harder (and possibly impossible) to sue to reinstate all NIH and NSF grants that have been terminated, though scientists may still be able to win a court order forcing NIH or NSF to pay their universities the money that the government should have paid them under the grants," he wrote.

Delaney co-founded Grant Witness, a tool that scours federal datasets to tally which grants the federal government under Trump has terminated or suspended.

CalMatters asked him to count how many National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health grants that campuses across the country were fighting to reinstate are now affected by the Supreme Court ruling. The answer?

• NIH: 4,044 grants worth $5.7 billion in unspent funds ($12.6 billion in total award value)
• NSF: 1,954 grants worth $1 billion in unspent funds ($1.8 billion in estimated total award value)

Delaney said the Supreme Court ruling will likely affect billions of other dollars in grants from other agencies, such as NASA and the Environmental Protection Agency, but Grant Witness isn’t tracking all those yet.

Why Court of Federal Claims may be a challenge for universities 

Marcus said there are probably four reasons universities want to avoid the Court of Federal Claims in their lawsuits — and these are likely the same reasons why the Trump administration wants them there.

First, some district courts and appeals courts are more likely to include judges whose judicial leanings are more sympathetic to the states and research groups suing the Trump administration. That doesn’t mean just judges appointed by Democrats. Young, the district judge in the National Institutes of Health case, was appointed by Ronald Reagan.

Next, the Court of Federal Claims can award monetary damages, but it cannot make wider rulings, such as halting an agency from continued funding terminations. Those questions would have to go before a traditional district court, so it adds more work for plaintiffs suing the federal government.

Third, the Court of Federal Claims is more limiting in how it allows researchers to join a class action suit. Basically, researchers whose grants were affected by the terminations would have to opt-in by filing paperwork to receive potential financial relief or have their grants restored, Marcus said. That’s different from what occurs in traditional federal courts, where a judge can approve a set of criteria for who is eligible for a class, and then all those eligible people benefit from any decision that awards the class relief.

But if a university sues, Marcus thinks the process is somewhat easier: The school would just file a complaint with a long list of all the grants or researchers covered in their suit.

Fourth, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson in her dissenting opinion for the Supreme Court noted other possible hardships. Requiring plaintiffs to argue before district courts that the rules terminating their grants are illegal and then separately getting their terminated grants reinstated is “sending plaintiffs on a likely futile, multivenue quest for complete relief,” Jackson wrote.

Justice Amy Coney Barrett disagreed in her majority 5-4 opinion. “Vacating the guidance does not reinstate terminated grants,” she wrote, adding that “two-track litigation” in different courts is common. She also addressed Jackson’s criticisms head-on, writing that both district courts and the Court of Federal Claims can separately adjudicate the relief universities or researchers seek.

Barrett and Jackson were on the same side in the other 5-4 decision that said Trump’s policies to cut the grants were likely illegal.

What’s next?

Marcus cautions that the legal terrain around restoring grants remains an open question.

But based on his reading of the Supreme Court cases, it is quite possible that the Court of Federal Claims is where scientists will have to try to force the restoration of any terminated funding. And the district court will continue to determine whether the policy behind the grant cuts is legal. It creates a scenario in which the Court of Federal Claims can order funding restored, but until a district court rules on the policy justifying the grant cuts, the federal government can continue to cancel other grants or deny new ones.

But Marcus also cites at least one federal judge in California who thinks that individual researchers cannot sue in the Court of Federal Claims because they’re third parties to the contracts; the government technically sent the contracts to the university, not to the researchers. Under that scenario, it may be that individual researchers cannot sue to restore their grants at all and would instead need to rely on their employer to take up the legal fight.

The equation for universities suing is also nuanced, Marcus said. If a university such as the UC sues to restore funding, there’s a possibility that a district court may rule that funding restoration would have to be heard in the Court of Federal Claims. However, he noted that a federal judge in Massachusetts ordered the Trump administration to restore the $2.2 billion in grants it froze at Harvard University. That judge argued in part that the cuts violated the First Amendment rights of the university. So even though the case is about money — presumably the domain of the Court of Federal Claims — issues of protected speech belong in a traditional district court.

“The resolution of these claims might result in money changing hands, but what is fundamentally at issue is a bedrock constitutional principle rather than the interpretation of contract terms,” the judge, Allison D. Burroughs, wrote.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

Updated March 31, 2026 at 20:14 PM ET

President Trump said on Tuesday that the United States will be leaving Iran very soon, giving a two to three week timetable.

Trump's remarks came in response to a question about gas prices — which earlier Tuesday hit a national average of $4 a gallon. Asked what he would do about it, Trump said: "All I have to do is leave Iran, and we'll be doing that very soon, and they'll become tumbling down."

