Department

President Trump’s 2026 “skinny budget” is out, and at first glance it gives small-government advocates reason to cheer. It proposes deep cuts to domestic agencies, calls for eliminating redundant programs and gestures toward reviving federalism by shifting power and responsibility back to the states. It promises to slash overreaching “woke” initiatives, end international handouts and abolish bureaucracies that have outlived their usefulness.

But this budget is more rhetorical than revolutionary. As impressive as Trump’s envisioned cuts are — $163 billion worth — they lose luster because the version of the budget being considered in Congress also calls for increases to defense and border security spending, as well as the extension of the 2017 tax cuts. And for all its fiery declarations, the budget fails to truly confront the drivers of our fiscal crisis.

The budget does, thankfully, enshrine the Department of Government Efficiency’s acknowledgment that federal sprawl has become unmanageable. It proposes defunding environmental-justice programs, trimming National Institute of Health and National Science Foundation budgets, slashing the Department of Education and eliminating corporate welfare masquerading as climate policy.

It also rightly calls for cutting the National Endowments for the Arts and the Humanities — two anachronisms with no constitutional justification. Art and education don’t need federal management; they need freedom.

The budget retreats from Washington’s micromanagement of local affairs. Education grants, housing subsidies and green-energy projects are best cut and handled by state governments or the private sector. One-size-fits-all federal fixes for everything from school lunches to water systems have failed. Devolving authority isn’t just constitutional; it’s practical.

But these trims are wrapped in a document that nevertheless sustains a bloated government. Even with the reductions, 2026 discretionary spending would remain essentially unchanged at $1.6 trillion. In some respects, the budget enshrines Biden-era spending.

Then there’s defense. For all the “America First” rhetoric about maintaining a domestic focus, Trump’s budget does nothing to rein in the Pentagon’s fiscal free-for-all aimed at projecting power around the world. Quite the opposite: It proposes a 13% increase, pushing base defense spending past $1 trillion, including $892.6 billion in discretionary spending supplemented by $119.3 billion in mandatory spending and an additional $150 billion to be passed through Congress’ reconciliation process.

The Pentagon remains the largest federal bureaucracy and among the least accountable. It hasn’t passed a full audit since 2018, yet it gets a raise. If “peace through strength” means blank checks for defense contractors and redundant weapons systems, we need to rethink our definition of strength.

Consider the new F-47 fighter jet included in this budget. As Jack Nicastro notes in Reason magazine, this aircraft — billed as the most advanced ever built — is being developed to replace the F-35, which has been a taxpayer-funded boondoggle. So far, the F-35 has cost taxpayers more than $400 billion, far beyond the initial projected cost, and is expected to total $2 trillion over its lifespan. It’s suffered from technical failures (including at some point having problems flying in the rain) and some doubt it will ever be fully functional.

Considering the government incentives that gave us the F-35 mess still exist and given that aerial combat is shifting toward automated or remotely piloted systems, why would we believe our money will be better spent on the F-47?

Trump’s budget also boosts Homeland Security spending, propping up another sprawling bureaucracy. The president’s high-profile and problematic approach to deportation, while politically popular with his constituency, costs a lot of money. As the Cato Institute’s David Bier notes, indiscriminate deportations risk shrinking the workforce, reducing tax revenue and undercutting economic growth — all while ignoring the merit-based immigration reforms Trump claims to support.

Finally, there’s the ever-present elephant in the room: entitlements. Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid make up nearly 60% of spending and are the main drivers of our debt. Yet they are mostly untouched in the current fiscal sketch. The administration promises a more complete plan later to show where the savings would be found, but we’ve heard that before — and House Speaker Mike Johnson said on Tuesday that Republicans would block some of the most effective approaches to cutting Medicaid. But the math is straightforward. Without serious entitlement reform, no discretionary spending cuts can avert a debt crisis.

The bipartisan failure to govern responsibly isn’t just a policy lapse; it’s a moral one. Deficit spending and the burden of debt repayment crowds out private investment, fuels inflation and burdens future generations with obligations they have no say over. The U.S. is on track to exceed its World War II-era debt record by 2029. If this budget is truly the plan to reverse course, we’re in trouble.

Yes, the new Trump budget has bright spots, but those gains are neutralized by massive defense spending, costly immigration priorities and persistent gimmicks. At best, it maintains a flawed status quo. We don’t need more of the same; we need evidence of a serious turnaround. Until that happens, we have little choice but to assume that Trump’s budget is another big-government blueprint in small-government clothing.

Veronique de Rugy is a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. This article was produced in collaboration with Creators Syndicate.

In a brutal bit of irony, in-custody deaths in Los Angeles were brought to the forefront by a 2023 case in which neither the County Sheriff’s Department or county hospitals would acknowledge that an inmate was in their custody when he died.

Stanley Wilson Jr., a Stanford graduate and former NFL defensive back with the Detroit Lions, died either before, during or after he was transported from the downtown Twin Towers Correctional Facility to the Metropolitan State Hospital in Norwalk on Feb. 1, 2023. It was 10 months after he had been arrested for entering a home in the Hollywood Hills during a psychotic break.

The Sheriff’s Department says Wilson died at the hospital. The hospital says he was already dead when he arrived. Nobody will take responsibility. What we do know is he was heavily medicated. Surveillance cameras weren’t operating. His body was bruised.

Frustrated with the lack of answers, Wilson’s parents filed a wrongful-death lawsuit against the Sheriff’s Department, the Department of State Hospitals and L.A. County in September, seeking $45 million. Last month they amended their complaint, refiling it in L.A. Superior Court after a federal judge ruled the case is a California state matter.

Trial is scheduled to begin Sept. 8. John Carpenter, the lawyer representing Wilson’s parents, Pulane Lucas and Stanley Wilson Sr., on Wednesday said, “in light of the slow rolling of discovery, that date probably won’t stick.”

What does a grieving parent do in the interim? Lucas organizes protests and other events to increase awareness of in-custody deaths. She writes legislators. She is, in Carpenter’s words, “the embodiment of a mother’s power. Mothers, boy oh boy, they are unstoppable.”

Lucas, who holds a PhD in public policy from Virginia Commonwealth University and three master’s degrees from Harvard, lives in Virginia, where she is president and CEO of Policy Pathways Inc., a firm that trains teens and young adults who desire to become leaders in public policy, public administration and international affairs.

But this Mother’s Day weekend she will be in L.A., camped on the lawn in front of the Men’s Central Jail along with other parents whose children died while in custody. The protest is called Stand With Mothers and will begin with a rally at 3 p.m. Saturday and conclude with a “spiritual event” at 10:30 a.m. Sunday after spending the night.

This is the second year in a row the event has taken place. About a dozen parents turned out and Lucas expects more this year.

“We write as mothers who carry the unimaginable pain of having lost our children while they were in custody,” the statement from the mothers says. “As we approach the Second Annual Mother’s Day Action Weekend — a time that holds both deep sorrow and a powerful sense of solidarity — we were looking forward to honoring our children’s memories together: with a rally, sleepover, and Mother’s Day Service all held on the premises outside the jail where our children’s lives were taken.

“The symbolism of sleeping on the ground — within eyesight of the same buildings where our children took their last breaths yet under the same sky our children were denied access to see — is not just a gesture without impact. It is an act of remembrance, resistance, and love that matters deeply to us.

“As mothers, this gathering is for our children. For our healing. And for the truth.”

Last year’s protest was peaceful despite the presence of sheriff’s deputies in riot gear who were anticipating pro-Palestinian protests across L.A. Lucas raised the mothers’ concerns, speaking with Assistant Deputy Sheriff Sergio Aloma.

“He was very kind and told us they would fall back,” Lucas said. “We slept overnight in tents and he said nobody would bother us. They checked on us and asked if we wanted food and water.

“It was a wonderful weekend, a beautiful time and we are so looking forward to it again.”

Among the mothers joining Lucas will be Terry Lovett, whose 27-year-old son, Jalani, died in 2021 while in solitary confinement at the Men’s Central Jail. The county coroner’s autopsy report said Lovett’s death was “accidental” and that he had fentanyl and heroin in his system, noting that he had a bruise on his neck and abrasions on his arms, but “no external trauma” or “life-threatening injuries.”

Terry Lovett has questions, the primary one being, how did her son access fentanyl while in solitary confinement with interaction only with guards? Civil rights lawyer Christian Contreras filed a claim against the county on behalf of the family in January 2022 — the first step toward a lawsuit — but Lovett said she hasn’t followed through because she would need an independent autopsy conducted and she can’t afford it.

“I’m looking forward to the vigil and spending time with the other mothers,” she said. “It’s comforting. We all share the frustrations and heartbreak of our children dying under suspicious circumstances, and we all need to keep seeking answers.”

Lucas can rattle off her unanswered questions about Stanley Wilson’s death. A judge found him unfit to stand trial because of his deteriorating mental health in November 2022, and ordered him to be treated at Metropolitan State Hospital. Yet he was not transferred until three months later, the day he died.

Sheriff’s Department records show Wilson was on three anti-psychotic medications. Lucas contends that two of them shouldn’t be administered together because they cause anxiety and can lead to a pulmonary embolism, which is what Wilson’s autopsy determined was his cause of death.

As her lawsuit inches toward a trial, she remains dedicated to making sure the voices of parents of inmates who died in custody are heard. Nineteen inmates have died in the custody of the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department so far in 2025.

“I have committed my life to initiatives related to Stanley’s life and death that can enlighten and support others and save lives,” Lucas said. “As mothers, we find strength in coming together and advocating for our children.

“We are more than friends. We love each other. We are like sister mothers in solidarity.”

WASHINGTON — Energy Secretary Chris Wright clashed with House Democrats on Wednesday over Energy Department funding freezes and steep cuts proposed by the Trump administration.

The White House’s preliminary 2026 budget requested $45.1 billion for the Energy Department, a 9 percent decrease from the previous fiscal year. The administration’s proposal would cut funding for electric vehicles, batteries, some nuclear initiatives and toxic-waste cleanup programs.

Additionally, the budget proposal sought to cancel more than $15 billion in green energy and climate-change research programs authorized by the bipartisan 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.

“My priorities for the department are clear: to unleash a golden era of American energy dominance, strengthen our national security and lead the world in innovation,” Wright told Congress in a hearing before the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Energy and Water Development. “The Department of Energy will advance these critical missions while cutting red tape, increasing efficiency, unleashing innovation and ensuring we are better stewards of taxpayer dollars.”

Democratic lawmakers pressed Wright for answers on why billions of dollars in promised grants and contracts had been frozen, and why Energy Department staff were being let go.

“Since January, the Department of Energy has suspended critical energy programs, canceled executed awards and contracts authorized by this Congress, and severely reduced staffing,” said Rep. Marcy Kaptur, D-Ohio.

But Wright testified that the Energy Department had not frozen any funding.

“We have not frozen funding. We don’t have a single unpaid invoice at our department. Not one,” Wright said, adding that fewer than 1,000 employees had left the agency, primarily through voluntary retirements. He described the agency as “in flux” while he looks to “restructure” it.

Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla., pushed back on Wright’s claim that the department had not withheld any funding, citing a list compiled by the Appropriations Committee showing more than $67 billion in withheld funds.

“This is in clear defiance of both congressional intent and multiple court orders,” Wasserman Schultz said, urging Wright to release the funds.

Wright rejected the figure as “incorrect” and offered to follow up with her privately.

After exiting the hearing, Wasserman Schultz said the secretary was evading accountability.

