Policies & Analysis

This draft memo from the Office of Management and Budget directs agencies to consider laying off federal workers and permanently eliminate their roles during a government shutdown.

The Office of Management and Budget has told agencies to create plans to fire federal workers during the 2025 government shutdown. Employees working on programs for which the funding lapsed after September 30 would be most likely to be cut. This is a change from past procedure during shutdowns, in which furloughed federal workers retained their jobs and obtained back pay after the shutdown ended. The Trump-Vance administration is using federal workers as a bargaining chip to force Congress to capitulate to this administration's demands. This represents another attempt to continue the Trump-Vance administration's destruction of the federal workforce and limit the ability of civil servants to deliver services and help Americans.

This order distorts an existing visa program and turns a $1 million payment into "evidence" of "extraordinary ability."

This order purports to invent a new way of obtaining an EB-1 or EB-2 visa, which are reserved for people of "extraordinary ability" in their profession, by promising to give those visas instead to anyone willing to pay $1 million or whose employer is willing to pay $2 million. EB-1 visas are employment-based visas for individuals who show "extraordinary ability" in their field, which usually amounts to international recognition or significant recognition or prominence in their profession, and for managers and executives of multinational firms with a branch in the United States. EB-2 visas are employment-based visas for people with advanced degrees who receive either DOL permission to work in the United States or a national interest waiver, and also for people of extraordinary ability. The "Gold Card" order purports to determine that anyone who can pay $1 million, or whose employer can pay $2 million, automatically has qualifies for an EB-1 visa even if they do not have a job offer in the United States or "extensive documentation" of their "achievements" or "national or international acclaim." The order also purports to classify such individuals as having "extraordinary ability" in "business" and to classify their presence as "in the national interest," which waives the normal requirement that they have a job offer. The money for these "Gold Card" visas is to be paid to the Department of Commerce, placed in an account at the Treasury, and spent "to promote commerce and American industry." EB-1 and EB-2 visas are subject to an annual cap set by Congress, and thus any visas awarded via the "Gold Card" process will reduce the number of people of actual "extraordinary ability" who receive them.

This memorandum creates a federal Task Force for Memphis and asks the Tennessee governor to make the state National Guard available "to end street and violent crime."

This Memorandum to multiple cabinet secretaries creates a task force "to end street and violent crime in Memphis to the greatest possible extent through the promotion and facilitation of hypervigilant policing, aggressive prosecution, complex investigations, financial enforcement, and large-scale saturation of besieged neighborhoods with law enforcement personnel." The Memorandum also directs the Secretary of Defense to ask the Tennessee governor to make National Guard soldiers available in hybrid (non-federalized) status to help the task force. The Memorandum claims that state and local authorities requested federal assistance, but there is no evidence that local authorities either made such a request or support the task force or the National Guard deployment. The task force is instructed to report to the President through Stephen Miller ("Assistant to the President and Homeland Security Advisor").

This regulation would roll back previous efforts to fight climate change and allow polluting industries to hide the scale of their greenhouse gas emissions.

The Greenhouse Gas Reporting Rule has required major polluters to report the quantity in their greenhouse gas (carbon) emissions since 2008. With this new regulation, the EPA would scrap that requirement for over 8,000 facilities around the country, including refineries, landfills, and other large industrial sites. This regulation would also eliminate a key source of data that policy makers, scientists, and others can use to track carbon emissions and develop plans to reduce emissions and improve air quality.

The federal government attempted to deport dozens of unaccompanied children to Guatemala in the middle of the night in violation of their rights.

Over Labor Day weekend, the U.S. government took unaccompanied Guatemalan kids from shelters run by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, where they were staying until a formal sponsor could be located, and started taking steps to deport them to Guatemala. This was in clear violation of their rights under key anti-trafficking legislation. The government later claimed in court that the children's parents had requested that they be reunited, which the court determined to be a complete fabrication.

President Trump issued an executive order curtailing labor rights for even more federal employees.

Shortly before Labor Day, President Trump issued an Executive Order citing a narrow "national security" exception to remove even more federal workers from the their statutory right to collective bargaining and the labor protections of the the Federal Service Labor-Management Relations Statute. Employees affected by this order include those in the Patent and Trade Office, International Trade Administration, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and National Aeronautics and Space Administration. This order builds on retaliatory exclusions President Trump previously announced in Executive Order 14251 in April 2025.

