A Delta Airlines plane sits at El Paso International Airport after the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration lifted its temporary closure of the airspace over El Paso, saying all flights will resume as normal and that there was no threat to commercial aviation in El Paso, Texas, U.S., on February 11, 2026.
| Photo Credit: Reuters

A file image of U.S. President Donald Trump.
| Photo Credit: Reuters

A file image of Donald Trump
| Photo Credit: Reuters

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A view of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington. The case of firing of the of the head of federal agency dedicated to protecting whistleblowers, is not expected to be docketed until after the Supreme Court returns from the Presidents Day holiday weekend.
| Photo Credit: AP

The Trump administration wants the Supreme Court to permit the firing of the head of the federal agency dedicated to protecting whistleblowers, according to documents obtained on Sunday (February 16, 2025) that would mark the first appeal to the justices since President Donald Trump took office.

The emergency appeal is the start of what probably will be a steady stream from lawyers for the Republican president and his administration seeking to undo lower court rulings that have slowed his second term agenda.

The Justice Department’s filing obtained by The Associated Press asks the conservative-majority court to lift a judge’s court order temporarily reinstating Hampton Dellinger as the leader of the Office of Special Counsel.

Dellinger has argued that the law says he can only be dismissed for problems with the performance of his job, none of which were cited in the email dismissing him.

The petition came hours after a divided appeals court panel refused on procedural grounds to lift the order, which was filed Wednesday and expires on Feb. 26.

The case is not expected to be docketed until after the Supreme Court returns from the Presidents Day holiday weekend. The justices would not act until Tuesday at the earliest.

It’s not clear what reception Trump will get from the conservative-dominated court that includes three justices he nominated in his first term.

The case began last week when Dellinger sued over his removal as head of the Office of Special Counsel, which is responsible for guarding the federal workforce from illegal personnel actions, such as retaliation for whistleblowing. He was appointed by Democratic President Joe Biden and confirmed by the Senate to a five-year term in 2024.

Dellinger said the office’s work “needed now more than ever,” noting the “unprecedented” number of firings, without cause, of federal employees with civil service protections in recent weeks by the Trump administration.

The administration argues that the order reinstating Dellinger for two weeks wrongly restricts what the president can do. The brief cites the Supreme Court decision that gave Trump immunity from criminal prosecution and reflected a muscular view of executive power.

“Until now, as far as we are aware, no court in American history has wielded an injunction to force the president to retain an agency head,” acting Solicitor General Sarah M Harris wrote.

The brief references some of the dozen or more cases where judges have slowed Trump’s agenda, including by ordering the temporary lifting of a foreign aid funding freeze and blocking workers with Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency team from accessing Treasury Department data for now.

The executive branch has argued since the Carter administration that the Office of Special Counsel is the kind of job where the president should have the power to hire and fire, and letting the order in Dellinger’s case stand could “embolden” judges to issue additional blocks in the roughly 70 lawsuits the Trump administration is facing so far, the Justice Department argues.

Dellinger’s firing was the latest move in Trump’s sweeping effort to shrink and reshape the federal government, testing the limits of well-established civil service protections by moving to dismantle federal agencies and push out staffers.

The independent Office of Special Counsel is separate from Justice Department special counsels such as Jack Smith, who are appointed by the attorney general for specific investigations, such as Smith’s criminal investigation of Trump before he returned to the White House.

Washington:

Nearly half of an elite US epidemiology program known as the “disease detectives” were dismissed by the Trump administration on Friday, according to sources familiar with the matter, dealing a blow to public health efforts as fears rise over bird flu.

The sackings come as Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency pushes to downsize the federal government and as newly-confirmed Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr vows to overhaul the nation’s health agencies. 

“I’m so angry,” a senior epidemiologist in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention who supervised some of those affected by the cuts told AFP. 

“We’re on the verge of potentially another pandemic and we’re firing the people who have probably more expertise than anyone else in the country collectively.”

The cuts, first reported by CBS News, are part of broader efforts to remove employees still in their probationary periods, who can be dismissed more easily.

Established in 1951, the Epidemic Intelligence Service is a two-year post-doctoral training program whose officers have been on the frontline of investigating outbreaks from the first Ebola cases in Africa in the 1970s to the earliest case reports of Covid-19 in the United States. 

“Without those officers we would not have eliminated smallpox from the globe,” the official said. “We had people fanning across countries, wading through mud and navigating rivers on boats to eliminate smallpox.”

‘Directly impact health security’

Known colloquially as the “disease detectives,” the researchers are hired annually through a competitive process that each year whittles down hundreds of applicants — including doctors, nurses, scientists and more — to a class of a few dozen.

While some are stationed at CDC headquarters in Atlanta, others are posted around the country. 