“He doesn’t want to answer uncomfortable, difficult questions,” she said. “If he can illuminate me and show me that the programs that we know are frozen have not been and the funds have been distributed, then I will certainly be relieved. But that’s not what the recipients are telling us.”

Some Republican congressmen were also skeptical about the agency’s budget cuts to energy projects.

“I do have some concerns candidly with the proposed reduction to the nuclear energy budget,” subcommittee Chair Rep. Chuck Fleischmann, R-Tenn., said to Wright.

Rep. Frank Mrvan, D-Ind., warned the cuts could threaten clean energy jobs in the Midwest, pointing to a hydrogen hub project in Indiana that he said would create 12,000 jobs and modernize steel distribution. This was one of two hydrogen hubs that received commitments of $2.2 billion in 2024. The funding for these projects is now in flux.

Mrvan asked Wright for an update on the project. Wright responded that the hubs were still under review, comparing the process to how “any business would look at investments.” He said he hoped the review would be completed before the end of the summer.

“I want to make sure the secretary understands how deadly serious I am about the approval of the hydrogen hub,” Mrvan said after the hearing. “Real people’s lives are being impacted.”

WASHINGTON — An alleged coast-to-coast criminal conspiracy that has defrauded the employee benefit plans of major labor unions is being investigated by a joint task force of FBI and Labor Department agents, The Times learned Tuesday.

The alleged fraud involves hundreds of thousands of dollars in health insurance payments by members of labor unions in the last few years.

Search warrants filed in federal court in San Francisco, Chicago, Baltimore and other cities show that the investigation centers on Angelo T. Commito, a reputed associate of organized crime figures.

Sources said companies linked to Commito are suspected of using kickbacks and extortion tactics to obtain contracts for prepaid health care plans from labor unions.

Indictments May Be Near

At least half a dozen federal grand juries have been investigating the case for months, and indictments may be sought within several days, authorities said.

These sources, who declined to be named, said the broad investigation was hinted at in April when FBI Director William S. Sessions testified about the government’s continuing crackdown on organized crime before the permanent investigations subcommittee of the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee.

Although Sessions did not specifically mention employee benefit plans, he said the bureau was maintaining vigilance over “criminal organizations that deal in various criminal activities for profit,” including some in the field of labor racketeering.

Sessions noted that in the last two years, in addition to the convictions of Mafia members and associates, 43 officials or members of labor unions were convicted of racketeering charges.

The current investigation reportedly involves labor officials or employees with the Hotel and Restaurant Employees Union, the Teamsters Union, the United Food and Commercial Workers and others. Names of those suspected of criminal conduct could not be learned.

‘New Generation of Racketeer’

Raymond Maria, chief of the Labor Department’s office of labor racketeering, refused in an interview to disclose the names of those targeted. But he said federal investigators are focusing on “a new generation of racketeer” in the labor field.

“This new generation includes bankers, attorneys, accountants and administrators of employee benefit plans who, in many cases, deal with members of organized crime,” he said.

He said the people suspected of wrongdoing in the labor conspiracy allegedly “sought to establish a nationwide criminal monopoly in the delivery of services to employee benefit plans–insurance, health care, vision care, legal services and various types of rehabilitative counseling.”

Kickbacks were “the basic sales tool,” he said, in which union officials or benefit plan trustees received payoffs to award service contracts. The alleged offenses occurred within the last six years.

Maria complained that “the large number of employee benefit plans in the country dwarfs the minuscule number of government agents assigned to investigate instances of fraud. So the situation provides a tremendous incentive to steal and to cheat.”

Hope to Curb Abuses

Federal officials said they hope that the current inquiry cracks down on such abuses.

Commito, who reportedly maintains homes in San Francisco, Palm Springs and Chicago, could not be reached for comment Tuesday. Efforts to obtain comment from his lawyer, former U.S. Atty. Dan K. Webb of Chicago, also were unsuccessful.

Commito’s principal company is Chicago-based Labor Health Plans Inc., but he also owns firms named Labor Health and Benefits Plan and Dental Health Care Alternatives, according to FBI search warrants on file in Chicago.

Active for years in the prepaid health care industry, Commito’s firms usually receive monthly fees from labor unions of $5 to $15 per worker covered, authorities said.

In warrants it has filed, the FBI sought information about alleged payments or gifts from Commito’s firms to a former official of the United Auto Workers who died in December. Agents also sought documents that they believed would show contacts between Commito’s companies and organized crime figures in New York and Chicago, according to court files.

Identified as Mob Associate

The Pennsylvania Crime Commission identified Commito in 1982 as an associate of several Philadelphia-area mobsters, including John James Allu, who was convicted of three perjury counts for his testimony at hearings into New York City Teamsters corruption.

A former Teamster official told The Times that Commito also had been close to Vito Mango, a convicted felon who formerly ran Teamsters Local 413 in Columbus, Ohio, with which Commito had a contract to provide health services.

Court officials in Huntington Beach, Calif., confirmed that a search warrant was served earlier this year on Contact Corp., a prepaid health care company headed by Mark Kusel, in connection with the inquiry. Kusel declined comment on the matter two months ago. A reporter who attempted to call him Tuesday found that the company’s phone had been disconnected.

Frank Lloyd Wright’s Hollyhock House could soon be closed to the public and lose its designation as a UNESCO World Heritage Site if budget cuts proposed by Mayor Karen Bass are passed by the City Council.

The architectural landmark, perched atop Barnsdall Art Park in East Hollywood, is managed by the city’s Department of Cultural Affairs, with two full-time staffers running tours on Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays as well as handling the maintenance of the building, which is an early example of California Modernist architecture.

The mayor’s proposed budget, which attempts to close a nearly $1-billion shortfall in part by laying off more than 1,600 city employees, eliminates one of those two staff positions and also cuts two vacant positions at Hollyhock House.

The Cultural Affairs Department had been interviewing candidates for the vacant positions and had made an offer for the job of arts manager. But after the mayor released her proposed budget, the department had to rescind the offer and pause other job interviews.

“A single full-time staffer would not be able to manage both the tour program and preservation, necessitating the suspension of public tours until additional full-time staff could be restored,” said Juan Garcia, a spokesperson for the department.

Amid the massive budget shortfall caused in large part by rising personnel costs, soaring legal payouts and a slowdown in the local economy, department heads have been testifying before the City Council’s budget committee about how the mayor’s proposed cuts would affect city services.

The Cultural Affairs Department would face 14 layoffs and the elimination of 10 vacant positions, out of 91 total positions. The cuts also could lead to the closure of the Lincoln Heights Youth Arts Center, said Daniel Tarica, the department’s general manager.

Oil heiress Aline Barnsdall commissioned the Hollyhock House in 1918. She never lived in it, donating it to the city in 1927.

In 2019, it was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site — the only man-made World Heritage Site on the West Coast.

The house was closed for more than two years during the COVID-19 pandemic, reopening in August 2022 after undergoing major renovations.

The monumental fireplace, which brings together the four classical elements of earth, air, fire and water, was restored, as were the art-glass balcony doors in the master bedroom.

Two Wright-designed sofa tables, which the architect had said he considered “part of the house design itself,” were reinstalled.

The improvements also included a major restoration of the guest house.

The UNESCO designation required the house to have four full-time staffers, said Garcia, the spokesperson. The department has requested that the City Council restore the three positions in its final budget, which it must pass by June 1.

“The proposed staffing cuts will severely impact the management of Hollyhock House and subvert the baseline staffing commitments made by the City of Los Angeles as part of the site’s 2019 World Heritage List inscription,” Garcia said.

The proposed cuts shocked preservationists.

“UNESCO World Heritage status is a great honor that needs to be nurtured, not lost by taking public access away,” said Kim Cooper, one of two people behind Esotouric’s Secret Los Angeles, a tour company and preservationist blog. “Hollyhock House is the only one of Wright’s Los Angeles houses that people can tour, recently restored at great cost.”

Councilmember Hugo Soto-Martínez, who represents the area, said it’s imperative to keep the house’s UNESCO status in light of the upcoming Olympic Games and World Cup.

“We’re exploring all options through the budget process to save our dedicated Hollyhock House staff and preserve its protected status,” he said in a statement.

NEW YORK — Columbia University said Tuesday that it will be laying off nearly 180 staffers in response to President Trump’s decision to cancel $400 million in funding over the Manhattan college’s handling of student protests against the war in Gaza.

Those receiving nonrenewal or termination notices Tuesday represent about 20% of the employees funded in some manner by the terminated federal grants, the university said in a statement Tuesday.

“We have had to make deliberate, considered decisions about the allocation of our financial resources,” the university said. “Those decisions also impact our greatest resource, our people. We understand this news will be hard.”

Officials are working with the Trump administration in the hope of getting the funding restored, they said, but the university will still pull back spending because of uncertainty and strain on its budget.

Officials said the university will be scaling back research, with some departments winding down activities and others maintaining some level of research while pursuing alternate funding.

In March, the Trump administration pulled the funding over what it described as the Ivy League school’s failure to squelch antisemitism on campus during the Israel-Hamas war that began in October 2023.

Within weeks, Columbia capitulated to a series of demands laid out by the Republican administration as a starting point for restoring the funding.

Among the requirements was overhauling the university’s student disciplinary process, banning campus protesters from wearing masks, barring demonstrations from academic buildings, adopting a new definition of antisemitism and putting the Middle Eastern studies program under the supervision of a vice provost who would have a say over curriculum and hiring.

After Columbia announced the changes, U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon said the university was “on the right track,” but declined to say when or if Columbia’s funding would be restored. Spokespersons for the Education Department didn’t immediately respond to an email seeking comment Tuesday.

Columbia was at the forefront of U.S. campus protests over the war last spring. Pro-Palestinian demonstrators set up an encampment and seized a campus building in April, leading to dozens of arrests and inspiring a wave of similar protests nationally.

Trump, when he retook the White House in January, moved swiftly to cut federal money to colleges and universities he viewed as too tolerant of antisemitism.

The Justice Department unit that ensures compliance with voting rights laws will switch its focus to investigating voter fraud and ensuring elections are not marred by “suspicion,” according to an internal memo obtained by the Associated Press.

The new mission statement for the voting section makes a passing reference to the historic Voting Rights Act, but no mention of typical enforcement of the provision through protecting people’s right to cast ballots or ensuring that lines for legislative maps do not divide voters by race. Instead, it redefines the unit’s mission around conspiracy theories pushed by Republican President Trump to explain away his loss to Democrat Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election.

Trump’s attorney general at the time, William Barr, said there was no evidence of widespread fraud in that election. Repeated recounts and audits in the battleground states where Trump contested his loss, including some led by Republicans, affirmed Biden’s win and found the election was run properly. Trump and his supporters also lost dozens of court cases trying to overturn the election results.

But in Trump’s second term, the attorney general is Pam Bondi, who backed his effort to reverse his 2020 loss. The president picked Harmeet Dhillon, a Republican Party lawyer and longtime ally who has echoed some of Trump’s false claims about voting, to run the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, where the voting section is housed.

“The Civil Rights Division has always worked to make sure Americans have access to the polls and that their votes matter,” said Stacey Young, an 18-year Department of Justice veteran who left that division days after Trump’s inauguration in January and founded Justice Connection, an organization supporting the agency’s employees. “The division’s job is not to promote the politically expedient fiction that voting fraud is widespread.”

The department did not respond to a request for comment.

Trump has already demonstrated his interest in using the Justice Department to pursue those who stood up for the 2020 election by directing the department to investigate one of his former appointees who publicly vouched for the safety and accuracy of the 2020 vote count.