This order places the District of Columbia police department under the Trump administration's control.

Over the protests of local leaders, President Trump has invoked Section 740 of the Home Rule Act, which gives the president the ability to use the District of Columbia's police department for "federal purposes." Under this order, the local DC Metropolitan Police Department is under the control of U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi. The policy expires in 30 days unless it is extended by the U.S. Congress. This order represents a usurpation of local authority by the federal government. It may put DC residents at increased risk of harmful encounters with law enforcement. It also provides another example of President Trump erroneously declaring an "emergency" to expand his power.

In a Truth Social post, President Trump called for a new census that does not count undocumented immigrants.

President Trump informally directed the Commerce Department to begin working on a new census that does not count undocumented immigrants. He also stated that the Commerce Department should use the results and information from the 2024 presidential election in this effort; it is unclear what he meant. Excluding undocumented immigrants from the census would buck decades of precedent and seek to boost efforts to apportion more seats to Republicans in the House of Representatives. Asking immigration questions may cause some households, especially households with immigrants (documented and undocumented) to decline to respond--leading to inaccurate data and less federal funding flowing to undercounted regions. President Trump tried something similar in his first term, but it was ultimately halted by the courts.

This proposed rule would repeal all emission standards for most cars, SUVs, and trucks.

The 2009 Endangerment Finding determined that six greenhouse gases (GHG) are air pollutants that endanger public health and welfare, and subsequently allowed EPA to regulate GHG emissions from motor vehicles under section 202(a) of the Clean Air Act. Specifically, EPA is proposing to repeal all greenhouse gas emission standards for most vehicles. In part, EPA is basing its reconsideration on an argument that climate change is a "major question" that Congress could not have intended the agency to regulate. The 2009 Endangerment Finding serves as the foundation for several subsequent environmental regulations, including regulations of methane, airplane emissions, and carbon pollution from fossil fuel-fired power plants. Its rescission could ultimately undermine multiple EPA regulations, making people and communities less safe and healthy.

This order seeks to undo decades of progress in ending homelessness and improving the lives of people with substance abuse disorders by promoting harmful institutionalization.

The Trump-Vance administration aims to punish people who are unhoused and people struggling with mental illness and/or substance abuse disorders through the criminalization of evidence-based harm reduction programs. It calls for the Attorney General, Secretary of Health and Human Services, and the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development to work with state and local governments to commit people who are living on the streets against their will. It also ends funding for "housing first" programs that improve the wellbeing of people struggling with substance abuse disorders. The Executive Order ignores evidence-based research on improving outcomes for people experiencing homelessness and promotes short-term actions rather than addressing the root causes of homelessness.

This order seeks to roll back rules and regulations to unleash the development of AI infrastructure and circumventing environmental review.

This Executive Order seeks to streamline permitting for AI data centers and other AI infrastructure. It calls for exempting a greater number of AI projects from assessing the environmental impacts of their projects and proposes a shorter review processes for projects that must undergo environmental review. Facilities powered by wind and solar power will not undergo expedited processing, however, demonstrating the Trump-Vance administration's commitment to the fossil fuel industry above renewable energy sources. Finally, the order revokes the Biden-era Executive Order on AI infrastructure. This order may increase the environmental harm wreaked by AI tools and data centers.

This order calls for the federal government to only use artificial intelligence systems that do not show results contrary to the Trump-Vance ideology.

The Trump-Vance administration is telling federal agencies to only procure AI systems that are "truth-seeking" and which have "ideological neutrality." AI tools have been shown to reflect (and therefore perpetuate) human racism, sexism, and other biases if developers do not take steps to mitigate those influences. The administration thinks of such mitigations as "woke" and does not want federal workers to use large language models (LLMs) or other AI tools which are designed to try to address and reduce existing biases and inequities. Any AI vendor who wants to obtain a government contract will be required to try to shape their tools according to the Trump-Vance administration's worldview, which could bake inequities into any AI tools used by government workers and make these tools less neutral and truth-seeking than they are now.