February 8, 2025: Donald Trump presidency news

Our live coverage of Donald Trump’s presidency has ended for the day. Follow the latest updates or read through the posts below.

US President Donald Trump steps off Air Force One upon arrival at Palm Beach International Airport in West Palm Beach, Florida, on Friday.

We will not know the extent or the success of President Donald Trump’s purge of the federal bureaucracy for some time. There will be lawsuits to fight some of his firings and delay or derail his effort to shut down departments and agencies.

But it is safe to assume the government that emerges at the end of his last four years in office will be permanently different from the one he inherited. Trump wants the federal government to be more immediately responsive to his political aims, and there have been comparisons to the spoils system put in place by his presidential hero, Andrew Jackson.

CNN spoke with Daniel Feller, a professor emeritus of history at the University of Tennessee, who has written extensively about Jackson and the spoils system of the 19th century.

What is the spoils system? According to Feller, “It is a system by which government offices are filled by people whose major qualification is their political service to the president’s party.”

How did it come about during the Jacksonian era? Feller said the spoils system “wasn’t all Jackson’s doing.”

“What he thought he was doing was cleaning out the federal bureaucracy from people who would become lazy and arrogant and incompetent, and replacing them with better ones,” Feller said.

How is what Trump is doing different from the spoils system? “Trump’s overhaul of the patronage is much more policy driven, or much more policy-grievance driven than Jackson’s was,” Feller said.

Feller said Jackson said the people he removed had “become arrogant through long tenure — they had become indifferent to the needs of the public that they were serving.”

“Trump’s attack on the bureaucracy is much, much deeper,” he said, adding that “it’s an attempt not only to switch some people out and to improve efficiency, but to entirely restructure and in some cases overtly destroy aspects of the federal government.”

Read more here.

President Donald Trump is eagerly dismantling an agency that was once championed by his daughter and senior adviser, Ivanka Trump.

The work of the US Agency for International Development was important enough to the president that during his 2019 State of the Union address, he unveiled a new key priority within the agency to be spearheaded by his daughter.

Days later in the Oval Office, joined by Ivanka Trump, top officials and women directly impacted by US funding for women’s economic empowerment abroad, he signed a presidential memorandum establishing W-GDP, the Women’s Global Development and Prosperity initiative, calling it a matter of national security and a “tremendous step for women.”

But six years later, Trump has frozen nearly all foreign assistance, and his administration is gutting USAID, which he’s said is run by “radical lunatics.” USAID staff around the world were supposed to be placed on leave with orders to return to the US on Friday, but a federal judge that afternoon temporarily ordered the administration to halt its plans.

The Trump administration’s targeting of USAID is hitting hard for some beneficiaries of Ivanka Trump’s work overseas.

Read more here.

The White House is pictured in Washington, DC, on January 20.

The White House likened the Saturday decision by a federal judge to block Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency from accessing the Treasury Department’s payment system to “children throwing pasta at the wall,” lambasting the ruling as “judicial overreach.”

New York Attorney General Letitia James and 18 other state attorneys general filed a suit contending that Musk’s associates, who were categorized as “special government employees,” were unlawfully granted access to the sensitive Treasury system.

The judge’s order, issued early Saturday, temporarily halts access to a sensitive payment system that distributes Americans’ tax returns, Social Security benefits, disability payments and federal employees’ salaries.

Musk also offered a defense of the access in a social media post Saturday, saying that DOGE and the Treasury Department “jointly agreed” to requirements involving government payments, including that “all outgoing government payments have a payment categorization code, which is necessary in order to pass financial audits.”

“The above super obvious and necessary changes are being implemented by existing, long-time career government employees, not anyone from @DOGE. It is ridiculous that these changes didn’t exist already!” Musk added.

US Forest Service firefighters monitor a large plume from the Line Fire in the San Bernardino National Forest in California on September 9.

The federal hiring freeze implemented by President Donald Trump has affected the hiring of a crucial group of federal workers: firefighters.

The freeze comes at a critical time, when fire departments across the country would typically onboard thousands of seasonal federal firefighters in preparation for wildfires in the spring and summer.

“We’re going to have a lack of personnel when fire season gets going,” McLane told CNN on Friday. “The precedent that we’ve seen over the last few decades at this point is making us pretty certain that it’s going to be a big fire season again.”

The federal hiring freeze, initiated through one of the executive orders the president signed on his first day in office, dictates that no new federal civilian positions can be created and no vacant positions can be filled.