“The mission of the Voting Rights Section of the DOJ Civil Rights Division is to ensure free, fair, and honest elections unmarred by fraud, errors, or suspicion,” the new mission statement declares.

It adds that the unit will “vigorously enforce” Trump’s executive order seeking to reshape how elections are run. Parts of that order have been put on hold by a judge.

The executive order signed late last month calls for people to provide documented proof of U.S. citizenship each time they register to vote; would require all mail ballots to be received by election day, which is counter to the law in 18 states; and directs an independent federal agency, the Election Assistance Commission, to amend its guidelines for voting machines.

Several legal analysts say much of the order is unconstitutional because only states and, for federal contests, Congress, can set election procedures. The Constitution provides no provision for the president to set the rules for elections.

The new mission statement for the Civil Rights Division also says the voting unit will focus on ensuring that “only American citizens vote in U.S. federal elections.” It’s already illegal for noncitizens to vote. People have to attest they are U.S. citizens when they register and attempts to vote by noncitizens can lead to felony charges and deportation.

Repeated investigations have turned up just a tiny number of noncitizens casting ballots, often doing so accidentally, out of the hundreds of millions of votes over recent contests. A proof-of-citizenship requirement in Kansas a little over a decade ago blocked 31,000 eligible U.S. citizens from registering to vote before it was overturned by the courts.

But Republicans, including Trump, have continued to insist there must be far more noncitizens casting votes and are pushing to tighten election laws to screen them out.

Notably, the roughly 200-word statement on the voting rights section mentions fighting “fraud” twice, as well as investigating “other forms of malfeasance.” The Department of Justice already investigates and prosecutes voting fraud, but in a separate division on the criminal side. The voting section is a civil unit that does not investigate potential crimes.

Now, however, it will “protect the right of American citizens to have their votes properly counted and tabulated,” according to the statement. It was unclear what that refers to. There have been no widespread cases of votes being improperly tabulated.

Justin Levitt, who served as President Biden’s senior policy advisor for democracy and voting rights, noted that because the voting rights section does not pursue prosecutions, its power is sharply limited by the specifics of civil rights laws and what judges will approve.

“For the civil section of the Civil Rights Division, courts need to be buying what they’re selling,” he said.

Riccardi writes for the Associated Press.

For the Los Angeles County Fire Department, it’s a clear red line: firefighters cannot assault their neighbors.

That’s why the department fired Adam Clint, a longtime Santa Clarita fire captain, whose heated off-duty dispute with a man a few doors down landed him with a felony assault conviction.

“By assaulting your neighbor and being convicted of a felony, you engaged in conduct unbecoming a fire captain,” Deputy Fire Chief Thomas Ewald wrote in a January 2023 termination letter. “Your misconduct embarrassed and discredited the Department.”

But the Fire Department may soon have to take Clint back.

In February, the L.A. County Civil Service Commission voted unanimously to reinstate Clint, 51, and award him more than two years of back pay.

The commissioners found that there wasn’t enough evidence to support accusations that Clint called his neighbor, who is Black, the N-word and brandished a gun before knocking him to the ground. They also found that Clint was stressed by the “aggressive” demeanor and “threatening” words of the neighbor, Robert Pope.

“His misconduct on July 3, 2021 was an isolated, uncharacteristic lapse in judgment not likely to be repeated,” the commission’s hearing officer wrote in his report, which recommended downgrading Clint’s punishment to a 30-day suspension.

The Fire Department is appealing the decision, filing a petition in L.A. County Superior Court on April 14 stating that it was “well within the Department’s discretion” to fire Clint. It is unclear where Clint, who took home $295,000, including benefits, the year of the assault, would be assigned if he returns to the department.

Steve Haney, Clint’s attorney, said his client feels deep remorse for hitting Pope but denies ever pointing a gun or calling him a racial slur. A judge reduced Clint’s felony assault conviction to a misdemeanor, which was later expunged from his record.

“The guy doesn’t have a racist bone in his body,” said Haney, who questioned why the county was spending money on outside lawyers to keep Clint out of a job. “It’s a ridiculous waste of taxpayer money.”

In the last four years, the civil service commission has forced department heads to take back dozens of workers they had tried to fire — including sheriff’s deputies, probation staffers and social workers — costing the county millions in back pay, records show.

Of the roughly 65 employees the commission has moved to reinstate since 2021, nearly two-thirds were peace officers from the Sheriff’s or Probation departments, according to a review of the commission’s minutes and annual reports.

The commission is made up of five members, each appointed by an L.A. County supervisor, who serve for $150 a meeting.

The city of Los Angeles has a similar commission, as well as Board of Rights panels for police officer discipline. The union that represents rank-and-file Los Angeles Police Department officers successfully pushed for the passage of a ballot measure allowing for more civilians on Board of Rights panels after a study showed that civilians were routinely more lenient on problem cops than their fellow police officers were.

John Donner, president of the county civil service commission, said he and his colleagues typically agree with the departments’ disciplinary decisions. He characterized the relationship between county departments and the commission as “pretty civil.” In 2023, the commission upheld roughly three out of four disciplinary decisions.

After Jim McDonnell became sheriff in 2014, he started suing to challenge the commission’s reinstatements of deputies who had been fired for lying, saying he did not know where to assign a deputy who would lack the credibility to testify in court.

Robert Luna, who has been sheriff since 2022, has not filed any petitions contesting the commission’s decisions regarding his deputies, court records show.

Probation Chief Guillermo Viera Rosa has fought in court to overturn two commission decisions.

One involved an employee fired in 2021 for buying a lobster lunch for a minor who wasn’t on her caseload and repeatedly visiting an imprisoned gang member without approval. A judge ordered the commission in April to reconsider that decision. In the other case, which is ongoing, a deputy was fired in 2019 after video footage showed he lied about a minor beating him up.

In 2022, the commission brought back probation bureau chief Hellen Carter, who was fired, in part, for lying to colleagues about being a psychiatrist, a coroner, a Pro Bass fisherman, a trauma surgeon, an Olympic swimmer, an acrobatic pilot and an Army vet who had lost 70% of her hearing from a bomb blast in Afghanistan, according to her disciplinary notice. The commission found that the decision to fire her was based on “false and unreliable allegations.”

The Probation Department sued to stop her reinstatement, saying she was a “blight and liability” and her behavior was “egregious and persistent (not quirky).” The department lost.

Carter did not respond to an email. When she returned to the county in 2024, she collected more than half a million dollars in backpay, according to salary records.

The neighborhood spat spiraled out of control almost immediately.

On July 3, 2021, Pope’s wife called him to say that Clint had just berated her for speeding on their Santa Clarita cul-de-sac.

Pope said he stopped by Clint’s house, and the two got into a heated argument in the doorway, culminating with the captain pointing a gun at him and yelling to “get the f— off my property,” punctuated with a racial slur.

Clint went inside his house and reemerged with a gun, according to Pope. As Pope retreated to his car, where his two 14-year-old stepdaughters were waiting, Clint knocked him out from behind, leaving him on the ground until he regained consciousness, Pope said. He said he later discovered a footprint-shaped bruise on his back.

Clint initially denied to sheriff’s deputies that he had hit Pope, but later admitted to punching him in the head.

After giving a statement to the deputies that morning, Pope arrived at his sister’s funeral, where he was supposed to be a pallbearer, just as everyone was leaving.

Tensions between Clint’s and Pope’s families worsened. In 2022, Clint sued Pope and his wife, Rozanna Avetyan, as well as L.A. County, arguing that the sheriff’s deputies and fire officials were biased in favor of Pope based on “his African American Ancestry.” Clint also alleged in the lawsuit that he was not afforded due process, “clearly due to his Caucasian race.” The case was dismissed.

Pope sued a year later for battery. That case is ongoing.

Pope and his wife said the family has struggled to move on from that day, becoming so reluctant to leave the house that they gave away their dogs so they wouldn’t have to encounter Clint on walks. They eventually decided to move away.

“I just don’t understand how he got his job back,” Pope said. “It is just mind-blowing.”

The Trump administration announced a plan Monday to try to ramp up the number of deportations: paying unauthorized immigrants $1,000 if they return to their home country voluntarily.

The Department of Homeland Security called the plan a “historic opportunity for illegal aliens,” noting in a news release that it would also pay for travel assistance.

Any immigrant who used the Customs and Border Protection Home App to inform the government that they plan to return home, the department said, would receive a $1,000 payment after the government had confirmed their return.

“If you are here illegally, self-deportation is the best, safest and most cost-effective way to leave the United States to avoid arrest,” Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said in a statement. “This is the safest option for our law enforcement, aliens and is a 70% savings for US taxpayers.”

President Trump has made mass deportations — a key platform of his 2024 election campaign — a priority in his first three months in office. But so far, the actual number of immigrants deported under his Republican administration has slightly lagged the number deported under his predecessor, Democratic President Biden, as fewer immigrants are now attempting to cross the U.S. border.

Hiroshi Motomura, a law professor at UCLA who specializes in American immigration and citizenship, said the U.S. is not the first nation to try to persuade immigrants to leave the country. Over the years, other countries, such as Germany and Japan, have offered financial incentives for immigrants to self-deport.

“Some of the calculus is what you’re seeing now, which is it’s much cheaper to pay people to leave than it is to forcibly deport them,” Motomura said.

Clearly, the Trump administration is looking for ways to up the number of deportations to match its campaign rhetoric, Motomura said. But he urged any immigrant considering whether to self-deport to consult with an attorney.

Many immigrants have a potential legal pathway to stay — if they are married to a U.S. citizen or have a job offer or a claim of persecution in their home country — but may not have access to an attorney or the legal help to negotiate that pathway, Motomura said.

“Self-deportation certainly is one way to get people to leave the country,” he said. “But the dilemma here, or the policy problem, is that they’re going to get people to leave the country who actually have a right to stay. … They’re asking people to make decisions in a vacuum of knowing what their rights are.”

The Trump administration is promoting its incentives to immigrants who are in the country illegally to leave on their own as a “dignified way to leave the U.S.” — one that it says will have them deprioritized for detention or being picked up by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents if they demonstrate they’re making plans to depart.

Homeland Security also provoked controversy in legal circles by promoting its offer as a way for unauthorized immigrants to legally return to the U.S.: Self-deporting, the news release states, “may help preserve the option … to re-enter the United States legally in the future.”

Some immigration experts warned that this offered false promise.

“It is an incredibly cruel bit of deception for DHS to be telling people that if they leave they ‘will maintain the ability to return to the U.S. legally in the future,’ Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, said on the social media platform X.

“Despite DHS’s claims, leaving the country could impose SEVERE consequences for many people here currently without status, with a 10-year bar on reentry being a best-case scenario for most,” he added.

In an interview with Fox News on Monday, Department of Homeland Security spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin said immigrants who took advantage of the deal could “potentially come back the legal, right way and come back to live the American dream.”

“This might put you in a better position,” she added, “because there’s documentation that you have decided to self deport.”

Asked why immigrants should trust the Trump administration’s offer, McLaughlin said: “We’re giving you our word that we will give you this money and that you can leave today. It’s the safest way. You will not be arrested, you will not be detained, and we will give you that free flight.”

Motomura said the idea that immigrants who self-deport would have a better chance of returning to live in the U.S. legally stemmed from the fact that there are some negative consequences to a formal order of removal: “It limits when you can come back,” he said, “and it may limit your ability to access other immigration related benefits.”

