Trump takes aim at city and state climate laws in executive order
Dharna Noor
Donald Trump is taking aim and city- and state-led fossil fuel accountability efforts, which have been hailed as a last source of hope for the climate amid the president’s ferociously anti-environment agenda.
In a Tuesday executive order, Trump instructed the Department of Justice to “stop the enforcement” of state climate laws, which his administration has suggested are unconstitutional or otherwise unenforceable.
The president called out New York and Vermont, both of which have passed “climate superfund” laws requiring major fossil fuel companies to help pay for damages from extreme weather.
“These State laws and policies are fundamentally irreconcilable with my Administration’s objective to unleash American energy,” the executive order says. “They should not stand.”
He also targeted the dozens of lawsuits brought by states, cities and counties against big oil in recent years, accusing the industry of intentionally covering up the climate risks of their products and seeking compensation for climate impacts.
The move left advocates outraged. “This order is an illegal, disgusting attempt to force everyday people to pay for the rising toll of climate disasters, while shielding the richest people in the world from accountability,” said Aru Shiney-Ajay, the executive director of the youth-led environmental justice group the Sunrise Movement.
The new order came as Trump touted new moves to revive the coal, the dirtiest and most expensive fossil fuel.
Key events
Speaker Mike Johnson delays House budget vote after GOP rebellion threatened defeat
Last night a beleaguered Mike Johnson canceled a vote on the Senate’s budget resolution as it became obvious that, despite his earlier projections of confidence, too many Republican deficit hawks would vote against and doom the measure.
It’s a huge blow for Johnson, who along with his team spent days scrambling and wrangling with those GOP holdouts agitating for greater spending cuts in Trump’s “big beautiful bill”. Given the slim Republican majority in the House, only four votes against would have sunk the resolution – and, according to Axios, dozens were threatening rebellion.
Republicans need to adopt the measure in order to enact a sweeping party-line package that would enact Trump’s domestic agenda – including tax cuts, military spending, energy policy, border security investments – this year. But conservative fiscal hawks refused to back the Senate budget blueprint, which contains far fewer spending cuts than the version passed by the House in February.
Politico reports that Johnson and House leadership will explore either amending the Senate bill or going straight to conference with the other chamber and working out differences there. Changing the bill, however, as Axios notes, would force the Senate to vote once again, which could put the two chambers in a stalemate.
Johnson remains under pressure to find further cuts in federal spending to satisfy the fiscal hawks in his party, but has said many times that House Republicans would not cut Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security benefits. But in order to meet their huge deficit reduction targets, it’s unclear where else the money would come from if not from cuts to Medicaid.
Israel would be ‘leader’ of strike if Iran doesn’t give up nuclear weapons program, Trump says
Israel would be the “leader” of a potential military strike against Iran if Tehran doesn’t give up its nuclear weapons program, Donald Trump said on Wednesday.
The president’s comments, reported by the Associated Press, come ahead of this weekend’s scheduled talks involving US and Iranian officials in Oman, which Trump has insisted this week would be “direct” while Iran has described them “indirect”. Trump issued a thinly veiled threat on Monday that if the talks failed, Iran would be in “great danger”.
He said on Wednesday:
If it requires military, we’re going to have military. Israel will obviously be very much involved in that. They’ll be the leader of that. But nobody leads us, but we do what we want to do.
Trump went on:
I want Iran to be great. The only thing that they can’t have is a nuclear weapon. They understand that.
In 2018 Trump unilaterally withdrew the US from the long-term, comprehensive nuclear agreement it reached with other world powers in 2015 that limited Tehran’s enrichment of uranium in exchange for the lifting of economic sanctions, calling it the “worst deal ever”. Under the Biden administration, the US and Iran held indirect negotiations in Vienna in 2021 aimed at restoring the nuclear deal. But those talks, and others between Tehran and European nations, failed to reach any agreement.
Meanwhile, the US Treasury Department earlier on Wednesday issued new sanctions targeting Iran’s nuclear program.
Iranian president Masoud Pezeshkian again pledged on Wednesday that his nation is “not after a nuclear bomb” and even dangled the prospect of direct American investment in Iran if the countries can reach a deal, marking a departure from Iran’s stance after its 2015 nuclear deal with world powers. Then, Tehran had sought to buy American airplanes but in effect barred US companies from coming into the country.
In a speech in Tehran, referring to Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Pezeshkian said:
His excellency has no opposition to investment by American investors in Iran. American investors: Come and invest.