"I would say that within two weeks, maybe two weeks, maybe three," he added.

Trump also appeared to reverse previous promises about reopening the Strait of Hormuz.

"We'll be leaving very soon. And if France or some other country wants to get oil or gas, they'll go up through the strait, the Hormuz Strait, they'll go right up there, and they'll be able to fend for themselves. I think it'll be very safe, actually, but we have nothing to do with that. What happens with the strait? We're not going to have anything to do with it," he said.

Just on Monday, though, Trump offered this threat on social media over the strait reopening: "If for any reason a deal is not shortly reached, which it probably will be, and if the Hormuz Strait is not immediately 'Open for Business,' we will conclude our lovely 'stay' in Iran by blowing up and completely obliterating all of their Electric Generating Plants, Oil Wells and Kharg Island (and possibly all desalinization plants!), which we have purposefully not yet 'touched.'"

The White House later said Trump would speak to the nation about the war at 9 p.m. ET on Wednesday.

Here are more updates from the war in the Middle East:

Kidnapped journalist | Troop visit | Peacekeeper deaths | Iran | Rubio on Spain | Trump slams allies | Dalai Lama

American journalist kidnapped in Iraq

Iraqi authorities reported a foreign journalist was kidnapped in Baghdad Tuesday. It turned out to be an American freelance reporter, Shelly Kittleson, according to Al-Monitor, a Middle Eastern news site for which she has written articles.

Iraqi security forces said they intercepted a vehicle that crashed and arrested one of the suspected kidnappers, but are stilling searching for the kidnapped journalist and other suspects.

U.S. officials say they're working to get her released.

"The State Department previously fulfilled our duty to warn this individual of threats against them and we will continue to coordinate with the FBI to ensure their release as quickly as possible," Dylan Johnson, the assistant secretary of state for global public affairs, said on social media.

He said Americans, including media workers, have been advised not to travel to Iraq and should leave the country. The statement did not condemn the kidnapping or express concern.

Johnson said Iraqi authorities apprehended a suspect associated with Iran-backed Iraqi militia Kataib Hezbollah, believed to be involved in the kidnapping.

This comes as the U.S.-Israeli war in Iran enters its second month, and the fallout ricochets across the region.

Press freedom organizations expressed deep concern. The Committee to Protect Journalists called on "Iraqi authorities to do everything in their power to locate Shelley Kittleson, ensure her immediate and safe release, and hold those responsible to account."

Based in Rome, Kittleson has reported on Iraq, as well as Syria and Afghanistan, for years, according to Al-Monitor.

Reporters Without Borders said she is "very familiar with Iraq, where she stays for extended periods."

"RSF stands alongside her loved ones and colleagues during this painful wait," the organization said.

Al-Monitor said in a statement it is "deeply alarmed" by her kidnapping. "We stand by her vital reporting from the region and call for her swift return to continue her important work," it said.

U.S. defense secretary visits troops

U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth made an undisclosed trip to the Middle East to visit troops over the weekend. He did not divulge the location for the troops' safety.

"I spoke to Air Force and Navy pilots on the flight line who every day both deliver bombs deep into Iran, but also shoot down drones defending their base. Many had just returned from the skies of Iran and Tehran," he told reporters in a briefing Tuesday.

He said he "witnessed an urgency to finish the job" and tried to draw a comparison with America's earlier drawn-out wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

He said the U.S. is improving bunkers and layered air defenses as a priority to protect troops and aircraft.

This comes after more than a dozen U.S. service members were injured, several severely, and U.S. aircraft were damaged in Iranian strikes on a base in Saudi Arabia last Friday. The Pentagon says 13 U.S. service members have been killed and 300 wounded in what it calls Operation Epic Fury.

He repeated the administration's assertion that the U.S. is negotiating with Iran, despite Iranian officials' denial that talks are happening.

He said the U.S. prefers negotiations, but would not rule out using ground troops.

"In the meantime, we'll negotiate with bombs," Hegseth said. "Our job is to ensure that we compel Iran to realize that this new regime, this regime in charge is in a better place if they make that deal."

President Trump told the New York Post he is in talks with Iran's parliamentary speaker, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf.

Security Council meets after U.N. peacekeeper deaths

Countries denounced the killings of three U.N. peacekeepers in Lebanon this week as they met for an emergency meeting of the U.N. Security Council.

"These are sadly not the only dangerous incidents faced by UNIFIL's courageous peacekeepers," Jean-Pierre Lacroix, the head of U.N. peacekeeping, said, using the acronym for the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon. "There has been a worrying increase in denials of freedom of movement and aggressive behavior."