But ultimately, Motomura said, any benefit of self-deportation would depend on the individual: an immigrant who left the U.S. after being in the country without status for 180 days could not come back for three years, he noted, and an immigrant who left the U.S. after being in the country for a year could not come back for 10 years.

He added that while an immigrant who was in the country without status for a shorter period of time, such as two weeks for example, could be better off leaving on their own rather than being subject to a formal deportation order, such situations were less typical.

The Trump administration is also pitching its plan as a deal for American taxpayers.

“Even with the cost of the stipend, it is projected that the use of CBP Home will decrease the costs of a deportation by around 70 percent,” the Department of Homeland Security said in its release, noting that it costs more than $17,000, on average, to arrest, detain and remove an unauthorized immigrant.

Homeland Security said that an immigrant in the U.S. illegally recently used the program to receive a ticket for a flight from Chicago to Honduras, and that additional plane tickets have been booked for the next few weeks.

California and a coalition of other states sued the Trump administration Monday to block sweeping cuts to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, arguing they are unconstitutional and endanger Americans.

The lawsuit specifically challenges Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s March 27 directive firing 10,000 full-time employees, consolidating 28 department divisions into 15 and shutting down five of 10 regional offices, including one in San Francisco. The moves have upended an array of crucial services, the states argue, including by closing laboratories monitoring the nation’s current measles outbreak.

The lawsuit — brought by California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta and the attorneys general of 18 other states and the District of Columbia — argues the cuts are “arbitrary and capricious” and unconstitutional, violating the Administrative Procedure Act and going “beyond the scope of presidential power” by usurping the authority of Congress to appropriate funding toward certain government services, Bonta’s office said.

“The Trump Administration does not have the power to incapacitate a department that Congress created, nor can it decline to spend funds that were appropriated by Congress for that department,” Bonta said in a statement. “That’s why my fellow attorneys general and I are taking the Trump Administration to court — HHS is under attack, and we won’t stand for it.”

The lawsuit asks the courts to declare the cuts illegal, block or reverse their implementation and undo the firings, Bonta’s office said. It was one of two lawsuits filed by Bonta’s office against the Trump administration Monday — the second challenging new federal restrictions on wind energy.

A Health and Human Services spokesperson defended the agency’s actions Monday, saying they have been carried out in accordance with the law and other federal employee protections.

Health and Human Services previously characterized the changes as a “dramatic restructuring” of the agency in line with an executive order by President Trump in February that tasked advisor Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency with “eliminating waste, bloat, and insularity” in the federal workforce, including through mass firings.

Health and Human Services said the overhaul also would help it focus on Kennedy’s priorities of “ending America’s epidemic of chronic illness by focusing on safe, wholesome food, clean water, and the elimination of environmental toxins.”

“We aren’t just reducing bureaucratic sprawl. We are realigning the organization with its core mission and our new priorities in reversing the chronic disease epidemic,” Kennedy said in a statement. “This Department will do more — a lot more — at a lower cost to the taxpayer.”

Kennedy said that “bureaucracies like HHS become wasteful and inefficient” over time, “even when most of their staff are dedicated and competent civil servants,” and that the overhaul would “be a win-win for taxpayers and for those that HHS serves.”

“That’s the entire American public, because our goal is to Make America Healthy Again,” he said, repeating a slogan the Trump campaign took up after Kennedy suspended his own presidential bid to back Trump in August.

Kennedy was confirmed by the Senate as Health and Human Services secretary in February amid sharp criticism from Democrats, who lambasted the eccentric scion of the politically storied Kennedy family as an antivaccine conspiracy theorist who for years has spread dangerous, unscientific beliefs about a host of health issues and viruses, including HIV and COVID-19.

Kennedy has continued to cause alarm since, including through his handling of the nation’s measles outbreak, which in recent months has swept through large parts of the Southwest where vaccination rates have lagged.

Rather than push for greater vaccination, which has proved highly effective and safe, Kennedy has directed his department to look for new treatment options. Scientists have derided the move as a foolish and likely ineffective diversion of resources in the face of a serious and deadly threat — and one that is unnecessary, given the effectiveness of the measles vaccine.

In their lawsuit, the states refer to Kennedy’s “history of spinning conspiracy theories” and advocating for the dismantling of Health and Human Services, Bonta’s office said. Already, his directive downsizing the agency is causing harm, crippling support for programs such as Head Start, ending production of N95 masks and shutting down laboratories that monitor infectious diseases such as measles, Bonta’s office said.

The Associated Press has reported that cuts under Kennedy appear to have eliminated more than a dozen data-gathering programs that tracked deaths and diseases across the nation.

Congress provided Health and Human Services with a budget of $1.8 trillion in 2024 and has passed various laws that outline its mission, Bonta’s office said.

Including departures from an earlier buyout, the department has lost about 20,000 of its 82,000 employees since the start of the Trump administration, Bonta’s office said.

The states argue in their lawsuit that Health and Human Services fell into disarray after termination notices went out April 1, thousands of employees were “immediately expelled from their work email, laptops, and offices,” and work across the department “came to a sudden halt.”

“Throughout HHS, critical offices were left unable to perform statutory functions. There was no one to answer the phone, factories went into shutdown mode, experiments were abandoned, trainings were cancelled, site visits were postponed, application portals were closed, laboratories stopped testing for infectious diseases such as hepatitis, and partnerships were immediately suspended,” the states say.

Joining Bonta in the lawsuit are the attorneys general of Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, the District of Columbia, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Washington and Wisconsin.

The lawsuit was the 17th filed by Bonta’s office against the Trump administration. The 18th came Monday too as California joined 16 other states and the District of Columbia in suing the administration over its halting of federal approvals for offshore and onshore wind energy projects — a move that the states argue violates the Administrative Procedure Act and their right to pursue clean energy sources.

California has separately sued the Trump administration over Centers for Disease Control and Prevention plans to cut billions of dollars in federal public health grants aimed at increasing state resilience to infectious disease, based on similar arguments about the administration overreaching its authority to contradict decisions by Congress on federal spending.

California leaders also have raised concerns about the planned closure of the Health and Human Services office in San Francisco. Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) said the move was “shortsighted” and would have “detrimental impacts to our public health response capabilities,” and that she was “examining all possible avenues to fight back” against the cuts.

May 5 (UPI) — Harvard won’t receive any new federal grants until it meets demands from the Trump administration, the Education Department said Monday.

The requirements were spelled in a letter by Education Secretary Linda McMahon to Harvard President Alan M. Garber.

The Trump administration earlier froze $2.2 billion in multi-year federal grants, and President Donald Trump wants to revoke the Ivy League school’s tax-exempt status if it doesn’t make the changes. Also, the Trump administration has threatened to not allow international students to attend.

An Education Department official told reporters on Monday that Harvard will receive no new federal grants, of more than $1 billion, until it “demonstrates responsible management of the university” and satisfies federal demands on a range of subjects.

“Those investigations would need to lead to resolution agreements that bring Harvard back into compliance with federal law. They could also open up a broader negotiation if they were interested in accelerating that,” the official said.

The unnamed person accused Harvard of “serious failures” in four areas: anti-Semitism, racial discrimination, abandonment of rigor and viewpoint diversity.

They include banning masks at campus protests, requiring merit-based hiring and admissions, and giving foreign students’ discipline records.

It does not apply to federal financial aid students to help cover tuition and fees, including Pell Grants. Tuition at Harvard, which has an enrollment of more than 21,000, was more than $56,000 this year and the total cost of attendance was almost $83,000, according to its financial aid website.

Harvard announced last month that families with incomes of $200,000 and less will not pay tuition.

Harvard sued the Trump administration on April 21 after rejecting a letter on April 11 outlining the demands.

The 51-page lawsuit, which was filed in federal court of its home state of Massachusetts, asks a judge to block the funding freeze, arguing it is “unlawful and beyond the government’s authority.”

“All told, the tradeoff put to Harvard and other universities is clear: Allow the Government to micromanage your academic institution or jeopardize the institution’s ability to pursue medical breakthroughs, scientific discoveries, and innovative solutions,” Harvard’s lawyers wrote.

Garber, in a letter addressed to the Harvard community with the lawsuit announcement, said the actions “have stark real-life consequences for patients, students, faculty, staff, researchers, and the standing of American higher education in the world.”

Harvard is the oldest higher education schools in the United States, founded in 1636.

The school’s endowment is valued at $53.2 billion, but it’s considered a long-term investment and not a slush fund.

The Trump administration also has paused funding at other private schools, including Columbia, Cornell, Brown and Northwestern.

President Trump said he plans to reopen the notorious Alcatraz prison to house the “most ruthless and violent” criminals on land that has been a Bay Area tourist attraction and national recreation area for decades.

Trump wrote on his Truth Social site Sunday that, “For too long, America has been plagued by vicious, violent, and repeat Criminal Offenders, the dregs of society, who will never contribute anything other than Misery and Suffering. When we were a more serious Nation, in times past, we did not hesitate to lock up the most dangerous criminals, and keep them far away from anyone they could harm. That’s the way it’s supposed to be.”

“That is why, today, I am directing the Bureau of Prisons, together with the Department of Justice, FBI, and Homeland Security, to reopen a substantially enlarged and rebuilt ALCATRAZ, to house America’s most ruthless and violent Offenders.”

Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office suggested Trump’s announcement was a ploy to draw attention away from his actions as president.

“Looks like it’s distraction day again in Washington, D.C.,” said Diana Crofts-Pelayo, a spokesperson for Newsom. “Trump is pledging to reopen Alcatraz as American consumers feel the financial pinch of his unpopular tariffs and he continues to tussle with the courts over mass deportations of immigrants.”

Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) said on the social media site X that “the President’s proposal is not a serious one.”

The history of Alcatraz Island as a detention center dates back to 1868 when the U.S. military created a disciplinary barrack on site. The famous prison building known as the Rock was built in 1912 and transferred to the Department of Justice in 1933 for use as a federal prison.

The prison closed in 1963, and Alcatraz Island is currently operated as a tourist site by the National Park Service. Visitors to the island learn about famous prisoners like Al Capone, escape attempts and the occupation by a group of Native American activists that lasted from 1969 to 1971.

John Martini, an Alcatraz historian, said the prison was closed in part because it was built with bad construction methods, was decaying and “would be such a money pit to bring it up to standards … that it was easier to build a new penitentiary.”

“It’s nowhere near what you’d consider to be modern standards for housing incarcerated people,” he said, adding it would be challenging to reopen it as a prison.

Last year, the National Park Service awarded a nearly $50-million contract to “address deterioration and structural deficiencies associated with the Alcatraz Main Prison Building,” according to a news release.

The contractor, Tutor Perini Corp., said the work would include the “abatement of hazardous materials” and be substantially completed by summer 2027, so as to “provide a safe facility for the 1.4 million annual visitors.”

The order to return the island to a prison comes as Trump has been clashing with the courts as he tries to send accused gang members to a notorious prison in El Salvador without due process. Trump has also talked about wanting to send American citizens there and to other foreign prisons.

In Trump’s post Sunday, the president said “we will no longer be held hostage to criminals, thugs, and Judges that are afraid to do their job and allow us to remove criminals, who came into our Country illegally.”

In the United States, judges have the ability to rule whether a president has violated the law and at times have ruled Trump has overstepped his authority since returning to office.

State Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco) called the order “unhinged.” But he said that doesn’t mean he is dismissing what Trump said on social media.

“It’s an absurd idea,” Wiener said in an interview Sunday evening. “But on the other hand, we’ve learned that when Donald Trump says something, he means it. … He specifically refers to the judges who won’t let him deport people without due process, so it looks like he wants to open a gulag here in the U.S.”