Several former CDC directors began their careers as EIS officers, highlighting the program’s role as a pipeline for leadership in public health.

There are approximately 140 officers across two classes. On Friday, the class of 2024 was informed they would receive termination emails that afternoon, while the class of 2023 was informed that their status was still under review.

Around 30 officers from both classes were hired through a different mechanism under the US Public Health Service, meaning they remain unaffected for now.

In total, nearly 1,300 CDC employees — roughly 10 percent of the agency’s workforce — were dismissed, according to CBS News.

“The Epidemic Intelligence Service is one of the most storied and prestigious programs of the CDC,” infectious disease physician Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at Johns Hopkins University told AFP.  

“Any attempts to end this program will directly impact the national and health security of the US.”

Health Secretary RFK Jr. has made no secret of his disdain for infectious disease research, suggesting recently that it should be paused entirely for eight years while the focus shifts to addressing chronic conditions. 

Beyond his well-known anti-vaccine stances, Kennedy has also expressed skepticism about widely accepted infectious disease science, questioning whether germs cause disease and whether HIV causes AIDS.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

Elon Musk listens to U.S. President Donald Trump speak in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, D.C.
| Photo Credit: Reuters

The campaign by President Donald Trump and his adviser Elon Musk to radically cut back the U.S. bureaucracy spread on Friday (February 14, 2025), firing more than 9,500 workers who handled everything from managing federal lands to caring for military veterans.

Workers at the departments of Interior, Energy, Veterans Affairs, Agriculture and Health and Human Services had their employment terminated in a drive that so far has largely — but not exclusively — targeted probationary employees in their first year on the job who have fewer employment protections.

The firings, reported by Reuters and other major U.S. media outlets, are in addition to the roughly 75,000 workers who have taken a buyout that Mr. Trump and Mr. Musk have offered to get them to leave voluntarily, according to the White House. That equals about 3% of the 2.3 million person civilian workforce.

Mr. Trump says the federal government is too bloated and too much money is lost to waste and fraud. The government has some $36 trillion in debt and ran a $1.8 trillion deficit last year, and there is bipartisan agreement on the need for reform.

But congressional Democrats say Mr. Trump is encroaching on the legislature’s constitutional authority over federal spending, even as his fellow Republicans who control majorities in both chambers of Congress have largely supported the moves.

The speed and breadth of Mr. Musk’s effort has produced growing frustration among some of Mr. Trump’s aides over a lack of coordination, including White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, sources told Reuters.

In addition to the job reductions, Mr. Trump and Mr. Musk have tried to gut civil-service protections for career employees, frozen most U.S. foreign aid and attempted to shutter some government agencies such as the U.S. Agency for International Development and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau CFPB almost entirely.

Almost half of the probationary workers at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and others at the National Institutes of Health are being forced out, sources familiar with the job cuts told Reuters.

The U.S. Forest Service is firing around 3,400 recent hires, while the National Park Service is terminating about 1,000, people familiar with the plans said on Friday.

The tax-collecting Internal Revenue Service is preparing to fire thousands of workers next week, two people familiar with the matter said, a move that could squeeze resources ahead of Americans’ April 15 deadline to file income taxes.

Other spending cuts have raised concerns that vital services were in danger. A month after wildfires devastated Los Angeles, federal programs have stopped hiring seasonal firefighters and halted removal of fire hazards such as dead wood from forests, according to organizations impacted by the reductions.

Critics have questioned the blunt force approach of Mr. Musk, the world’s richest person, who has amassed extraordinary influence in Mr. Trump’s presidency.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on Friday shrugged off those concerns, comparing Mr. Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency to a financial audit.

“These are serious people, and they’re going from agency to agency, doing an audit, looking for best practices,” he told Fox Business Network.

Mr. Musk is relying on a coterie of young engineers with little government experience to manage his DOGE campaign, and their early cuts appear to be driven more by ideology than driving down costs, budget experts say.

New Delhi:

Zaya Perysian, a US-based Transgender influencer, has alleged that she has been forced to identify as male under the Donald Trump administration. Zaya claims that the gender on her passport has been changed to male while all her other documents identify her as female. This comes after Trump, during his inaugural address, announced that there will only be two genders in the US – male and female.

In an executive order titled “Defending women from gender ideology extremism and restoring biological truth to the federal government” signed on January 20, it was clarified that “sex” shall refer to an individual’s immutable biological classification as either male or female. “Sex” is not a synonym for and does not include the concept of “gender identity.”

The executive categorically states that gender identity cannot be recognised as a replacement for sex.

In a recent video posted on Instagram, Zaya shared what it is “like being a transgender under this new administration.” Sharing evidence, Zaya showed a passport with her picture and “a big ugly M” written under the header “sex”.

