Closing summary
We’re closing this blog now. Here’s what happened today:
Gary Shapley, the acting commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service, has been ousted after treasury secretary Scott Bessent complained to Donald Trump that Shapley had been installed without his knowledge and at the behest of billionaire Elon Musk, according to the New York Times. Citing five people with knowledge of ousting, the New York Times reports that Bessent believed that Musk “had done an end run around him” to get Shapley installed, despite the IRS having to report to Bessent’s department.
Speaking to reporters at the White House on Friday, Donald Trump said that the US is having good conversations with China amid the ongoing trade war between the two countries. “By the way, we have nice conversations going with China … It’s, like, really very good,” he said. He did not offer additional details, Reuters reports.
Speaking to reporters at Dulles airport in Washington on Friday afternoon, the senator Chris Van Hollen just accused the government of El Salvador of creating the hoax he called “Margarita-gate”, by placing a pair of cocktail glasses on the table between himself and Kilmar Ábrego García as they met the night before, to make it look as though they were enjoying drinks.
Trump, asked about Ábrego García, the Maryland man wrongly deported to El Salvador, says he has “no interest in that prisoner”.
A federal judge blocked a Trump administration policy banning people from changing gender markers on their passports, and using the letter X to denote non-binary gender. The state department previously froze all applications for passports with “X” sex markers and all changes to gender identity on existing passports in response.
The American Civil Liberties Union asked the US supreme court to block what the group called the imminent deportation of a new group of Venezuelan men detained in Texas without the judicial review previously ordered by the court. In an emergency Friday court filing, ACLU lawyers said dozens of Venezuelan men held in Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Bluebonnet detention center in Texas were given notices indicating they were classified as members of the Tren de Aragua gang and would be deported under the Alien Enemies Act, and were told “that the removals are imminent and will happen tonight or tomorrow”.
Keir Starmer and Donald Trump spoke about UK-US trade talks and Ukraine in a phone call on Friday, according to Downing Street. A statement from a No 10 spokesperson reads: “The leaders began by discussing the ongoing and productive discussions between the UK and US on trade. The Prime Minister reiterated his commitment to free and open trade and the importance of protecting the national interest.”
Trump and his team will continue to study whether to fire the Federal Reserve chair, Jerome Powell, the White House economic adviser Kevin Hassett said. “The president and his team will continue to study that matter,” Hassett told reporters at the White House in response to a question.
The Trump administration has requested records from Harvard University on the money it receives from foreign funding, in the latest step in Donald Trump’s pressure campaign against the university. The education department said it sent a records request from Harvard “after a review of the university’s foreign reports revealed incomplete and inaccurate disclosures”.
Trump has accepted the Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni’s invitation to pay an official visit to Italy in the “very near future”, a joint statement by the leaders said on Friday. The statement came a day after the two leaders met at the White House in an attempt by Meloni to bridge the gap between the EU and the US amid trade tariff tensions.
Elon Musk’s unofficial “department of government efficiency” and the Trump administration have spared the jobs of US Department of Transportation employees who provide support services for spacecraft launches by Musk’s companies, SpaceX and Starlink – a revelation that raises a new round of conflict-of-interest questions around Doge. In its most recent buyout announcement, the transportation department did not note that the positions spared supported Musk’s and others’ space operations.
Updated
A federal prosecutor sent a letter to a medical journal editor probing whether the publication was “partisan” according a report by MedPage Today.
Per MedPage:
Edward R. Martin Jr., U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, sent a list of questions to CHEST Editor-in-Chief Peter Mazzone, MD, MPH, of the Cleveland Clinic, asking how the journal handles “misinformation” and “competing viewpoints,” among other things.
MedPage Today has learned that at least two other journals have received similar letters.
“It has been brought to my attention that more and more journals and publications like CHEST Journal are conceding that they are partisans in various scientific debates,” the letter stated.
The letter to CHEST was first posted on X by Eric Reinhart of Chicago.
The probe fits with the Trump administration’s broader actions targeting independent medical research. The administration has tried to undercut research it deems to biased, including scientific studies it believes are forwarding “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion”. In February, it also moved to block a crucial step in the National Institutes of Health (NIH) process for funding medical research.