Lacroix said initial findings suggested two Indonesian peacekeepers were killed Monday in a roadside explosion in southern Lebanon. A day earlier another peacekeeper from Indonesia was killed when a projectile hit a U.N. base, Lacroix said.

Their deaths came as Israeli forces have invaded Lebanon, intensifying a second front in the war in the Middle East. Israel says it is targeting the Iran-backed Lebanese militant group Hezbollah.

The U.N. has not pinned blame and is investigating the incidents.

Ahead of the Security Council meeting, Israel's ambassador to the U.N., Danny Danon, expressed condolences for the Indonesian peacekeepers' deaths.

Displaced people warm up around a fire outside their tent along Beirut's seafront area on March 30, 2026.

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Danon blamed Hezbollah for laying explosive devices that killed two peacekeepers on Monday.

U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Mike Waltz paid tribute to the Indonesian peacekeepers and urged Security Council members not to jump to conclusions but to allow the U.N. to investigate.

Indonesia's foreign minister called for a swift, thorough and transparent investigation.

Iran executions, Starlink arrests

Meanwhile, Iran says it has arrested 46 people who were selling Starlink internet connections — one of the few ways that people in Iran have been able to connect to the global internet while authorities block communication. Starlink allows users to connect directly to the internet via satellite, bypassing government firewalls.

Global internet monitor NetBlocks said the country's "internet blackout has entered day 32."

"Extended digital isolation is bringing new challenges for Iranians, from expired domains and accounts to unpatched servers on a degrading national intranet," it said on X.

Iran said it executed two people who had taken part in opposition activities as well as two citizens it accused of spying for the U.S. and Israel.

Rubio accuses Spain's prime minister of "bragging"

Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Monday responded to news that Spain had closed its airspace to U.S. planes involved in the Iran war by lashing out at the NATO partner. In an interview with Al Jazeera, Rubio answered a question about whether the EU and NATO countries had "betrayed the U.S." by focusing on Spain, a NATO member who has publicly adopted a position opposing the war in Iran.

Gas prices are displayed at a Mobil gas station on March 30, 2026 in Pasadena, California. The average price of one gallon of regular self-service gasoline rose to $5.99 today in Los Angeles County, climbing from $4.69 one month ago, amid the ongoing war with Iran.

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"We have countries like Spain, a NATO member that we are pledged to defend, denying us the use of their airspace and bragging about it, denying us the use of our – of their bases," Rubio said.

Earlier on Monday, Spain Defense Minister Margarita Robles said the country had closed its airspace to U.S. planes involved in the Iran war. It is unclear when the closure started — Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez had hinted at the measure during a parliamentary debate on March 25.

The weekend the U.S. and Israel launched the attack on Iran, flight records showed at least 15 in-flight refueling planes leaving two jointly operated military bases in the south of Spain after not being allowed to provide support for the military action in Iran. Robles later confirmed the decision by the Spanish Government. That triggered a spat between President Trump and Spain's leadership the week after the war started. Trump said from the Oval Office that he would cut off all trade with Spain if the Spanish government did not allow U.S. forces to use the jointly operated bases. In response, Sánchez doubled down on his stance on the war in the Middle East.

Sánchez has relied on his opposition to the war, making it his main platform at the domestic level. Sánchez's Socialist Party has struggled to keep a government coalition from breaking apart, as he faces pressure to keep his party's hopes alive ahead of a parliamentary election due in 2027.

Trump slams allies

President Trump criticized France and the United Kingdom, among others, on his social media platform.

"All of those countries that can't get jet fuel because of the Strait of Hormuz, like the United Kingdom, which refused to get involved in the decapitation of Iran, I have a suggestion for you: Number 1, buy from the U.S., we have plenty, and Number 2, build up some delayed courage, go to the Strait, and just TAKE IT," Trump wrote on Truth Social.

Trump had asked allies for help after Iran largely blockaded the vital waterway, sending up oil and gas prices. But they have been hesitant to join in the war, with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer repeating again this week that Britain would not get involved.

"You'll have to start learning how to fight for yourself, the U.S.A. won't be there to help you anymore, just like you weren't there for us. Iran has been, essentially, decimated. The hard part is done. Go get your own oil!" Trump's post concluded.

He also said France "wouldn't let planes headed to Israel, loaded up with military supplies, fly over French territory." and called the country "VERY UNHELPFUL."

Dalai Lama calls for peace

Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama on Tuesday posted an appeal for an end to war in the Middle East.