Martini, the historian, said the news took his breath away.

“It’s been preserved by the National Park Service to tell multiple stories, including incarceration, crime in America, rehabilitation and stories like the Native American takeover in 1969,” Martini said. “If this was to happen, what happens to all the history?”

Los Angeles Times reporter Melody Gutierrez and the Associated Press contributed to this report.

The question of who controls a small independent media outlet has roiled Los Angeles’ left for more than a year.

This week, the clash over Knock LA exploded into the legal system, with dueling lawsuits that allege copyright and trademark infringement, defamation and even theft of trade secrets.

In one corner is a group of prominent independent journalists, including Cerise Castle and Ben Camacho, who have built large public followings for tough reporting on local law enforcement.

On the opposing side stands Ground Game LA, a scrappy advocacy group whose ascent has been inextricably tied to the leftward shift in the city’s political power structure.

Ground Game LA formed Knock LA in 2017, billing the nonprofit community journalism project as “by and for Los Angeles progressives.” The publication flourished during the pandemic, as public health restrictions and protests over police reform put fresh focus on city government. Knock LA and its extremely online reporters helped channel that frenzy of attention into activism, with popular voter guides and live coverage of public meetings.

Amid a particularly fertile moment for local leftist politics, Ground Game LA also soared.

Meghan Choi, Ground Game LA’s co-founder and executive director, led Nithya Raman and Eunisses Hernandez’s insurgent City Council bids, helping them unseat incumbents. The group also rallied behind Councilmember Hugo Soto-Martínez and City Controller Kenneth Mejia’s successful campaigns in 2022.

But there were deep fissures between the organization’s leadership and some of the journalists who had become synonymous with Knock LA’s work.

Camacho and Castle charge that Ground Game LA has continued to profit off their work without authorization, even after blocking their access to the site, and are seeking nearly $5 million in damages. Ground Game LA argues that the journalists essentially tried to hijack the news outlet, taking its trademarked name, stealing its confidential mailing list and misrepresenting themselves as the outlet’s rightful leaders.

On Tuesday, Castle and Camacho filed a federal copyright infringement lawsuit against Ground Game as well as Liberty Hill Foundation and the California Endowment, two leading philanthropic groups that have provided it with financial backing.

Castle and Camacho said in their lawsuit that Ground Game and the nonprofits have “maliciously and systematically” exploited their copyrighted journalistic works “across multiple platforms.”

At issue is Castle’s 15-part series, “A Tradition of Violence,” on gangs of deputies within the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. The account of violent law enforcement cliques went viral when Castle published it on Knock LA in 2021, winning accolades and contributing to heightened scrutiny of the Sheriff’s Department.

Camacho, known for obtaining the photos, names and serial numbers of 9,000 LAPD officers, then publishing them and subsequently being targeted with two lawsuits from L.A. City Atty. Hydee Feldstein Soto, identified 23 images and articles that he said Ground Game had infringed upon.

The duo trace the infringement to March 2024, when Castle led an effort to separate Knock LA from Ground Game. The move, according to the suit, was prompted by reasons including “editorial overreach,” “demands for unpaid labor,” “racial discrimination” and “lack of support for Mr. Camacho” after Feldstein Soto’s office sued him.

Within weeks, Camacho and Castle contend, they were cut off from Knock LA’s email and other systems “in a deliberately hostile and retaliatory action.” They say the move kept their journalistic work captive and allowed Ground Game “to profit from their unauthorized use.” As independent journalists, both assert that they had retained the copyrights and never “executed any work-for-hire agreements” or transferred their intellectual property.

The pair accuse Ground Game of misappropriating their work to boost its fundraising and stature. By providing grant money and social media promotion, the California Endowment and Liberty Hill “materially contributed” to the infringement, the suit alleges. Both organizations declined to comment.

Castle and Camacho are seeking an injunction barring Ground Game from using their copyrighted works and an award of damages “totaling no less than $4,650,000,” among other demands.

“This lawsuit is about protecting years of investigative work that I developed independently, often under difficult and dangerous conditions,” Castle said in a statement. “No one should be allowed to take your work, take credit for your work, and use it to fundraise without consent. That’s not solidarity — it’s exploitation.”

On Wednesday, Ground Game countered with force, filing a federal lawsuit and exhibits spanning 119 pages that cast Camacho, Castle and two others as villains in a “scheme” to seize the reins of Knock LA, register it as their own company and unlawfully use its trademarks for their own offshoot site.

Ground Game’s suit also focuses on spring 2024, when Castle — Knock LA’s then-managing editor — along with Camacho, the photography editor, and Katja Schatte, the editor in chief, asked to separate from Ground Game and form their own new entity.

When Ground Game’s board rejected that proposal, the trio “began interfering” with Knock LA, and the parent organization shut down their Knock email accounts soon after.

The quarrel quickly spilled into public view. Castle, who is Black, accused Ground Game LA of racism, and a social media “toolkit” — complete with talking points, hashtags and draft posts — alleged that the nonprofit was holding the news outlet “hostage.” Other contributors joined with Castle, recording a video that accused Ground Game LA “of killing local journalism” and appealing to the public to stand with them.

Ground Game LA alleges that around that same time, the offshoot group took the organization’s confidential mailing list and sent multiple emails without permission, “representing themselves as the legitimate successors of Knock LA” and “misrepresenting” their separation from the broader group to divert donations.

The offshoot group used the contact list to “advertise, promote, and grow … their individual and personal interests,” according to the suit, calling such actions a “theft” of trade secrets.

Ground Game LA also accuses the offshoot group of hijacking Knock LA’s social media accounts and trying to lock the organization out of them, “including by changing the Two-Factor Authentication for Knock LA’s Instagram account, removing the administrator email on Knock LA’s Facebook account, and taking down multiple YouTube videos from Knock LA’s YouTube account.”

Their lawsuit seeks to prevent the offshoot group from using the mailing list or Knock LA trademarks and demands that they restore access to “blocked social media accounts.”

Knock LA continues to publish new material, and its website still prominently features Castle’s series on the Sheriff’s Department. But its Instagram and Twitter accounts have been dark for months.

Neither side directly responded to the allegations but both lamented that the acrimony had escalated to litigation.

“Our folks worked very hard and did everything that they could to prevent it from getting to this place,” Choi, Ground Game LA’s executive director, said of the dueling lawsuits. “Fundamentally, this is just about somebody trying to hijack our project and our identity.”

Camacho, in a statement shared by his attorney Almuhtada Smith, emphasized the sacrifice of “time, risk and dedication” that went into his photography and writing — and that now motivates his and Castle’s fight.

“We didn’t want to take legal action, but our efforts to resolve this privately were ignored,” Camacho said in the statement. “No creator — especially those from historically excluded communities — should be expected to let others profit off their work without permission or credit.”

May 2 (UPI) — Federal officials are proposing to roughly triple the number of hunting opportunities across the National Wildlife Refuge System and National Fish Hatchery System, the U.S. Department of the Interior confirmed Friday.

The proposal would see 42 new hunting opportunities across more than 87,000 acres within the department’s systems, including the first-ever sanctioned hunting opportunity in the newly established Southern Maryland Woodlands National Wildlife Refuge.

Opportunities will expand in 16 National Wildlife Refuge System stations and one National Fish Hatchery System station in 11 states. The system is made up of 573 national wildlife refuges and 38 wetland management districts.

The proposal would amount to more than tripling the number of hunting opportunities under President Donald Trump‘s administration. It would also more than quadruple the number of fishing stations, the department said in a statement Friday.

“Expanding recreational access to our public lands isn’t just about tradition — it’s about supporting rural economies and the American families who depend on them,” Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum said in the department’s statement.

“By opening more areas to hunting and outdoor recreation, we’re helping drive tourism, create jobs, and generate revenue for local communities, all while promoting responsible stewardship of our natural resources.”

The proposal will see expanded hunting opportunities at National Wildlife Refuge System stations in Alabama, California, Idaho, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Montana, North Carolina, Texas and Washington.

Among the new opportunities is the first time sport fishing will be offered at the North Attleboro National Fish Hatchery in Massachusetts.

The department says it is making the changes to grow interest in outdoor activities, which collectively generated more than $394 billion worth of economic expenditures in the United States in 2022. Hunting and fishing specifically accounted for over $144 billion of that total, according to the National Survey of Fishing, Hunting and Wildlife-Associated Recreation.

Federal officials say they are working in harmony with their state-level counterparts to facilitate the new proposal. In Minnesota, the department is proposing an end to an experimental five-day early opening of the hunting season for the American teal, a common duck, at the request of the state and White Earth Nation.

“Hunting and fishing are traditional recreational activities deeply rooted in America’s heritage. National wildlife refuges, national fish hatcheries and other Service lands offer hunting and fishing access that helps boost local economies and gives Americans an opportunity to unplug,” Fish and Wildlife Service Acting Director Paul Souza said in the department’s statement.

“We are pleased to expand access and offer new opportunities that are compatible with our conservation mission and are committed to responsibly managing these areas for the benefit of future generations.”

Four years ago, Los Angeles City Councilmember Monica Rodriguez stood on the steps of City Hall and celebrated the creation of the Youth Development Department.

She had pushed since 2018 for the department, which oversees programs for young people, including a Youth Council to educate them about city government.

On Tuesday, with the city deep in a budget crisis, Rodriguez pleaded for Mayor Karen Bass not to get rid of the department.

In her proposed budget for the upcoming fiscal year, Bass suggested that the city fold the Youth Development Department — along with the Department of Aging and the Economic and Workforce Development Department — into the larger Community Investment for Families Department.

The Youth Development Department would no longer exist, though some of its functions would be preserved. Under Bass’ proposal, the budget dedicated to those functions would decrease from $2.3 million to less than $1.6 million. Eight employees would be laid off, with 10 remaining.

“Don’t undermine and wipe away all those years of work,” Rodriguez said at a news conference at City Hall on Wednesday.

She called the mayor’s proposed budget “a hatchet to so many programs that Angelenos rely on” and said there was no “rhyme or reason” to some of the suggested cuts.

Matt Hale, the city’s deputy mayor of finance, innovation and operations, said the three departments being absorbed by the Community Investment for Families Department have responsibilities that sometimes overlap.

“Like most things in the city, we have divided them into silos, and people who come through our doors saying ‘I need help’ are then given a scavenger hunt to perform,” Hale said.

At a City Council budget committee meeting Tuesday, Hale said the consolidation would save $5 million and “result in better outcomes and more effective services.”

Bass spokesperson Zach Seidl said the mayor’s office is not considering reversing course on the consolidation.

Bass’ proposed budget, which is being considered by the budget committee in several weeks of hearings, attempts to close a $1-billion shortfall caused in large part by rising personnel costs, soaring legal payouts and a slowdown in the local economy. The mayor’s budget eliminates more than 2,700 city positions — about 1,650 of them through layoffs.

In addition to running the 30-member Youth Council, the Youth Development Department organizes the Youth Summit and the Youth Expo, annual events that help young people get jobs and internships. The department also is reviewing city programs to determine whether they are reaching youths and meeting youths’ needs.

If the cuts suggested by the mayor are made, the Youth Development Department would reach about 6,900 constituents, down from about 10,000 last year.

“To take [the department] away now would not just be a step backwards, it would be a betrayal of the youth … who deserve to be invested in, not ignored,” said Monica Rodriguez — no relation to the councilmember — who was a member of the inaugural Youth Council.