The majority of firefighters employed by the federal government are seasonal, hired as either permanent or temporary employees, according to McLane. Each year, ahead of the summer fire season, these employees have to be rehired.

“All of that is stopped right now,” McLane said. And there’s “no wiggle room in the schedule” for restarting the hiring process at a later date and ensuring crews are ready for the height of fire season.

Remember: Southern California has already seen devastating wildfires early in the new year, with entire Los Angeles neighborhoods burned to the ground and dozens of casualties.

Gov. Gavin Newsom has taken to echoing experts in the state who say California no longer has an identifiable fire season, and that wildfire threats remain year-round, due in part to climate change.

TikTok is seen in the app store of an iPhone on January 8.

Elon Musk is not interested in buying video-sharing platform TikTok, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX said during a virtual meeting at the WELT Economic Summit on January 28.

Some background: The Chinese-owned app, which has about 170 monthly American users, was set to be banned on January 20 due to national security concerns. President Donald Trump gave ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company, a last-minute lifeline by delaying the ban for 75 days. The extension has given TikTok more time to find a non-Chinese buyer, a condition in the bill signed by former President Joe Biden last April.

ByteDance has said it doesn’t have plans to sell, though some investors have publicly stated they are interested.

YouTube and TikTok influencer MrBeast, whose real name is Jimmy Donaldson, posted in January that he intended to buy the app. “Shark Tank” star Kevin O’Leary and former Los Angeles Dodgers owner Frank McCourt are also among a group of billionaires who have expressed interest.

More on Musk: The world’s richest man was thought to be another potential bidder.

In 2022, Musk completed a $44 billion deal to acquire Twitter, which he has since renamed X. But Musk says he’s not one to acquire companies, calling it “highly unusual.”

He said that acquiring Twitter was because it was “important to preserve freedom of speech in America,” and that he’s not sure “if the same logic applies to TikTok.”

Musk has slashed X’s safety teams, dismantled content moderation policies and welcomed White supremacists and misinformation peddlers back to the platform, causing many users and advertisers to flee.

US-funded aid work around the world has been largely brought to a standstill, multiple sources tell CNN, despite Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s claims that the United States continues to provide lifesaving humanitarian aid.

As the Trump’s administration’s 90-day freeze on nearly all US foreign aid continues into a third week, thousands of United States Agency for International Development (USAID) personnel were expected to be placed on administrative leave or fired, with plans to only retain several hundred workers deemed “essential,” effectively gutting the agency.

However, a federal judge Friday temporarily blocked the Trump administration’s plans to put 2,200 direct-hire USAID employees on leave and halted the accelerated removal of staffers from countries around the world.

“The goal of our endeavor has always been to identify programs that work and continue them and to identify programs that are not aligned with our national interest and identify those and address them,” Rubio said Thursday during a visit to the Dominican Republic.

Rubio, now the acting administrator of USAID, reiterated earlier this week that he had issued a blanket waiver for lifesaving programs.

However, multiple USAID staff and contractors who have spoken to CNN say that’s not reflective of the situation on the ground. Almost all USAID humanitarian assistance programs remain stopped in their tracks, they said.

CNN has reached out to USAID for comment.

Read more about what they have said.

Elon Musk attends Donald Trump's inauguration.

One is a 23-year-old software engineer from Nebraska who helped decipher an ancient scroll buried for centuries. Another was the runner-up in a “hackathon” contest last year as a Harvard senior. A third is the CEO of a multibillion-dollar startup.

These are among the operatives linked to Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), whose work to slash public spending and reshape the federal bureaucracy have sent shockwaves through government agencies.

For the past couple of weeks, DOGE staffers have appeared without warning throughout the nation’s bureaucracy, seeking access to sensitive files, databases and computer systems, and frightening the federal workforce.

Although the slate of software engineers in their early 20s working under DOGE appear to lack government experience, their resumes detail impressive accomplishments in the tech field.

At the heart of much of the controversy was the unique, short-lived pairing of Tom Krause, a long-time software CEO, and Marko Elez, a 25-year-old recent employee at Musk’s company SpaceX.

The two men — designated as “special government employees” by the executive branch — obtained access to the computer system that’s used by the Treasury Department’s Bureau of the Fiscal Service to cut more than $5 trillion in checks for the federal government each year, according to lawyers for the Justice Department at a court hearing on Wednesday that arose out of privacy concerns over their access.