"History has shown us time and again that violence only begets more violence and is never a lasting foundation for peace," he said on his official account on X.

"An enduring resolution to conflict, including the ones we see in the Middle East or between Russia and Ukraine, must be rooted in dialogue, diplomacy and mutual respect — approached with the understanding that, at the deepest level, we are all brothers and sisters," he said.

He said he was adding his plea to one made at the Vatican by Pope Leo during his Palm Sunday Mass, adding: "His call for the laying down of arms and the renunciation of violence resonated profoundly with me, as it speaks to the very essence of what all major religions teach."

Carrie Kahn in Tel Aviv, Israel, Lauren Frayer in Beirut, Jennifer Pak in Shanghai, Emily Feng in Van, Turkey, Miguel Macias in Seville, Spain, Kate Bartlett in Johannesburg, Jane Arraf in Amman, Jordan, Quil Lawrence in New York, Giles Snyder, Michele Kelemen and Alex Leff in Washington contributed to this report.
Copyright 2026 NPR

The Los Angeles region’s homelessness agency will miss a Tuesday deadline for submitting its federally required annual audit of the agency’s financial records, which could jeopardize its federal funding.

LAHSA executives blamed the delay on a “perfect storm” of leadership changes and competing priorities within LAHSA’s finance department, including an L.A. County review of LAHSA’s delayed payments to contractors.

“Our staff made a good-faith effort to meet the deadline,” interim CEO Gita O’Neill said at a LAHSA Commission meeting Tuesday. “However, over the past year, we've experienced several transitions. As a result, we could not get all the required materials to the auditors as quickly as needed.”

Each year, LAHSA, like all non-federal agencies and organizations that get substantial federal dollars, is required to hire an outside auditor to determine whether it’s properly tracking and reporting the taxpayer funds it manages.

LAHSA’s single audit report for last fiscal year was due March 31, nine months after fiscal year 2024-2025 ended. Earlier this month, LAHSA officials said they were on track to meet the March 31 deadline.

Justin Measley, lead auditor for the firm CliftonLarsonAllen, had warned that LAHSA was months behind schedule turning over records.

At a meeting Tuesday, Measley explained that because of LAHSA’s earlier delays, the firm would need at least an additional week to complete a quality-control review process.

“We’re moving at the fastest pace we possibly can,” Measley said.

On Tuesday, LAHSA officials said the single audit will be filed “at the earliest possible opportunity,” within the next few weeks.

Federal funds at risk

LAHSA manages hundreds of millions of federal dollars each year, through grants from the U.S. Office of Housing and Urban Development, or HUD.

O’Neill said the agency has been communicating with HUD officials regularly about the missed audit deadline and is “hoping for understanding.”

Janine Lim, LAHSA’s deputy chief financial officer, said she’s also been talking with HUD.

“They seem amenable to our situation and to our stated timelines,” Lim said. “So, we are hopeful that this will be a good outcome, despite having missed the deadline.”

HUD did not immediately respond to LAist’s request for comment Tuesday.

What went wrong 

Measley said LAHSA’s financial statements should have been turned over around last December, but LAHSA only submitted them this month, after blowing through multiple extended deadlines.

Measley said he contacted LAHSA’s governing commission about the overdue documents March 3.

He said he also previewed his firm’s findings, noting one “significant deficiency” in its draft report, related to LAHSA’s timeliness in detecting accounting errors.

LAHSA could contest those findings, officials said. That would add additional back-and-forth between the homelessness agency and accounting firm before the audit report is ready to file.

Justin Szlasa, a LAHSA commissioner who chairs the audit subcommittee, told LAHSA’s CEO he’s concerned that there was no time provided for LAHSA’s governing body to review the audit report.

“Next year, we will absolutely do that,” O’Neill responded. “I think this year, we were under the gun, and so we felt it was the most important thing was to get it uploaded on time.”

O’Neill said the agency hired accounting firm KPMG to help modernize LAHSA’s financial systems, with a focus on its contractor payments.

“We have an outside, trusted voice to help us create a system that works going forward because the system we have is not working at all, in finance,” O’Neill said.

Updated March 31, 2026 at 20:44 PM ET

President Trump on Tuesday escalated his efforts to reshape American elections, signing an executive order that seeks to create lists of U.S. citizens who are eligible to vote in each state, and instructing the U.S. Postal Service to send mail ballots only to verified voters.

Trump told reporters in the Oval Office that he believes the order is legally "foolproof." But election experts said the order was unconstitutional, and voting rights advocates and Democratic state officials quickly pledged to sue to block the order from going into effect.