Councilmember Rodriguez said that instead of being consolidated, the department should grow, suggesting that the Gang Reduction and Youth Development program should come under its purview. The program, which provides gang intervention and prevention services and community engagement programs, is under the mayor’s office and has a proposed budget of nearly $40 million.

“The department doesn’t have to go away. The department can sustain itself,” the council member said. “This budget document needs to be a reflection of the values of this city and what’s being communicated at this time is young people’s voices are subordinate to other priorities — and that’s not OK.”

When Jim McDonnell took over as Los Angeles police chief late last year, he promised to take stock of the department within 90 days and start overhauling what needed fixing.

Nearly six months later, seemingly little has changed and there are growing questions about when — or even if — McDonnell will shake things up.

Complicating the chief’s situation is the possibility of losing more than 400 civilian workers to layoffs as city leaders scramble to close a $1-billion budget gap.

McDonnell addressed the delays in his reorganization plan during a City Council committee hearing Wednesday, saying that his original three-month timetable was set back by the January wildfires.

Now, the chief said, the challenges ahead are clear.

“I have an opportunity as we move forward with our senior leadership team to reevaluate based on what the budget ends up looking like,” he said, “and then to be able to streamline our operations to support our core functions, which is getting out there and answering radio calls for service.”

Council members are trying to figure out how to save positions on the chopping block, including by reducing overtime funds or even potentially slowing down the hiring of new police recruits.

Some have expressed concerns that patrol officers would be taken out of the field to backfill certain desk jobs. Roughly 130 positions — including crime scene photographers and analysts who process fingerprints and ballistic evidence — are not easily replaced, McDonnell warned.

“We know cops aren’t going to turn a wrench, and we need somebody to fix” broken-down squad cars, Councilmember Tim McOsker said.

Another council member, Eunisses Hernandez, requested more information from the department about whether the millions spent on its helicopter fleet was justified given the city’s financial straits.

Among other changes, McDonnell said he has considered updating the department’s so-called “basic car” plan, which divided the city into small geographical areas that are patrolled by a senior lead officer who is responsible for building ties with community representatives. The city has grown since the program was last studied, he said.

McDonnell on Wednesday repeated his promise to announce a departmental realignment after the completion of a study by Rand Corp., a global policy think tank brought in last year to conduct a top-down review. McDonnell told council members that the department had received some preliminary recommendations from the study, with a final version expected in the coming weeks.

The chief has also convened numerous working groups, which he has said will “reevaluate the way we’ve been doing business versus what we may look to do moving forward.”

Given the “very difficult financial times,” he said, it would be “very questionable” to plan for a future with “major increases” to the department’s size.

Connie Rice, a longtime civil rights attorney who has both sued the LAPD and advised past chiefs on reforms, said McDonnell shouldn’t have to wait for high-priced consultants to tell him what’s wrong with the department.

Among the challenges, she said, are the department’s “hollowed out” community policing program and long-standing issues with racism. She noted McDonnell has said little about how he intends to address allegations about a group of recruitment officers who were secretly recorded making derogatory comments about Black police applicants, women and LGBTQ+ co-workers.

“The LAPD is in a world of trouble, and the xenophobic comments are just the start,” Rice said.

Mario Munoz, a retired LAPD internal affairs lieutenant who now runs a firm that advocates on behalf of whistleblowers, said he has heard concerns within the department about McDonnell’s inaction.

“I don’t think [police officials] know what he’s looking for, because he hasn’t made his expectations clear,” Munoz said, adding that his sense is that even after the Rand audit there will not be major changes or “true reform of the system.”

With crime numbers continuing to trend downward, McDonnell has received public support from Mayor Karen Bass and the Los Angeles Police Protective League, the union that represents rank-and-file officers.

But a faction in the Command Officers Assn., which represents all officials above the rank of lieutenant, has pushed for the union to call a no-confidence vote against McDonnell, citing growing discontent over his performance so far.

Some of McDonnell’s backers point out that the chief took a similarly deliberative approach during his last two leadership stints, as chief of police in Long Beach and as Los Angeles County sheriff. Given the challenge of taking over a department as large and complex as the LAPD, it only makes sense that McDonnell should take his time, they say.

In a letter to Councilmember Katy Yaroslavsky ahead of his Wednesday presentation to the budget committee, McDonnell argued against eliminating hundreds of jobs and said that the staffing reductions could lead to the closure of three city jails.

“Tasks previously performed by civilian professionals may require staffing by sworn personnel, potentially impacting the number of officers that are available to deploy for protection and service to our communities,” the chief’s letter said.

Amplifying the uncertainty, McDonnell has yet to fill several captain and several commander vacancies, and he has not elevated any candidates from the lieutenant’s promotional list.

But he has made some personnel changes, including moving Deputy Chief Emada Tingirides from her longtime home base in South Bureau to Central Bureau. She was replaced by Deputy Chief Ruby Flores. He also ousted the civilian head of the department’s constitutional policing office, who had drawn the wrath of the police union.

Bernard Parks, a former chief who later served on the City Council, said McDonnell is in a tough spot amid the budget crunch and competing pressures from inside and outside the department.

Parks said he laid out his reorganization plan within weeks of being appointed chief in 1997, but he didn’t fault McDonnell for treading carefully.

“The key is if you have a plan, you should share it as best you can in its totality: We’re at Point A, and we’re trying to get to Point Z,” Parks said. “Stops and starts are the worst thing you can do with an organization because people lose interest quickly.”

Others have similarly preached patience for McDonnell.

Councilmember John Lee, who chairs the council’s public safety committee, said in an interview last month that the chief had privately shared some plans for the department, which centered on improving recruitment and retention of officers.

Lee said it’s “very natural” for some senior officials to worry about their fate under a new chief.

“There’s a lot of different concerns from everybody — it could be a captain whose commuting might change or somebody who’s established really good relationships with a community,” Lee said.

McDonnell may not be moving as quickly as some would like, Lee added, but “we have to put a little trust in him.”

Times staff writer David Zahniser contributed to this report.

Republicans and Democrats at the House Foreign Affairs Committee on Wednesday agreed on the need for reforms at the State Department but disagreed over Secretary of State Marco Rubio‘s plan to cut bureaus and staff focused on human rights.

Rubio last week announced sweeping reforms to the agency. In addition to gutting USAID, Rubio described plans to cut 132 bureaus, most of them pertaining to advancing human rights, women’s rights, protecting religious freedom and stabilization efforts.

Moreover, he called for a 15% decrease in the number of State Department domestic workers.

At a hearing Wednesday, titled “The Need for an Authorized States Department,” members of Congress disputed how the cuts would affect the ability of the United States to promote its values abroad and lead the world in human rights and humanitarian efforts.

Authorization bills allow Congress to exercise the power of the purse over federal departments, however, Congress has not passed an authorization bill for the State Department since 2002.

“The longer the Department of State goes without an authorization bill, the farther away it is from the will of the American people,” said one of the witnesses, former ambassador and former Under Secretary for Political Affairs David Hale.

Members from both parties expressed concern that without an authorization bill, the executive branch has conducted foreign policy without congressional approval.

Rep. Joaquin Castro, D-Texas, denounced Congress’s lack of oversight of foreign policy. “Right now, this committee, and this Congress are surrendering influence and control over our diplomacy to the President of the United States,” he said.

“We should debate how American tax dollars should and should not be used abroad,” said Chairman Brian Mast, R-Florida. He said the State Department spent $14 million on cash vouchers for immigrants at the southern border, $24,000 for a national spelling bee in Bosnia, and $20,000 for a drag show in Ecuador.

“President Trump, Secretary Rubio and DOGE are already making changes and they’re looking at us to be a partner in that process,” he said.

Rep. Gregory Meeks, D-N.Y., the top Democrat in the committee, criticized Rubio’s plans.

“What we’ve seen before us is not reform, it’s abandoning decades of bipartisan support for centering human rights and democracy in our foreign policy, without consultation, without engagement and without any regard for Congress’s constitutional role,” he said.

Republican representatives, however, said the State Department had become too bureaucratic. Between 2000 and 2024, the budget grew from $9.5 billion to $55 billion.

“The State Department has many duplicative missions but not a clear mission, a clear outline on how to go out there and affect the missions positively on behalf of the American people,” said Mast.

In particular, he criticized the lack of coordination and organization when the Biden administration withdrew troops from Afghanistan.

One of the major bureaus that would be cut is the Under Secretary of Civilian Security, Democracy and Human Rights. According to the Department of State website, this office “leads global diplomatic efforts to advance universal human rights, democratic renewal, and human-centered security.” Moreover, Rubio planned to cut the Secretary’s Office of Global Women’s Issues and the diversity, equity and inclusion office.

Representative Meeks pushed back against Marco Rubio’s reform plan and accused him of being compliant with President Donald Trump‘s wishes.

“There is no greater demonstration of this incredible cowardice in my opinion than that of Secretary Rubio, who knows this is wrong. But he would rather sit atop a kingdom of ash than defend the work he once praised,” said Meeks.

Members of the Committee also warned that foreign adversaries, such as the People’s Republic of China and Russia, would fill the gap if the United States pulled back from its role of promoting human rights abroad.

Uzra Zeya, CEO of Human Rights First, said these reforms would be detrimental to U.S. foreign policy. “The PRC is already filling that gap. We are seeing China increase its diplomatic spending by over 8% for 2025, over 6% last year and so again. To what end are we retreating from the field when our greatest geopolitical challenger is doubling down?” she asked the House Committee members.

Members of Congress passionately debated how the United States had recently been treating its allies and adversaries.

“So unfortunately, since his return to office in January, President Trump has chosen to attempt to overpower foreign partners rather than engage in strategic diplomacy, his administration claims their policy will bring bring safety, security and prosperity,” said Rep. Madeleine Dean, D-Pa. “But all that I’ve seen thus far is a reeling economy, weakened relationship with our allies and emboldened adversaries.”

When asked whether an authorization bill could actually pass Congress and whether Congress could have a say in how the Department of State operates, Dean answered, “We’re going to make sure that we have a say, that is our job.”

Long before the devastating fire in Pacific Palisades, leaders of the Los Angeles Fire Department’s labor union complained that the agency did not have enough money to keep the city safe.

“It’s a damn shame, and excuse my language, that it took this incident, the Pacific Palisades, to finally bring attention to our grossly understaffed, underfunded Fire Department,” Freddy Escobar, president of the United Firefighters of Los Angeles City, said at a city Fire Commission meeting in February.

Union leaders, along with top LAFD commanders, said budget cuts had resulted in a backlog of engines needing repairs and not enough mechanics to fix them. But even as they denounced those reductions, the union leaders secured four years of pay raises for the city’s 3,300 firefighters through negotiations with Mayor Karen Bass. And firefighters often make much more than their base pay, with about 30% of the LAFD’s payroll costs going to overtime.

That includes Escobar and other top union officers, who have for years been padding their paychecks with overtime while also collecting a five- to six-figure union stipend, a Times investigation found.

Escobar made about $540,000 in 2022, the most recent year for which records of both his city and union earnings are available. He more than doubled his base salary of $184,034 with overtime payouts that year, earning a total of more than $424,500 from the city in pay and benefits, payroll data show.

He collected an additional $115,962 stipend from the union, according to its most recent federal tax filing. He reported working 48 hours a week on union and related duties, while records provided by the city for that year show he picked up an average of roughly 30 hours of overtime a week — a total of about 78 hours of work each week.

