Trump latest: White House stands firms on Trump’s tariffs and claims 70 nations want to negotiate new deals

The Trump administration’s DOGE-led initiatives have caused chaos for both citizens attempting to interact with the agencies of state and the people trying to run them, despite Elon Musk touting the effort as Silicon Valley-style “tech support” for the federal government.

Part of the difficulty has come as thousands of government employees, including ones hired for entirely remote roles, have been ordered back to work at actual government offices.

The influx of personnel has strained government tech systems, employees of the Department of Agriculture and the Internal Revenue Service have said.

“We are getting hammered with RTO tickets,” one employee said, using an acronym for return to office.

“We do not have the IT infrastructure to support this massive RTO mandate.”

Workers have “no soap, toilet paper, or paper towels anywhere in the building. Their water machine is broken. Many cannot get on local area networks, and the Wi-Fi keeps going down,” an IRS employee added in an interview with Wired magazine.

Democrats in the House of Representatives have launched a new investigation into Elon Musk’s potential conflicts of interest at Nasa.

In a letter sent to the space agency on Monday, Maxwell Frost of Florida and Gerry Connolly of Virginia, who both serve on the House Oversight Committee, demanded documents on all its dealings with Musk’s companies and what officials are doing to prevent conflicts.

It described Musk’s influence over the government and his effective leadership of DOGE as “a textbook example of corruption at taxpayers’ expense” by the world’s richest person.

It also noted that Musk’s rocket company SpaceX has already been awarded federal contracts worth more than $525 since Trump returned to power, on top of the nearly $21 billion his companies have landed since 2008.

The White House is standing by the sweeping tariffs the president has imposed on some of the United States’ biggest trading partners, despite a global backlash that has left the world’s stock markets jittery.

After the president dug in his heels and insisted he was “not looking at” delaying the program, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told Fox Business host Larry Kudlow that 70 nations had already approached the administration about agreeing new trade deals to ease the pain.

The administration’s other big tactic to mitigate the negative press the tariffs policy has been generating has been to take a victory lap on yesterday’s Supreme Court decision, trumpeting it as a major win in the hope of delivering a distraction.

Ken Langone, 89, has lashed out at the president’s trade war in conversation with The Financial Times, commenting that the 46 percent tariff placed on Vietnam was “bulls***” and that the 34 percent tariff on China – which now is bracing for an additional 50 percent tariff if it does not remove its counter levies on U.S.imports – was “too aggressive, too soon.”

“Forty-six percent on Vietnam? Come on!” Langone said.

“You might as well tell them, ‘Don’t even bother calling.’”

Here’s more from James Liddell.

U.S. Navy Vice Admiral Shoshana Chatfield, the only woman on Nato’s military committee, was fired over the weekend by the Trump administration, U.S. officials said Monday.

Although no reason was given, officials said it was apparently tied to comments she has made that supported diversity in the force.

Chatfield reportedly got a call from Admiral Christopher Grady, the acting chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and was told the administration wanted to go in a different direction with the job.

The officials said they believe the decision was made last week by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, but it was unclear whether he received any direction from the president.

The Trump administration is reportedly planning a military parade through the streets of Washington, D.C., to celebrate the U.S. Army’s 250th anniversary – which just so happens to fall on Donald Trump’s 79th birthday.

Io Dodds has the details.

A renowned economist who co-wrote research used by the Trump administration to justify his aggressive tariff hikes says the White House got it “very wrong”.

University of Chicago Economics Professor Brett Neiman, who was also a Biden administration Treasury official, said the Republican’s team have wildly overcalculated tariff rates placed on nearly all countries that export to the U.S.

The Big Tech boss and special adviser to the president made direct yet unsuccessful appeals to Trump to reverse his tariffs program over the past weekend, according to reporting by The Washington Post.

The exchange marks the highest profile disagreement between the president and the Tesla boss, who understands the complexities of a global supply chain from personal experience and will therefore well understand the likely impact of Trump’s actions on his own businesses.

Musk has been slyly making his unhappiness at the policy clear on his social media platform X, notably posting a clip of free market economist Milton Friedman championing globalisation over protectionism on Monday.

Here’s more from Rachel Clun.

The U.S. Supreme Court moved yesterday to allow the president to continue summarily deporting alleged Venezuelan gang members under a centuries-old wartime law after the administration had already deported dozens of immigrants to a notorious El Salvador prison.

A divided court on Monday night agreed to lift a judge’s order that temporarily blocked the president’s use of the Alien Enemies Act to swiftly deport people from the U.S. while a legal challenge plays out.

But the justices said the immigrants are “entitled to notice and an opportunity to challenge their removal” in front of a judge.

“The only question is which court will resolve that challenge,” they wrote.

Those challenges must take place in Texas, not in Washington, D.C., according to the unsigned order.

Conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett joined the court’s liberal justices Elena Kagan, Ketanji Brown Jackson and Sonia Sotomayor in dissent.

This was Trump’s reaction on Truth Social last night:

The 5-4 decision – with the court’s women dissenting – follows a federal appeals court’s rejection of the president’s attempt to throw out a ruling from District Judge James Boasberg.

The judge is also weighing whether to hold government officials in contempt for allegedly defying his court orders to return deportation flights to the United States before dozens of Venezuelan immigrants landed in a Salvadoran prison facing the prospect of indefinite detention.