A previous executive order on elections, signed about a year ago, has been blocked by federal judges who said the president lacked the constitutional authority to set voting policy.

The Constitution says the "Times, Places and Manner" of federal elections are determined by individual states, with Congress able to enact changes.

"This Executive Order is a disgusting overreach from the federal government and shows how little the Trump Administration understands about election administration," Adrian Fontes, the Democratic secretary of state of Arizona, said in a statement Tuesday. "We will not let this order stand without a fight and will meet the federal government in court," he added.

Arizona is among more than two dozen states Trump's Department of Justice has sued over access to sensitive voter data.

The Trump administration claims it needs the data to enforce states' voter list maintenance. Federal judges in three states have dismissed the Justice Department's lawsuits in those states.

In another case, a DOJ official admitted in court last week that the department plans to share that voter data with the Department of Homeland Security, to run it through the so-called SAVE system to search for noncitizens.

NPR has reported that some U.S. citizens have also been inaccurately flagged by SAVE.

How the executive order seeks to change voting

Trump has long railed — baselessly — about widespread illegal voting by noncitizens and fraud associated with mail ballots.

The new executive order — which was first reported by The Daily Caller — takes aim at both.

It instructs the Department of Homeland Security, working in conjunction with the Social Security Administration, to "compile and transmit to the chief election official of each State a list of individuals confirmed to be United States citizens who will be above the age of 18 at the time of an upcoming Federal election and who maintain a residence in the subject State."

The order then "requires the USPS to transmit ballots only to individuals enrolled on a State-specific Mail-in and Absentee Participation List, ensuring that only eligible absentee or mail-in voters receive absentee or mail-in ballots," according to a White House fact sheet.

Trump's executive order claims that "additional measures are necessary" to secure voting by mail, a form of voting he has used himself — including last week — but also falsely maligned for years. In the 2024 general election, nearly a third of all voters cast mail ballots.

The Postal Service should also review the design of mail ballot envelopes to protect "the integrity of Federal elections," the order says.

Collectively, the provisions would be a significant change to how mail ballot programs are currently administered in American elections, which are largely carried out by state and local officials.

"Our government's citizenship lists are incomplete and inaccurate. The United States Postal Service is overburdened and inadequate. This combines a car crash with a train wreck," the Brennan Center for Justice, which advocates for expanded voting access and sued to block Trump's 2025 election executive order, said in a statement.

Rick Hasen, an election law expert at UCLA, wrote on his blog that the order is likely unconstitutional. And regardless, he added, "the timing here makes this virtually impossible to implement in time for November's elections. … It seems highly unlikely any of this could be implemented for 2026, even if it were not blocked by courts."

The order comes as Trump pressures Republicans in Congress to pass the SAVE America Act, a sweeping election overhaul that would impose new voter identification and documentation requirements.

That bill is stalled in the Senate due to Democratic opposition and the legislative filibuster.

The Supreme Court is also expected to rule this year on whether Mississippi should be allowed to count mail ballots that are postmarked by Election Day but received by election officials after Election Day.

The legal challenge, which could have sweeping implications for mail voting nationwide, was filed by the Republican National Committee and Trump's 2024 presidential campaign.

Copyright 2026 NPR

Federal immigration officials arrested more than 14,000 people in the greater Los Angeles area in 2025 — the majority of whom had no criminal record, according to an LAist analysis of new data from the Deportation Data Project.

The data project, an initiative between UCLA and UC Berkeley, publishes federal data obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.

In 2025, federal officials arrested 14,394 people, up from 4,681 the year prior. Forty-six percent of people arrested had criminal convictions, 15% had pending charges, and 39% had no criminal charges or convictions.

In a December news release, the Department of Homeland Security said it had arrested more than 10,000 people in the L.A. area since immigration raids began in June of last year, including "murderers, kidnappers, sexual predators and armed carjackers,” but did not publish details of the number of people who had criminal records.

The data from the Deportation Data Project shows that arrests in L.A. spiked in June, and about two-thirds of people arrested that month had no criminal convictions.

More than 313,000 people were arrested by ICE nationwide in 2025, according to an LAist analysis.

In a statement, a DHS spokesperson said the agency has not “verified the accuracy, methodology or analysis of the project and its results” and said “this only reveals how data is manipulated to peddle the false narrative that DHS is not targeting the worst of the worst.” The spokesperson said 61% of people ICE arrested across the country either had criminal convictions or pending charges.

The agency has regularly published press releases identifying people they have arrested and who they have called “the worst of the worst,” including from the raids in L.A. in June. But an LAist investigation and reporting from other outlets has found that some of the people on those lists already has been in custody and were serving lengthy sentences.