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The Supreme Court on Monday temporarily reinstated a Food and Drug Administration rule allowing the abortion pill mifepristone to be prescribed via telemedicine and dispensed through the mail.  The order, by Justice Samuel Alito Jr., paused a ruling by the federal Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals that sought to block nationwide access to mifepristone by cutting […]

The Justice Department is running out of attorneys.The nation’s largest law office has repeatedly asked for delays in arguing its myriad cases, and in doing so has accidentally divulged a massive staffing crisis raging underneath the surface.In an obscure civil lawsuit dug up by independent journalist Scott MacFarlane, a Justice Department attorney revealed that “the Appellate Section has lost over 40 percent of its attorneys since February 2025, due to retirement, resignation, or temporary transfer.” “At this time, it is not possible for me to assign this case to yet another attorney, who would need to devote time to learning the issues,” she wrote in a filing dated February 19.The overwhelming stress inside the agency has seeped through the cracks in other ways, as well. In early February, a lawyer volunteering with the short-staffed office on ICE-related cases in Minnesota begged a judge to put her in contempt of court so that she could “get 24 hours of sleep.”“The system sucks, this job sucks, I am trying with every breath I have to get you what I need,” said attorney Julie Le when pressed as to why the government had failed to follow judicial orders. Since then, Le was removed from the temporary position and reshuffled back to ICE. She has since leveraged the notoriety of her remarks to launch a congressional bid for Minnesota’s 5th congressional district.The DOJ’s appellate staffs vary in size but altogether account for more than 150 positions, according to a 2012 write-up in Scotusblog by Al J. Daniel Jr., a former DOJ appellate attorney.Yet that’s just the tip of the iceberg for the department’s staffing woes. There were an estimated 10,000 attorneys working across the Justice Department before Donald Trump returned to the White House. By September 2025, that number had been nearly halved: Justice Connection, an advocacy group that tracks DOJ departures, estimated that around 5,500 people (not all of them attorneys) had left the department, either by their own volition, by accepting the Trump administration’s buyout, or by being fired.Just a fraction of those experienced employees have been replaced, causing a massive backlog of work. The immigration court system—which has been placed under tremendous pressure as a result of Trump’s aggressive deportation agenda—has been particularly hampered, experiencing a backlog of more than 3.3 million cases by the end of February 2026, according to data from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse. That means that the lives of more than three million people are effectively on pause as they await legal decisions that determine whether their future will be spent inside or outside of the United States.The Justice Department’s rightward shift toward the MAGA agenda has sparked concern inside the legal community, with former prosecutors and ethics directors arguing that the agency’s recent politicization has undermined public confidence in the country’s legal system.

Donald Trump is lying about the U.S. military’s escalating extrajudicial strikes on vessels in the Caribbean, according to a sweeping report from The Intercept published Monday. In late January, Trump claimed to reporters in the Oval Office that the Pentagon’s deadly strikes on boats suspected of carrying drugs from South America to the United States had successfully brought down the amount of “drugs entering our country by sea” by 97 percent. But the Pentagon’s own statements don’t support this outrageous claim, Rear Admiral William Baumgartner, the former commander of the Seventh Coast Guard District, told The Intercept.“He’s trying to imply that 97 percent of the cocaine that left South America by boat headed to the United States has been stopped,” Baumgartner said. “That’s not true and is contradicted by the administration’s own statements.” In March, Joseph Humire, a Pentagon official, told the House Armed Services Committee that there had been only a “20 percent reduction of movements of drug vessels in the Caribbean and an additional 25 percent reduction in the Eastern Pacific.” Humire also credited Operation Southern Spear with causing a 20 percent drop in drug overdose deaths as of September 2025—but the strikes on so-called drug boats didn’t start until September. “I can’t imagine how you could come to some of these conclusions regarding illegal smuggling and drug overdose deaths based on the facts as we know them,” Baumgartner told The Intercept.As the White House has continued to espouse the strikes’ value as a deterrent against trafficking, there is little evidence that vessels are actually being deterred. Last month, there were eight strikes in the span of 16 days, with five strikes occurring within as many days, according to The Intercept. Last month, the Coast Guard boasted a record-setting interdiction of cocaine seized in the Caribbean and the Pacific, suggesting that trafficking has not stopped. Baumgartner pointed to a recent offloading of 1.2 tons of cocaine by the U.S. Coast Guard, which claimed the haul was worth $19.3 million altogether. “This works out to be about a $16,500 per kilogram wholesale price. It doesn’t reflect the major jump in price that you would expect if you really had 97 percent reduction in flow,” Baumgartner said.It’s also worth noting that the House Armed Services Committee was explicitly told that vessels were not actually transporting fentanyl, according to Representative Sara Jacobs and five other government officials who spoke to The Intercept. “They had some convoluted reason why it was still impacting fentanyl that was hard to follow and I did not buy,” Jacobs told the outlet, before pointing out that statistics suggest that 99 percent of the drugs that enter the United States come through legal ports of entry, brought by U.S. citizens and permanent residents. Baumgartner also easily dismantled Trump’s outrageous claim about how many lives he’s saved: about 25,000 per boat, the president claimed. “The claim that sinking each cocaine smuggling boat saves 25,000 lives makes no sense,” said Baumgartner. “That would probably be more than the number of cocaine deaths in the last five decades combined.”

Last Tuesday, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT.) released a report showing just how intensely the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights has failed students. The report found that there were zero resolution agreements in 2025 “involving sexual harassment, sexual violence, seclusion or restraint, racial harassment, or discriminatory school discipline.” Overall, just one percent of complaints submitted […]

In an exclusive in-person interview, David Sirota grills Graham Platner on whether to engage the right or draw a hard line.

Duffy’s comments come as Trump has described complaints on affordability as a “line of bullshit.”