Joseph Gedeon
Ro Khanna introduces ‘Drain the Swamp Act’ to enforce anti-corruption measures in White House
The California representative Ro Khanna is introducing legislation that would force White House officials to abide by strict anti-corruption measures after Donald Trump dismantled ethics rules established by his predecessor that turns the president’s own catchphrase against him.
The “Drain the Swamp Act” – shared exclusively with the Guardian and deliberately invoking Trump’s own 2016 campaign slogan – would convert into permanent law the ethics requirements previously established by executive order, including bans on lobbyist gifts and “revolving door” restrictions.
Khanna said:
[Trump] campaigned on draining the swamp, and yet he gets in there and he says, no, lobbyists can give gifts to White House officials. What I’m saying is that we need to ban lobbyists from giving gifts to White House officials, not just this administration, but for all administrations going forward.
The congressman’s bill comes in direct response to Trump’s decision to rescind a Biden-era executive order on ethics rules upon returning to office in January. The legislation would prohibit appointees from accepting gifts from registered lobbyists, impose two-year cooling-off periods for officials entering and leaving government, and ban special “golden parachute” payments from former employers.
Trump’s commercial enterprises during his campaign – hawking everything from gold-plated sneakers to diamond watches and branded Bibles – showed a pattern of monetizing political influence that Khanna’s bill aims to address at the governmental level. The White House’s recent relaxation of ethics standards stands in contrast to his first administration, when he initially imposed a five-year lobbying ban on departing officials – only to nullify those same restrictions during his final days in office in 2020.
Pentagon chief says US could ‘revive’ Panama bases
The US defence secretary has floated the idea of the country’s troops returning to Panama to “secure” its strategically vital canal, a suggestion quickly shot down by the Central American country’s government.
Pete Hegseth suggested during a visit to Panama that “by invitation” the US could “revive” military bases or naval air stations and rotate deployments of its troops to an isthmus the US invaded 35 years ago.
He also said his country was seeking free passage through the canal for its navy ships – which Donald Trump had said were “severely overcharged and not treated fairly in any way, shape or form”.
Trump, since coming to power in January, has repeatedly claimed that China has too much influence over the canal, which handles about 40% of US container traffic and 5% of world trade.
His administration has vowed to “take back” control of the strategic waterway that the US funded, built and controlled until 1999.
Hegseth suggested on Wednesday the former US military bases that dot Panama could be used again to host American troops.
He said a deal signed with Panama this week was an “opportunity to revive, whether it’s the military base, naval air station, locations where US troops can work with Panamanian troops to enhance capabilities and cooperate in a rotational way”.
The European Union will put on hold for 90 days its first countermeasures against US president Donald Trump’s tariffs, European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen said in a statement on X.
“We took note of the announcement by president Trump. We want to give negotiations a chance. While finalising the adoption of the EU countermeasures that saw strong support from our member states, we will put them on hold for 90 days,” she said.
Trump orders DoJ to investigate two former officials who defied him
David Smith
Donald Trump’s persecution of critics intensified on Wednesday when he ordered the justice department to investigate a whistleblower and a cybersecurity director who refuted unfounded claims of election fraud.
The US president signed memorandums targeting Miles Taylor and Chris Krebs, former homeland security officials who served in the first Trump administration.
Taylor had worked in the George W Bush administration and as a senior aide on Capitol Hill. After Trump’s election in 2016, he joined the homeland security department, eventually becoming chief of staff to the secretary, Kirstjen Nielsen.
But in 2018, under the pseudonym “Anonymous”, he wrote a column in the New York Times newspaper under the headline “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration”. Trump demanded that the Times reveal his identity, tweeting: “TREASON?”
Taylor subsequently quit the administration and followed up with a book, A Warning, attributed to “Anonymous: A Senior Trump Administration Official”, again portraying the president as unfit for office. Taylor made his identity public in October 2020.
Trump takes aim at city and state climate laws in executive order
Dharna Noor
Donald Trump is taking aim and city- and state-led fossil fuel accountability efforts, which have been hailed as a last source of hope for the climate amid the president’s ferociously anti-environment agenda.
In a Tuesday executive order, Trump instructed the Department of Justice to “stop the enforcement” of state climate laws, which his administration has suggested are unconstitutional or otherwise unenforceable.
The president called out New York and Vermont, both of which have passed “climate superfund” laws requiring major fossil fuel companies to help pay for damages from extreme weather.
“These State laws and policies are fundamentally irreconcilable with my Administration’s objective to unleash American energy,” the executive order says. “They should not stand.”
He also targeted the dozens of lawsuits brought by states, cities and counties against big oil in recent years, accusing the industry of intentionally covering up the climate risks of their products and seeking compensation for climate impacts.