“All of my other documents are updated to female and I have been fully, surgically updated to female,” she said.

Zaya read the government letter elaborating an update to her passport: “The sex was corrected on your passport application. The changes were made for one of the following reasons – to match our record.”

Zaya was born male but later underwent a sex reassignment surgery and now identifies as female. She says she had a passport as a kid and used it once. “If you have had a passport in the past that displays the opposite sex then they will not honour your gender change. Now obviously I will be seeking legal action,” she added.

The digital video creator reiterated that there is nothing about her anymore that represents “male”. But the Trump administration’s denying to put “female” on her passport put her in “danger while travelling.”

“I am in danger now,” she claimed.

Zaya believes this is to scare people like her as the government doesn’t want them in public life. “They want us to hide in fear and be scared of them. But trust me, I am not going anywhere. Trans people have been here and are staying here and I will fight this. I am not scared. I am not gonna cry.”

The trans creator said it is a “direct violation” of her rights as an American citizen under the Equal Rights Amendment.

“I submitted a passport application that was intended to update my gender marker to female. That exact application is still available on the website to update your gender,” she said, adding that this is just the beginning.

After working for years alongside the United States to combat the Taliban in Afghanistan, Zahra says she was just days from being evacuated to America when President Donald Trump suspended refugee admissions.

She sold her belongings as she awaited a flight out of Pakistan, where she has been embroiled in a three-year process applying for a refugee scheme Mr. Trump froze in one of his first acts back in office.

“We stood with them for the past 20 years, all I want is for them to stand up for the promise they made,” the 27-year-old former Afghanistan Defence Ministry worker said from Islamabad.

“The only wish we have is to be safe and live where we can have peace and an ordinary human life,” she said, speaking under a pseudonym.

Start of new exodus

The 2021 withdrawal of U.S.-led troops from Kabul ended two decades of war but began a new exodus, as Afghans clamoured to escape Taliban government curbs and fears of reprisal for working with Washington.

Mr. Trump’s executive order to pause admissions for at least 90 days starting from January 27 has blocked around 10,000 Afghans approved for entry from starting new lives in the United States, according to non-profit #AfghanEvac.

Tens of thousands more applications in process have also been frozen, the U.S.-based organisation said. “All sorts of people that stood up for the idea of America, now they’re in danger,” #AfghanEvac chief Shawn VanDiver said. “We owe it to them to get them out.”

Mr. Trump’s order said “the United States lacks the ability to absorb large numbers of migrants, and in particular, refugees”, and stopped the relocation scheme until it “aligns with the interests of the United States”. But campaigners argue the country owes a debt to Afghans left in the lurch by their withdrawal — which Mr. Trump committed to in his first term but was overseen by his successor President Joe Biden.

A special visa programme for Afghans who were employed by or on behalf of the United States remains active. But the more wide-reaching refugee scheme was relied on by applicants including ex-Afghan soldiers and employees of the U.S.-backed government, as well as their family members.

With America’s Kabul embassy shut, many travelled to neighbouring Pakistan to enter paperwork, conduct interviews and undergo vetting.

Female applicants are fleeing the country where the Taliban government has banned them from secondary school and university, squeezed them from public life and ordered them to wear all-covering clothes.

‘Hopes are shattered’

“I had a lot of hopes for my sisters, that they should graduate from school and pursue education,” said one of five daughters of an ex-government employee’s family seeking resettlement from Pakistan.

“All my hopes are shattered,” said the 23-year-old. “I have nightmares and when I wake up in the morning, I feel like I can’t fall asleep again. I’m very anxious.”

The European Court of Justice ruled last year that Afghan women have the right to be recognised as refugees in the EU because Taliban government curbs on women “constitute acts of persecution”.

This week, the International Criminal Court chief prosecutor said he was seeking arrest warrants for Taliban government leaders because there are grounds to suspect they “bear criminal responsibility for the crime against humanity of persecution on gender grounds”.

Moniza Kakar, a lawyer who works with Afghan refugees in Pakistan, said some women told her they “prefer suicide than going back to Afghanistan”.

The Taliban government has announced an amnesty and encouraged those who fled to return to rebuild the country, presenting it as a haven of Islamic values.

But a 2023 report by UN rights experts said “the amnesty for former government and military officials is being violated” and there were “consistent credible reports of summary executions and acts tantamount to enforced disappearances”.

Last summer, Pakistan’s Foreign Ministry complained as many as 25,000 Afghans were in the country awaiting relocation to the United States.

Islamabad announced a sweeping campaign in 2023 to evict undocumented Afghans, ordering them to leave or face arrest as relations soured with the Taliban government.

