Free Republic

President Donald Trump’s second term had already brought misery to the nation’s 2.1 million civilian federal workers: unprecedented mass layoffs, strict return-to-office requirements and more red tape regulating everything from travel to printer paper. Now, with the government shut down, 750,000 federal staffers have been furloughed and many others are working without pay, even as Trump and his top lieutenants vow to put more federal jobs on the chopping block. “When did we become the enemy?” said one National Institutes of Health employee who, like other workers interviewed for this article, spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of...

Four Indian students were rejected for U.S. visas after undergoing a new Trump-era social media screening. All were told they had failed to prove ties to India. Kaushik Raj felt like his future was falling into place. He’d just won a $100,000 scholarship to pursue a graduate degree in journalism at Columbia University. A U.S. visa was the only thing that stood between him and a new life in New York. Raj, 27, wasn’t overly concerned. He had completed every stage of the traditional application process. As a last step, he had to allow American authorities to vet his “online...

Four top prosecutors have been forced out of the Eastern District of Virginia amid Trump’s push to charge political opponents.Lawyers inside the high-profile U.S. attorney’s office prosecuting former FBI director James B. Comey are unnerved by what they see as an unprecedented push by President Donald Trump to inject politics into their staffing and charging decisions, according to three people familiar with the matter, a strategy they say could jeopardize national security investigations. The Justice Department in recent days fired two longtime prosecutors who had risen to leadership positions within the U.S. attorney’s office for the Eastern District of Virginia,...

The Trump administration has telegraphed that mass firings are coming, but officials have cautioned that such moves could violate appropriations law.Senior federal officials have quietly counseled several agencies against firing employees while the government is shut down — as President Donald Trump has suggested he will — warning the strategy may violate appropriations law, according to two people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive internal deliberations. The officials cautioned that firings — known as RIFs, or reductions in force — could be vulnerable to legal challenges under statutes labor unions cited this...