Elez, according to the Wall Street Journal, has since resigned from his role at DOGE following the newspaper’s reporting that linked him to a social media account with posts supporting racism and eugenics.

Read more here about the team driving Trump’s government overhaul.

The National Institutes of Health campus in Bethesda, Maryland.

The US National Institutes of Health is lowering the maximum “indirect cost rate” that research institutions can charge the government, the agency said late Friday — a move that scientists said could be devastating for the nation’s position as a research leader.

The average NIH grant to an institution has typically had about 30% earmarked for infrastructure costs such as facilities, maintenance and security; some institutions charged up to 60% or more. The new NIH policy will cap that indirect cost rate at 15%.

The agency defended the move, saying it would more closely align government-funded indirect costs with the rates paid by private foundations. The Gates Foundation, for example, pays a 10% rate for indirect costs, while the Carnegie Corporation and John Templeton Foundation each pay 15% of indirect costs for research.

But researchers said the new policy would kneecap the nation’s status as a global leader.

Institutions will have to absorb these costs themselves, Krumholz said, or cut back on their work.

Dr. Carl Bergstrom, a biologist at the University of Washington, noted on social media that the new policy “means cutting one of the most important sources of university funding nationwide by 75% or more.”

Dr. Theodore Iwashyna, a professor of pulmonary and critical care medicine and of health policy and management at Johns Hopkins University, said the move was “a disastrously bad idea.”

Read more about the move here.

President Donald Trump speaks to reporters at the White House in Washington, DC, on January 30.

President Donald Trump signed an executive order Friday aimed at freezing assistance to South Africa over a controversial law that allows the government to seize farmland from ethnic minorities — namely White farmers — without compensation, as well as the country’s stance against Israel and its war in Gaza.

Trump said in the order the United States would no longer support South Africa with foreign aid if such policies — which he claims highlight a “shocking disregard for its citizens” and amount to “human rights violations” — continue, ordering US agencies to stop providing any aid to South Africa unless deemed necessary.

South African President Cyril Ramaphosa has previously denied that South African authorities were “confiscating land” and said his country was looking forward to working with the Trump administration “over our land reform policy.”

Ramaphosa spoke to Trump’s “first buddy” and South African-born Elon Musk earlier this week “on issues of misinformation and distortions about South Africa,” according to a government statement at the time.

Trump’s order also directs the United States to assist Afrikaners — an ethnic group descended from European settlers — if they flee South Africa due to discrimination, including helping them resettle through refugee programs.

South Africa’s foreign ministry called the order a “great concern” and said it “(lacked) factual accuracy and fails to recognize South Africa’s profound and painful history of colonialism and apartheid,” adding that the move seemed “to be a campaign of misinformation and propaganda aimed at misrepresenting our great nation.”

Read more about Trump’s executive order.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom waits for President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump to step off Air Force One upon their arrival to Los Angeles on January 24.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed laws Friday setting aside $50 million to help the state protect its policies from challenges by the Trump administration and defend immigrants from the president’s mass deportation plans.

One of the laws allocates $25 million for the state Department of Justice to fight legal battles against the federal government, and another sets aside $25 million in part for legal groups to defend immigrants facing possible deportation.

During his first presidency, President Donald Trump sparred with California over climate laws, water policy, immigrant rights and more, and the state filed or joined more than 100 legal actions against the administration. The same fights are reemerging in the early days of Trump’s second term.

Republican lawmakers have criticized the funding, in part because they say the legislation doesn’t adequately ensure it won’t go to defending undocumented immigrants who have been convicted of serious felonies. Newsom has said the money wasn’t intended to be used for that purpose, and has encouraged lawmakers to pass subsequent legislation if clarifying is needed.

GOP critics have also said the state’s attention should remain on wildfire relief efforts, rather than battling Trump.

Newsom signed a $2.5 billion package for fire relief into law last month to help fund the state’s disaster response. His administration has said they expect the federal government to reimburse the state.

Russell Vought testifies before the Senate Budget Committee in Washington, DC, on January 22.

Russell Vought took over as acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau on Friday night, and officials from Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency deleted the banking watchdog’s X account, a person familiar with the matter told CNN.

Vought’s new role, first reported by The Wall Street Journal, came a day after he was confirmed by the US Senate to lead the Office of Management and Budget.

The source told CNN that DOGE officials have been granted administrative access to CFPB systems, including the content management system, back-end systems for the bureau’s website and the active directory of personnel.