After inquiries from The Times, the LAFD said this week that it has launched a “comprehensive review and overhaul” of its procedures for tracking the hours and reimbursement of those on leave for the union.

“The Department has recognized the need for significant improvements to its accounting and timekeeping processes related to union release time,” the agency said.

The overtime revelations come as the union, known as UFLAC, is facing scrutiny from its parent organization over its spending. The Washington D.C.-based International Assn. of Fire Fighters, which oversees local firefighter unions across the country, is conducting a wide-ranging audit of UFLAC’s finances, including the use of union credit cards by officers.

High overtime costs have long been a problem for the LAFD, whose around-the-clock staffing model depends heavily on employees taking on extra shifts. Many firefighters — who are typically scheduled for about 10 24-hour shifts a month, not including overtime — consider the option to boost their pay with extra hours at an increased rate an attractive feature of the job. But over the years, the LAFD’s reliance on overtime has generated concerns about fatigue, burnout and whether taxpayer dollars are being used effectively.

For many years, union leaders have warned the city that it needs to hire more firefighters to get overtime costs under control.

Zach Seidl, a spokesperson for Bass, said that overtime deployment is at the fire chief’s discretion and that the LAFD received $13.6 million this fiscal year to train three new classes of recruits. Seidl said that the LAFD union made salary increases one of its top priorities in contract negotiations but that Bass also secured $51 million for 10 fire engines, five trucks, 20 ambulances and other equipment. Bass’ proposed budget for 2025-26 includes 227 new LAFD positions, about half of them firefighters and including emergency medical technicians and mechanics, while some other city departments are slated for layoffs amid a nearly $1-billion budget shortfall.

Firefighters and fire captains last year made an average base salary of about $140,100, plus an average of $73,500 in overtime, according to the city’s payroll database.

Marc Bashoor, former chief of Prince George’s County Fire/EMS Department in Maryland, who teaches leadership to firefighters across the country, said vacancies create more vacancies, because “everybody gets psychologically and physically tired of working.”

“It becomes this deafening cycle. People get tired of working and start getting injured, calling in sick,” Bashoor said. “Overtime begets overtime.”

Under its contract with the city, the union can place several of its 10 board members on full-time leave from their LAFD jobs while they still collect their regular salaries. The LAFD said the board members on leave are allowed to pick up extra shifts on nights, weekends or holidays outside of their 40-hour union workweek, being paid overtime at 1.5 times their hourly rate. That’s the arrangement Escobar has as union president, a post he has held since 2018.

Escobar, who had the highest union stipend among the board members, also made the most in overtime in 2022, city and tax records show. The records show he made a total of $738,439 in overtime from 2018 through 2024. The LAFD said that overtime payouts include vacation time that is cashed out.

Freddy Escobar, head of the LAFD’s firefighters union, visits Fire Station 26.

(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)

Escobar is in his final two-year term as UFLAC president. He did not respond to questions from The Times, including which major emergencies he dealt with during his shifts and the length of his typical overtime shifts. He recently told a Times columnist that he picks up several shifts a month.

Records provided by the LAFD show that in 2022, Escobar took on an average of about nine overtime shifts a month. The shifts were typically overnight on weekdays, starting in the late afternoon and ranging from 12 to 16 hours. Some shifts, mostly on weekends, began in the morning and ran for 24 hours. For example, on one Sunday in January, he took a 24-hour shift starting at 8 a.m. For the next two days in a row, a Monday and a Tuesday, he took 14-hour overnight shifts starting at 6 p.m.

Including Escobar, UFLAC board members together made nearly $750,000 in overtime in 2022, while each collected a union stipend ranging from $67,000 to Escobar’s $115,962. All board members received a stipend, regardless of whether they were on leave, the tax records show.

In 2022, LAFD employees, including both firefighters and others, made $225 million in overtime. The Los Angeles Police Department, with more than triple the number of employees that year, spent about $214 million on overtime, records show. The city can be reimbursed by the state or federal government for some overtime work.

Former LAFD union secretary Adam Walker, who made almost $50,000 in overtime in 2022, said the department was dealing with a staffing shortage that year.

“The overtime was a mixture of mandatory overtime … and voluntary in order to do my part in assuring that resources stayed open to serve the city,” he said in an email. Even though Walker was on full-time leave from the LAFD in 2022, the union’s tax filing reported that he worked only 23 hours a week on union and related duties. Walker said that number appeared to be a typo.

“I haven’t worked less than 60 hours a week since I was 18 years old. Accordingly, during 2022, I reported to duty as scheduled, working 40 plus hours a week,” he said, referring to his full-time union schedule.

In an email last week, the LAFD attributed the high overtime costs to staffing fire stations around the clock, even when people are out sick or on vacation. In the past, LAFD officials have also pointed to staffing shortages and large-scale emergencies, including extreme weather and wildfires, as fueling the costs.

An audit in 2019 found that LAFD overtime costs climbed from nearly $166 million in fiscal year 2014-15 to almost $193 million in 2018-19 due to wage increases, even though overtime hours hovered around 3 million for each of those years. At the time, the city controller called for better oversight and regulation to improve staffing and protect employees from burnout, as well as to ensure that taxpayer dollars were spent effectively.

With roughly 3,300 uniformed firefighters and 106 fire stations, the LAFD responds to more than 500,000 calls a year, or an average of more than 1,300 a day. According to the LAFD’s strategic plan, 81% of calls in 2022 involved medical emergencies, and the rest involved fires or other unspecified incidents.

The department is staffed by three 24-hour shifts, known as platoons, with about 1,000 firefighters on duty at any given time. When firefighters call out sick or are on vacation, their shifts are either backfilled by employees working overtime, or the department places some engines, ambulances or other equipment out of service for the day.

Oshea Orchid, an attorney who represented more than 1,100 LAFD firefighters in a federal lawsuit alleging they were stiffed out of overtime for being expected to show up to their shifts early, said the city is not hiring enough firefighters to keep up with those retiring or leaving.

“Because they sleep and live there, they’re willing to work overtime,” she said. “When you have less staff, you just have huge overtime bills.”

She added: “There’s no question in my mind that with more workers, more budget, you have more engines running — you’d have better service.”

An agreement to settle Orchid’s case for $9.5 million is pending, court records show.

Last year, LAFD employees received 23% of the city’s total overtime payouts, which reached $1.1 billion, the city’s payroll database shows. The Department of Water and Power accumulated the most overtime pay: $426 million. About $262 million in overtime went to LAFD employees, while the LAPD paid out more than $265 million in overtime.

The city’s highest-paid employee last year was LAFD Battalion Chief Nicholas Ferrari, who racked up more than $644,000 in overtime, with total pay and benefits of more than $928,000, according to city data. About a dozen LAFD employees each made more than $300,000 in overtime.

Ferrari did not respond to a request for comment.

Firefighters battle the Palisades fire off Bollinger Drive in Pacific Palisades on Jan. 7.

(Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times)

In a December 2024 report, then-Fire Chief Kristin Crowley said a $7-million reduction to the overtime budget “severely limited the Department’s capacity to prepare for, train for, and respond to large-scale emergencies, including wildfires, earthquakes, hazardous material incidents, and large public events.”

But City Administrative Officer Matt Szabo told The Times in January that Fire Department overtime actually increased in this year’s budget by nearly $18 million.

The union’s parent organization, IAFF, is also examining the finances of UFLAC’s Fire Foundation, a charity for injured firefighters. That review resulted in the removal of Walker, the former UFLAC secretary, from his posts with both the labor union and the foundation board. The IAFF accused Walker of improperly depositing more than $75,000 of the charity’s funds into his personal accounts from December 2022 to January 2024, according to internal records reviewed by The Times.

Walker, who still works as a firefighter, disputed the allegations. He said the account he drew from was not for the charity but was set up for two golf tournaments to raise money for a disabled former firefighter. All of the deposits, he said, were reimbursements for his legitimate out-of-pocket expenses for the tournaments.

Separately, The Times found that UFLAC’s former treasurer, Domingo Albarran Jr., bought a union car at an alleged discount — and then reported an even lower sale price to the state to avoid paying taxes. Albarran, who has since retired, acknowledged that he underreported the sale price to the DMV because he did not want to pay taxes. But he said the price he paid was fair because the car was in poor condition.

Once the IAFF completes its financial audit, it will determine whether to place UFLAC under a conservatorship, which could result in the removal of officers, according to a person with knowledge of the investigation.

UFLAC has long been considered a political force in the city, with elected officials valuing its endorsements and financial contributions, although it backed the losing candidate in the last two mayoral elections with no incumbent running.

Union leaders also have fiercely backed Crowley, who was ousted by Bass over, in part, her handling of the Jan. 7 fire that leveled much of the Palisades and killed 12 people. Crowley and members of her executive staff blamed City Hall budget cuts for their inability to prevent or limit the scope of the destruction.

They said 40 fire engines — 1 in 5 of the LAFD’s fleet — were out of service when the blaze broke out because the Fire Department didn’t have enough money to fix or replace them. In an interview with a Fox 11 reporter, Crowley said the city of Los Angeles and its leaders had failed her and her department.

But The Times found that LAFD officials chose not to predeploy any engines in the Palisades amid extraordinary wind warnings, even though dozens were available. Bass cited the LAFD’s failure to keep 1,000 firefighters on duty for a second shift as one reason she ousted Crowley.

Bass and her team have also said that, once employee raises were factored in, the Fire Department budget actually grew this year.

“Chief Crowley had the guts and the courage to speak out,” Escobar said during a City Council hearing on whether to give Crowley her job back. “But her honesty cost her her job.”

Only two of 15 council members voted for Crowley’s reinstatement.

California’s two U.S. senators have joined with Democratic colleagues to demand answers from the Trump loyalist and Californian now heading the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, amid reports that she and other officials have pushed out senior leaders and imposed hard-right policies at odds with the department’s mission.

In a letter sent Friday to Assistant Atty. Gen. Harmeet Dhillon, seven senators — including Alex Padilla and Adam Schiff of California — cited reports that Dhillon had emailed directives changing long-standing enforcement goals to employees, including in sections that are “meant to protect voting rights, prevent discrimination by federal funding recipients, investigate illegal bias in housing, prohibit discrimination in education, and defend the rights of those with disabilities.”

Those directives “may well be inconsistent” with the intent of Congress when it passed legislation standing up the division, the senators wrote, and must be disclosed to them for review by Thursday.

The senators also referred to reports that multiple career lawyers and supervisors in the unit have left or been reassigned, that none remain in unit leadership, and that political appointees with no experience with such work are now fully in charge. Dhillon and other department leaders, the senators wrote, are further diminishing the unit’s experienced workforce through buyouts and other measures.

“These measures appear to be an attempt to cajole career officials at the Division to leave voluntarily in order to fundamentally transform its work,” the senators wrote. They demanded disclosure, also by Thursday, of “all personnel-related changes” in the division since Trump’s inauguration.

Dhillon, a San Francisco attorney, Republican Party insider and conservative pundit, declined to comment when asked by The Times about the senators’ letter.

However, in an interview with conservative podcast host Glenn Beck, Dhillon acknowledged being blunt with division attorneys about the expectation that they work to enforce Trump’s political agenda regardless of their own personal politics — which she said some did not like.

“We tell them, these are the president’s priorities, this is what we will be focusing on — you know, govern yourself accordingly,” she said. “And en masse, dozens and now over 100 attorneys decided that they’d rather not do what their job requires them to do.”

Dhillon said she is working to find replacement attorneys interested in enforcing the law, “not woke ideology.”