At least 8,00,000 Afghans have left since October 2023, according to the Norwegian Refugee Council. But Afghans awaiting refugee relocation have also reported widespread harassment to leave by authorities in Pakistan.

A Foreign Ministry spokesman told presspersons this week Trump’s administration had not yet communicated any new refugee policy to Pakistan.

Islamabad is following “the same old plan” where Washington has committed to taking in refugees this year, Shafqat Ali Khan said.

Afghans awaiting new lives abroad feel caught between a cancelled future and the haunting prospect of returning to their homeland.

“I don’t have the option of returning to Afghanistan, and my situation here is dire,” said 52-year-old former Afghan journalist Zahir Bahand. “There is no life left for me, no peace, no future, no visa, no home, no work: nothing is left for me.”

Donald Trump has shaken up America and the world in an extraordinary first week back in the White House that saw him remake the US political universe in his own image.

On his first day, Trump signed more executive orders than any president in history, consolidating his power over every lever of the US government.

Since then, he has seemingly been everywhere, doing everything all at once to further impose his will — and his conservative, nationalist version of a “golden age” — on the country.

The theme has been “promises made, promises kept”: starting with his mass pardons for the 2021 US Capitol rioters and a slew of executive orders from immigration to gender.

From Trump and his supporters, the theme has been one of regal, even divine, power.

The 78-year-old claimed he was “saved by God” from an assassination attempt to make America great again — and danced with a sword at an inaugural ball. His ally Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, simply hailed the “return of the king.”

Trump’s influence on the world stage is outsized too, as he flaunts mass tariffs and threats of American territorial expansion.

“Early in his new term, emboldened by his astonishing resurrection, Trump appears to be Godzilla domestically and abroad,” Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics, told AFP.

‘We are so back’

If Trump’s supporters — and critics — had any doubts about what his second coming would bring, they were dispelled with a few squeaky strokes of a black marker in the Oval Office on Monday.

Hours after his inauguration at the US Capitol, Trump signed a pardon of 1,500 rioters who had stormed the same building four years earlier to try to overturn his election loss to Joe Biden.

But it was just the start of an avalanche of dizzying changes.

The Republican’s orders launched a long-promised immigration crackdown, eliminated birthright citizenship, and said the US government would only recognize two genders.

He purged the government of diversity efforts and employees — and then got rid of the internal watchdogs who might challenge his rulings.

He yanked the United States out of the Paris climate agreement and the World Health Organization.

“We are so back,” was the repeated refrain heard in the corridors of the White House.

His spokeswoman insisted Trump had delivered “more in 100 hours than any president in 100 days.”

And the contrast with Trump’s own first term could not have been greater.

Instead of chaos and fights, the first days of Trump 2.0 have been marked by what appears to be careful planning, steely discipline and intense messaging.

Internationally, Trump appeared at the Davos forum on a huge screen where he towered over the gathered global elite.

Trump has told other countries to either make products in America or face tariffs.

All week, he has repeated his territorial threats against Greenland and Panama — calling their sovereignty into question even as he asserted America’s.

“Trump is saying: I’m in control,” said Peter Loge, the director of George Washington University’s School of Media and Public Affairs.

‘Imperial presidency’

But the return of the Trump show has also brought back some old habits — and challenges.

Trump still can’t resist rehashing grievances against opponents — including a bishop at his inaugural service who urged him to show “mercy” — and continues to deploy falsehoods and exaggerations.

Nor can the former reality TV star resist a microphone, holding a series of freewheeling encounters with the press since his return. At one point Trump asked reporters: “Does Biden ever do news conferences like this?”

Key promises remain unfulfilled: US grocery prices remain high despite Trump’s pledge that they would come down, and the war in Ukraine that he vowed to end within 24 hours of his return grinds on.

But as billionaire Trump promises a golden age, his critics fear it will come with a dark side.

For instance, the freed leader of one far-right militia toured the Capitol two days after the January 6 pardons.

And a neo-Nazi group paraded at an anti-abortion march in Washington that Trump himself addressed by video message.

Trump’s message praised “every child as a beautiful gift from the hand of our Creator” — the same God from whom Trump had claimed a divine mandate in his inaugural address on Monday.

“Trump would love to restore the so-called imperial presidency” that existed from Franklin Roosevelt in the 1930s until Richard Nixon’s fall in 1974, said Sabato.

However, Sabato added that “era was long gone and Trump lacks the strong public support necessary to sustain the tough image he’s projecting.”

While Democrats and the anti-Trump “resistance” that opposed his 2016 victory have largely fallen silent for now, there is already legal action against key parts of his agenda.

“We all know Trump. He can’t change and won’t change, so over time much of the public will tire of his antics, just as they did in his first term,” said Sabato.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)