The DOGE team took control of the CFPB’s X account and deleted it on Friday night, the source said.

Neither the White House nor the CFPB responded to requests for comment.

Protesters opposed to immigration raids in schools outside the State Department of Education in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, last month.

A 6-year-old first grader in New York City has been asking to visit the school nurse almost every day for the last month, hoping to be sent home. Her teacher eventually figured out why.

In New York and other cities across the nation, educators are grappling with fear among students and parents that US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents will show up at schools — or their homes — as the Trump administration vows to deport millions of undocumented immigrants.

Anxiety around America’s classrooms has only increased since the administration last month reversed a longstanding policy that directed immigration agents to avoid sensitive locations such as schools, churches and hospitals — leaving educators scrambling for guidance on what to do if agents appear and how to reassure worried students and parents.

Keep reading.

President Donald Trump attends a meeting at the White House in Washington, DC, on Friday

President Donald Trump and X Corp. (formerly Twitter, Inc.) have agreed to dismiss the president’s legal fight against the social media giant over being banned from the platform after the January 6, 2021, US Capitol riot.

According to a filing from the 9th Circuit Court obtained by CNN, both sides agreed to “bear its own costs and fees on appeal.” The filing did not include more specifics on the agreement.

Some background: Trump initially filed suit in July 2021, months after he was banned from the platform two days after the Capitol riots. At the time, the company’s decision was “due to the risk of further incitement of violence,” with Trump arguing that the move infringed upon his First Amendment rights.

A federal judge in California dismissed Trump’s initial lawsuit in May 2022, stating that Twitter was not acting as part of the US government — and therefore did not violate the then-former president’s right to free speech. Trump appealed that decision.

Elon Musk, now a close Trump confidante who heads the newly created Department of Government Efficiency, acquired X (then Twitter) in October 2022 and reinstated Trump’s account the next month. Trump, who launched his own social media platform, Truth Social, in February 2022, posts from his personal X account in addition to the @POTUS handle.

CNN’s Kaitlan Collins reported late last month that Trump had reached a $25 million settlement in his lawsuit against Meta, a platform he sued concurrently alongside X and Google, regarding the suspension of his Facebook account in the aftermath of January 6.

The White House did not immediately return a request for comment.

CNN has also reached out to attorneys for Trump and X.

A demonstrator holds up a sign in protest of Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency outside the US Treasury Department on Tuesday.

A federal judge has restricted the Elon Musk-led government efficiency team from accessing a critical Treasury Department payment system.

The order, issued early Saturday, stops the access temporarily and demands the destruction of any downloaded information, saying there is risk of “irreparable harm.”

The order from District Judge Paul Engelmayer came in response to a suit filed by New York Attorney General Letitia James and 18 other state attorneys general against the Trump administration.

The suit alleges that the team led by Musk and staffed by young associates, who were categorized as “special government employees,” have been unlawfully granted access to the Treasury Department system that previously was restricted to government employees who needed to perform specific tasks to operate the system.

The effort, which the Trump administration calls the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, is intended to cut government costs drastically but has sought access to critical computer systems including the payment system, at the objection of others in the agencies, as CNN has previously reported.

“The conduct of Doge members presents a unique security risk to the States and State residents whose data is held,” the original complaint charged.

The judge temporarily blocked the access and ordered the president and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to respond by February 14.

Labor Department data: Meanwhile, a federal judge on Friday ruled he will not limit DOGE representatives from accessing Labor Department data for now, rejecting an emergency request by labor unions and a think tank to put restrictions on DOGE’s access.

US District Judge John Bates said he had “concerns” about how DOGE was allegedly operating, but that the challengers had not shown the type of imminent harm known as standing that would make it appropriate for a court to intervene at this juncture.

US immigration officials are planning a wave of enforcement actions to detain and deport individuals living in the Los Angeles area unlawfully, a law enforcement source familiar with the plans told CNN.

The new surge, currently scheduled to begin this month, is similar to other significant immigration enforcement efforts recently seen in cities like Chicago and New York.

The new initiative was first reported by the Los Angeles Times.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers are expected to be assisted by numerous federal agents from agencies such as the Drug Enforcement Administration; Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives; FBI; and Customs and Border Protection, the source said.

Los Angeles is one of a number of Democratic-led cities in California, Colorado and Illinois that have instituted sanctuary city policies restricting cooperation with federal immigration officials’ efforts to arrest, detain or gather information on migrants.