The move left advocates outraged. “This order is an illegal, disgusting attempt to force everyday people to pay for the rising toll of climate disasters, while shielding the richest people in the world from accountability,” said Aru Shiney-Ajay, the executive director of the youth-led environmental justice group the Sunrise Movement.
The new order came as Trump touted new moves to revive the coal, the dirtiest and most expensive fossil fuel.
Trump signs executive order on water pressure to ‘restore shower freedom’
A global trade-war rollercoaster was not enough to distract Donald Trump from fulfilling one of his longtime priorities on Wednesday: changing the federal definition of “shower head”, a move the White House said would “end the Obama-Biden war on water pressure”.
Trump has complained for years about inadequate water pressure in American showers, sinks and toilets, and has blamed federal water-conservation standards for the problem.
“In my case, I like to take a nice shower to take care of my beautiful hair,” Trump said as he signed the executive order, which the White House said would apply to multiple household appliances, including toilets and sinks. “I have to stand under the shower for 15 minutes until it gets wet. It comes out drip, drip, drip. It’s ridiculous.”
The White House said in a statement on the executive order: “By restoring shower freedom, President Trump is following through on his commitment to dismantle unnecessary regulations and put Americans first.”
Some appliance experts have found Trump’s continued focus on American water pressure notable.
“It was very striking that the White House memo included toilets and shower heads as a presidential priority. It really was something,” Andrew deLaski, executive director at the Appliance Standards Awareness Project, told the Guardian in January. “But I think Donald Trump’s concerns are somewhat out of date, to tell you the truth.”
Trump signs executive order seeking to revitalize US shipbuilding
Good morning and welcome to the US politics blog. I’m Tom Ambrose and I’ll be bringing you all the latest news over the next few hours.
We start with news that president Donald Trump signed an executive order on Wednesday aimed at reviving US shipbuilding and reducing China’s grip on the global shipping industry.
Republican and Democratic US lawmakers for years have warned about China’s growing dominance on the seas and diminishing US naval readiness, AP reports.
Senators Mark Kelly, a Democrat, and Todd Young, a Republican, welcomed the executive order and said they would reintroduce their bipartisan legislation to provide the congressional authorizations needed to revitalize the industry.
The order directs the US Trade Representative (USTR) to move ahead with a proposal that included levying million-dollar US port docking fees on any ship that is part of a fleet that includes Chinese-built or Chinese-flagged vessels. Allies will be pushed to act similarly.
USTR’s recommended port fees had sparked sharp criticism from commodities exporters, trade groups and US ship operators, who warned of supply chain disruptions, job losses in port cities and inflation. The order must be finalized by an 17 April deadline.
In other news:
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Donald Trump has backed down on tariffs on most countries for 90 days, applying instead a 10% tariff, effective immediately. In an announcement that made no mention of several days of market meltdown, rising US inflation fears and fears of a global recession resulting from his tariff policies, Trump insisted his decision was based on the fact that more than 75 countries had approached the US to negotiate on tariffs and non-monetary tariffs rather than retaliate (he was less diplomatic in his description of conciliatory nations last night). Mexico and Canada are included in the 10% baseline tariffs, US treasury secretary Scott Bessent said.
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Democratic governors hit back at a Trump order blocking state climate policies. Kathy Hochul and Michelle Lujan Grisham, the governors of New York and New Mexico respectively and who co-chair the US Climate Alliance, wrote: “The federal government cannot unilaterally strip states’ independent constitutional authority.” They vowed to continue “advancing solutions to the climate crisis”. Last night Trump issued an executive order that aims to block the enforcement of state laws passed to reduce the use of fossil fuels and combat the climate crisis. It came just hours after Trump issued orders to increase coal production. The order named California, New York and Vermont as specific targets, while also listing a broad range of state policies that the administration would seek to nullify, from cap-and-trade systems to permitting rules.
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The Trump administration intends to appeal a judge’s ruling lifting access restrictions on the Associated Press, a court filing seen by Reuters showed. The US district judge Trevor McFadden ordered the White House to restore full access to the Associated Press to presidential events, after the news agency was punished for its decision to continue to refer to the Gulf of Mexico in its coverage.
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Federal judges in New York and Texas have taken legal action to block the government from deporting five Venezuelans under the rarely invoked Alien Enemies Act that gives the president the power to imprison and deport non-citizens in times of war.
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A Democratic senator has introduced a bill that would prohibit awarding government contracts and grants to companies owned by special government employees, taking aim at Elon Musk, the SpaceX and Tesla CEO.
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