US politics

Voting rights groups, joined by 23 states and the District of Columbia, sued the administration to stop the proposed rule, arguing that the US constitution provides no authority for the president to issue orders governing the administration of elections.

A federal judge on Tuesday blocked ⁠the US Postal ⁠Service ​(USPS) from implementing part of Donald Trump’s executive order that aims ⁠to tighten rules for mail-in voting ahead of November midterm elections that ⁠will decide control of Congress.

The ruling by ​US district ‌judge Indira ‌Talwani in Boston in effect expanded on an ‌earlier order she had issued in June that had prevented Trump’s administration from implementing it in 23 mostly Democratic-led states.

In January 2025, Donald Trump delivered a death knell, ending DEI within the federal government with executive orders and threatening to target companies that still supported it. Companies including Google, Goldman Sachs, McDonald’s and Walmart that had embraced DEI years earlier fell into line and announced an end to their policies.

But new research published on Friday and shared exclusively with the Guardian found that companies that resisted the pressure and kept their DEI practices, including Costco, Apple and Delta Air Lines, performed just as well as their competitors who pulled back.

For the research, Jacob Grumbach, an associate professor at at the University of California at Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy, analyzed how S&P 500 companies fared after Trump’s January executive order. He used what economists define as “abnormal returns” – the difference between how a stock was expected to perform versus how it actually performed – to isolate the impact of a company’s DEI decision.

What he found was the firms that kept their DEI policies or voted down anti-DEI shareholder resolutions did just as well financially, even after Trump’s executive order, as firms that didn’t. In the days after the executive orders were signed, companies that kept their DEI policies actually performed better on the stock market than those that didn’t.

Sullivan’s decision follows a ruling by US district judge Indira Talwani last week, in which the NAACP had also challenged the executive order. Talwani blocked the administration’s plan for mail-in voting across 23 states and the District of Columbia, which sued the administration to stop the proposed rule. The latest order appears to extend this injunction nationwide, as it is meant to enforce an agreement that bound the postal service as an agency until 2028.

The Trump administration agreed on Monday to keep flying a rainbow Pride flag at the Stonewall national monument, reversing course after removing the banner in February.

The government revealed the decision as it seeks to settle a lawsuit filed by LGBTQ+ and historic preservation groups who had sought to block the removal. A judge must still approve the agreement.

“The one thing we can do is make sure the American people know what they’re doing in our name and with our tax dollars,” the congressman said. “We should do that because what they have pulled off here is a potential template for other betrayals of public trust that they and maybe future generations will attempt if we don’t challenge them.”

In June, the Trump administration abandoned an effort to try to halt all wind projects and leases across the US, giving up a challenge in court to a judge tossing Trump’s executive order to freeze all permitting and leasing for wind projects.

After his failure to appear at trial, Wilson found Byrne to be in default as a sanction for what the judge described as “repeated, intentional disobedience of court orders and unceasing efforts to delay proceedings”.

The judge on Friday wrote that “the evidence is clear and convincing that defendant has engaged in intentional misrepresentation with conscious disregard towards plaintiff’s rights” – and he awarded Biden $1 in nominal damages along with $1.7m in punitive damages.

Wilson also ordered Byrne to pay Biden about $35,000 in court sanctions.

Seven states sued the Trump administration on Tuesday over its decision to cancel a major offshore wind lease off the coast of New York.

In March, federal officials announced they would pay nearly $1bn in taxpayer dollars to French energy firm TotalEnergies in exchange for the company killing plans to erect two offshore windfarms off New York and North Carolina. TotalEnergies agreed to terminate the projects and pledged not to develop any new offshore wind projects in the United States, while investing hundreds of millions of dollars in oil and gas projects.

The deal was unlawful, says the lawsuit, led by Letitia James, New York’s attorney general.

“The Trump administration is once again trying to kill clean energy projects and destroy good-paying jobs for New Yorkers,” she said in a statement to the Guardian.

The administration’s agreement with TotalEnergies came after federal judges repeatedly struck down the president’s executive orders and stop-work directives which aimed to halt offshore wind development, ruling them unlawful and arbitrary.

Legal challenges to the fund and its addendum have been growing. A bipartisan group of 35 ex-federal judges on 27 May filed a motion appealing to a federal judge in Miami who oversaw Trump’s lawsuit against the IRS to reopen the case, and launch an inquiry to determine if Trump and DoJ’s unorthodox deal to settle the lawsuit involved fraud. The jurists’ charge that the settlement fund’s creation was a “fraud on the court”.

In an extraordinary turnaround on 29 May, the Miami judge reopened Trump’s lawsuit against the IRS to explore whether the court had been deceived by the parties involved including DoJ, and the deal was “premised on deception”.

Separately, responding to a lawsuit filed by a former January 6 prosecutor who the DoJ fired, plus other individuals and entities who say they have faced Trump administration attacks, a Virginia federal judge ruled on 29 May temporarily blocking further moves to set up the fund and fund dispersals until at least a hearing on 12 June.