A federal judge ordered the Trump administration to halt its plans to put at least 2,200 of employees at the US Agency for International Development on administrative leave Friday night and required the agency to temporarily reinstate 500 other workers who had been suspended.

In a temporary restraining order issued late Friday, US District Judge Carl Nichols said the Trump administration may not place any USAID employees on administrative leave and said that the hundreds of others who have already been placed on leave must be reinstated through at least February 14 at 11:59 p.m. ET.

The order came just before the embattled agency was set to put thousands of employees on indefinite leave or fire them. CNN reported ahead of the judge’s ruling that USAID had planned to keep fewer than 300 people on as essential personnel as of 11:59 p.m. ET Friday.

The order from Nichols, an appointee of President Donald Trump, also said that no USAID workers “shall be evacuated from their host countries before February 14, 2025 at 11:59 PM” and it required the government to give the employees “complete access to email, payment, and security notification systems until that date.”

The judge set a hearing on a request for a broader block on the Trump administration’s plans to dismantle the agency for February 12.

The seven-page order emphasized the “irreparable harm” that the USAID employees would face if they were put on leave under the original notice, particularly given the environments some of them work in around the globe.

The emergency order came in a lawsuit brought on Thursday by a pair of labor groups representing USAID employees.

CNN’s Jennifer Hansler, Alex Marquardt and Lauren Kent contributed reporting to this post.

President Donald Trump departs the White House on Friday.

President Donald Trump used his executive power Friday night for a series of actions, including more executive orders and switching up the Kennedy Center’s Board of Trustees.

Here are some of the measures he took:

Revoked access: The president said he was removing former President Joe Biden’s access to classified information by revoking his security clearance and stopping his daily intelligence briefings. The practical effect of Trump’s claim to revoke Biden’s security clearance is an open question. Former presidents typically do not have security clearances. As president, they have access to all classified information. Upon leaving office, they do not.

Kennedy Center: Trump announced an aggressive plan to gut the existing Board of Trustees at the Kennedy Center and oust its chairman, billionaire philanthropist David Rubenstein, a remarkable move aimed at remaking the nation’s cultural center. Trump said he would be appointing himself as chairman of the board.

And he took these executive actions:

President Donald Trump speaks as he hosts Republican senators for a dinner at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, on Friday.

President Donald Trump demanded a “balanced budget” from Republican senators at a dinner Friday, one day after meeting with House Republicans to discuss a spending resolution as the clock continues to tick on a spending deadline next month.

Lawmakers have until March 14 to pass a plan to fund the government and avoid a shutdown. Friday’s dinner came as Senate Republicans are charging ahead on their own plan, unveiling a blueprint earlier in the day even as House Republicans are spending the weekend nailing down the final details of their own budget agreement.

Addressing the Senate Republicans at his Mar-a-Lago club, the president reflected on his hourslong Thursday meeting with their House counterparts — calling it a “great meeting” with members “from all sides.”

Trump expressed confidence in his Cabinet picks while candidly reflecting on his relationships in the Senate — including some that have proven frustrating to the president at times. He appeared to issue a subtle warning, emphasizing the importance of getting his candidates confirmed.

“The relationships have been good. And we don’t always agree on everything, but we get there. We get there. We had a couple of people that had to get a little bit — they had to study a little bit further to get some of our nominees. I think you’re going to find our nominees are very good. I think it’s very important,” Trump said.

The dinner, which took place during the National Republican Senatorial Committee’s annual winter meeting in the Palm Beach area, came at Trump’s invitation, according to a source familiar with the agenda.

The Department of Defense logo is seen on the wall of the Pentagon press briefing room, in October.

The Washington Post, CNN, The Hill and The War Zone will lose workspace at the Pentagon this year under an expanded “media rotation program” instituted by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s press office.

The rotation makes room for a number of right-wing and explicitly pro-Trump media outlets that have not had workspace at the Pentagon before.

The Friday night announcement was criticized by some journalists as a way to score political points and penalize tough-minded news outlets.

The changes only affect workspaces, not credentials, so journalists from the affected outlets will not lose access to military officials and press briefings.

Effective later this month, One America News Network will replace NBC News for the remainder of the year; Breitbart will replace National Public Radio; The New York Post will replace The New York Times; and HuffPost will replace Politico.

HuffPost has a progressive bent, but the other three beneficiaries are all Trump-boosting brands that are notably smaller than the outlets they are replacing.

Read more about reaction to the Pentagon’s “media rotation program.”