Beck called Dhillon the perfect person for the job, saying she was “a machine” and “tough as nails.” Civil rights organizations had criticized her appointment by President Trump and Senate confirmation this month to head the division.

In addition to their letter to Dhillon, the senators wrote separately to their colleague Sen. Eric Schmitt of Missouri, the Republican chair of the judiciary subcommittee on the Constitution, asking him to hold an oversight hearing “to update the Senate and the American public on these concerning developments.”

Schmitt, in a statement to The Times, said Tuesday that the American people “resoundingly rejected the left’s woke ideology” by electing Trump, and that he was “glad to see” that Dhillon was “wasting no time getting to work implementing President Trump’s agenda that focuses on enforcing the law instead of forcing radical policies down Americans’ throats.”

In their letter to Dhillon, the Democratic senators cited reporting from the New York Times, the Guardian and Bloomberg Law. In one article, the New York Times reported that Dhillon had directed division staff “to focus on enforcing edicts on transgender women in sports and other issues” important to the president, “shifting from its founding purpose of fighting race-based discrimination.”

The senators wrote that one of Dhillon’s new directives reportedly required the division’s voting rights section to give priority to investigating election fraud, “despite overwhelming evidence” that it “is a rare occurrence.”

A second directive “purportedly” required staff to investigate recipients of federal funds for “discrimination to the President’s agenda, which could lead to attempts to punish state, local, and private institutions who disagree with the administration’s culture war agenda,” the senators wrote. A third “evidently directs investigations of educational institutions to focus on racial discrimination against white applicants,” they added.

The lawmakers’ concern over such changes adds to broader alarm among Democrats, civil rights organizations and legal experts that Trump is turning the Justice Department into an enforcement arm for his conservative politics and executive policies — and one that is loyal to him, rather than to the rule of law or the legislative directives of Congress.

Democrats including Schiff and Padilla raised serious concerns with the appointments of Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi and Dhillon, both of whom had represented Trump in the past. The senators questioned both women’s independence and willingness to split with Trump if the law required it.

Like Bondi, Dhillon has pushed Trump’s lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him. She has also been a cultural crusader against “woke” politics as a prominent member of California’s Republican Party for years.

Before her Justice Department appointment, Dhillon made a name for herself in California by challenging COVID-19 restrictions and voting rights initiatives, and by attacking California laws meant to protect transgender youths. In addition to Trump, she has represented California teen Chloe Cole, who is a prominent voice in the “detransition” movement, and Kari Lake, the failed Arizona gubernatorial candidate whom Trump named a special advisor to the U.S. Agency for Global Media.

Dhillon founded the conservative legal group Center for American Liberty, which claims there is “a coordinated assault on our civil liberties from corporations, politicians, socialist revolutionaries, and inept or biased government officials,” in 2018, and saw her star quickly rise in Republican circles as a result — with fans touting her as a rare champion for conservatives being victimized by liberal California policies.

Mark Trammell, the center’s chief executive, praised her selection by Trump for the civil rights post, and upon her confirmation said she was a “brilliant attorney, a fierce advocate for civil liberties, and is principled to the core.”

After her swearing in, the Justice Department said Dhillon would “bring experiences and perspectives to the DOJ unlike anyone before her.”

Others warned that Dhillon would ignore the division’s long-standing principles and recast it in her own image by focusing on ways to limit rights instead of protect them — especially for vulnerable groups such as transgender people.

The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, a coalition of hundreds of civil rights organizations nationwide, denounced her confirmation, saying she was “not a civil rights lawyer” and had “no business” leading the federal division.

“This confirmation is insulting, and it should alarm everyone that an election denier is now in charge of enforcing the Voting Rights Act, that an anti-LGBTQ+ activist is now tasked with protecting the civil rights of LGBTQ+ people in America, and that yet another one of Trump’s personal lawyers is now in a leadership role at the nation’s signature agency for the enforcement of our federal civil rights laws,” the group wrote.

Vanita Gupta, who served as director of the Civil Rights Division during the Obama administration, said in a statement to The Times that Dhillon’s moves to date as head of the division — and the departures they have spurred among career lawyers — are cause for alarm.

“This is not simply a change in enforcement priorities that comes with a change in administration — the division has been turned on its head and is now being used as a weapon against the very communities it was established to protect,” Gupta said. “The mass exodus that this has triggered is unprecedented and also understandable.”

Times staff writer Seema Mehta contributed to this report.

At a hearing in Boston in March, U.S. District Judge Myong J. Joun asked attorneys for a coalition of states what they stood to lose if he didn’t immediately intervene to block hundreds of millions of dollars in Trump administration cuts to teacher training programs nationwide.

“Your Honor, the situation is dire,” California Deputy Atty. Gen. Laura Faer responded. “Right now, as we speak, our programs across the state are facing the possibility of closure and dissolution and termination.”

Joun quickly issued a temporary restraining order blocking the cuts as “arbitrary and capricious,” a victory for the states. But less than a month later, the Supreme Court reversed that decision, finding the states had failed to refute an administration claim that it would be “unlikely to recover” the funds if they were disbursed amid the litigation.

It was a loss for the state, but not the end of the fight over the teacher training. It was also just one of many ongoing court battles in a much larger legal war being waged against the Trump administration by California and its allies.

During President Trump’s first 100 days in office, California has on average challenged the administration in court more than twice a week, according to an analysis by The Times. It has filed 15 lawsuits against the administration, all but one alongside other states, and filed briefs in support of other litigants suing the federal government in at least 18 additional cases.

Attorneys in California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta’s office have been working at a blistering pace to draft and file complex legal arguments opposing Trump’s policies on immigration, the economy, tariffs, LGBTQ+ rights, federal employee layoffs, government oversight, the allocation of federal funding to states and localities, the limits of the president’s executive authority and the slash-and-burn budgetary tactics of his billionaire advisor Elon Musk.

Along the way, the state has won victories that have slowed Trump’s agenda and could block some of his policies permanently. It has won multiple temporary restraining orders and preliminary injunctions blocking Trump policy measures, including a sweeping freeze of trillions of dollars in federal funding that Congress had already allocated to the states, and a Trump executive order to end birthright citizenship for the U.S.-born children of certain immigrants.

California also has suffered losses in court, with judges in some instances allowing administration policies to take hold while the state argues for their ultimate reversal. Higher courts have reversed a couple of restraining orders sought by the state and granted by district court judges, including the one on teacher preparation grants and another that had halted Trump’s mass firing of federal probationary employees.

The state also was denied an emergency order to block Musk’s exercise of sweeping power over the federal budget.

Bonta acknowledged the setbacks but noted they denied emergency relief only — without reaching any final conclusions about the underlying legality of the administration’s actions or the merits of the state’s challenges to them.

“We have not lost any case substantively at this point, and we’ve had major successes,” Bonta said.

What’s being litigated

All of the state’s lawsuits remain active, each at a different stage depending on when they were filed and how fast judges have responded.

California filed its first lawsuit, over Trump’s order to rescind birthright citizenship, on Jan. 21, the day after Trump was inaugurated. It argued the order is in clear violation of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, which states that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.”

Other groups sued on the same grounds, and three federal judges have issued orders striking down the policy nationwide as unconstitutional. The Trump administration has appealed the rulings, arguing district judges should not be able to issue nationwide orders, and the Supreme Court is set to hear arguments on May 15.

It is unclear whether the high court will rule on the constitutionality of Trump’s order, or simply on the national authority of district judges. Either way, Bonta said he is bullish on winning in the end.

California and its allies secured early wins, too, with their second lawsuit, challenging an Office of Management and Budget memo freezing trillions of dollars in federal funding pending a Trump administration review of whether the spending aligned with the president’s agenda.

Federal judges have blocked the freeze and repeatedly ordered the release of funding. The Trump administration has said it is complying with those orders — including as recently as last week, when the administration filed a “notice of compliance” with a court order to release Federal Emergency Management Agency funding that Bonta’s office argued was being withheld in violation of the court’s orders.

California also won a court order blocking employees from Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency from accessing sensitive Treasury Department data, though that order has since been modified to allow one specific DOGE employee to access such data.

And it won a permanent injunction to block sweeping cuts to National Institutes of Health funding for research at institutions across the country, though the administration has said it will appeal the ruling.

Judges are in the midst of reviewing briefings from California and the Trump administration in multiple other lawsuits, including claims by the state that emergency relief is needed and claims by the administration that the lawsuits lack merit.

Those include lawsuits in which the state is challenging mass firings at the Department of Education, billions in cuts to health and education funding, a Trump executive order requiring voters show proof of citizenship and restricting mail ballots, and Trump’s sweeping tariffs against foreign trading partners.

In the voting case, the court is considering whether California’s lawsuit, brought with other states in Massachusetts, should be consolidated with similar lawsuits brought in the District of Columbia, where judges have already blocked parts of Trump’s order. In the tariff case, which Bonta brought with Gov. Gavin Newsom, the court is considering a Trump administration request to transfer the proceedings to the U.S. Court of International Trade.

California’s latest lawsuit, challenging the Trump administration’s threat to revoke federal funding from schools with diversity, equity and inclusion programs, was just filed Friday.

California also has backed other litigants challenging the Trump administration.

Through what are known as amicus briefs, the state has questioned the legality of the Trump administration’s ban on transgender people serving in the military, threats to providers of gender-affirming medical care for transgender youths, suspension of refugee services, dismantling of asylum protections, rescinding of temporary protected status for Venezuelan and Haitian immigrants, and politically motivated revocations of student visas.

It also has questioned the administration’s dismantling of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, removal of members of the National Labor Relations Board and the Federal Trade Commission, and attacks on several law firms whose legal work had riled the president.

Judges have paused several of those policies as a result of the litigation — including the ban on transgender service members, which Trump has now asked the Supreme Court to take up.

The broader stakes

The mountain of litigation continues California’s leading resistance role during Trump’s first administration, which involved some 120 lawsuits over four years. The White House and other supporters of the president have sharply criticized the latest lawsuits as just more of the same from California liberals, who they allege are harming their own constituents by refusing to respect the will of voters who elected Trump.

“In recent years, California dreams have transformed into California nightmares of skyrocketing crime and dystopian scenes of homelessness and open-air drug use,” White House spokesman Kush Desai said in a statement to The Times. “The Trump administration is trying to restore American Greatness, and if California Democrats would work with us — or at least not waste taxpayer resources to grandstand in the way — the people of California would be infinitely better off.”

A U.S. Department of Justice spokesperson said the DOJ “will continue to fight in court to defend President Trump’s agenda no matter how many frivolous lawsuits are filed.”

Bonta and other critics of the president see it differently. They noted the state won often in suing the first Trump administration, and said they expect it to win many of its current cases, too.

They said the challenges are coming at a faster pace this term because Trump is brazenly violating the law at a breakneck speed, with major implications for American democracy.

“We don’t take him to court if he’s doing something that’s lawful,” Bonta said.

Michael Sozan, a senior fellow at the liberal Center for American Progress, recently co-authored a lengthy report accusing Trump of “smashing constitutional and legal guardrails to build an authoritarian presidency.” The report cited many of the same Trump administration steps that California has sued over.

Sozan said states such as California are “acting as a very important bulwark against the new imperial presidency,” and that Bonta and other state attorneys general “are going to play a key role in the months ahead,” too, as Trump “tries to test the boundaries of the law and of court precedent and of democracy.”

Bonta said if Trump and other officials in his administration “keep breaking the law,” California will respond “every time.”

“We’ve got a full tank of gas,” he said. “We’re ready to go.”