The Supreme Court has rejected President Donald Trump's bid to restrict mail ballots for the midterm elections, capping a flurry of last-minute legal action with voting already underway. The decision allows states to continue sending out mail ballots under the same processes they've used for years. Nearly a third of U.S. voters cast their ballots by mail. Trump slammed the justices in a lengthy social media post, saying "these are not the people I interviewed."
A federal whistleblower says a last-ditch Trump administration effort to hunt for noncitizen voters ahead of November's elections is requiring federal employees to misrepresent themselves on voter lookup tools in a way that likely violates state laws.
And the Federal Reserve is widely expected to lift its short-term interest rate Wednesday for the first time in three years to fight stubbornly high inflation, despite Trump's lobbying for a cut.
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Trump slams Supreme Court for rejecting his push to restrict mail ballots
“The Court’s inability and unwillingness to do the right thing for our Country will go down, in a very negative way, in the annals of History,” Trump wrote in a lengthy social media post Tuesday. “This Supreme Court is bullied and cajoled by the Radical Left into making decisions that have set America back at least a hundred years.”
Justices Neil Gorsuch, Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh were all nominated by Trump in his first term but ruled against him in Monday’s decision.
“These are not the people I interviewed to serve on the United States Supreme Court, they are merely a shell of their original selves,” Trump said, continuing that the court “is costing the United States Trillions of Dollars with shockingly bad rulings that are of such magnitude that it won’t be easily possible for our Country to recover or heal.”
Uncertainty over Trump’s order was acute in 8 states that rely on mail voting
Voters cast ballots almost entirely by mail in California, Colorado, Hawaii, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, Vermont and Washington, which lack extensive networks of polling places.
“This provides voters and elections officials with the certainty they need ahead of a major, federal election, and it sends a clear message to this country: Presidents don’t run elections, the people do,” said Oregon Secretary of State Tobias Read, a Democrat.
Nevada Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar said his reaction to the Supreme Court’s decision is “one of relief, but also excitement, because today the voters really won across America.”
More than half the voters in Nevada’s June primary cast ballots by mail, and the Democrat said “some of the damage has already been done” with false claims affecting people’s confidence in voting by mail.
“You can trust the process,” Aguilar urged voters. “Please participate.”
FBI Director Kash Patel returns to Capitol Hill
Patel is appearing at an oversight hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee.
The Republican-led panel is likely to try to keep the focus on Patel’s efforts to combat violent crime, counter drug trafficking and pursue the Trump administration’s agenda from his perch at the nation’s premier federal law enforcement agency.
But Democrats will almost certainly seize on the tumult inside the bureau over the last year. The FBI has seen sweeping firings of agents who participated in investigations into Trump, efforts by the bureau to investigate Trump’s perceived political adversaries and Patel’s travel schedule that has blended private leisure with professional responsibilities.
Supreme Court lifts a cloud over midterm elections
The U.S. Supreme Court has lifted much of the uncertainty over preparations for November's elections by rejecting Trump's push to have the U.S. Postal Service play a central role in deciding who would gets a mail ballot.
The decision late Monday is a win for the status quo — thousands of election offices around the country can send out mail ballots as intended without worrying about complying with 11th-hour Postal Service rules.
“Now, we can finally move forward and get back to what we do best: conducting our elections without a dark cloud hanging over us — fairly, openly, for the people, by the people,” California Secretary of State Shirley Weber, a Democrat who oversees voting in a state where all voters receive a mail ballot, said in a statement.
“Utahns can have confidence that the 2026 election will proceed as normal,” said Utah Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson, a Republican serving as the state’s chief election officer.
Mail voting fraud happens about four times for every 10 million ballots cast, study found
Trump hasn't immediately commented on the Supreme Court's rejection of his efforts to restrict voting by mail.
Trump has consistently promoted his executive order as vital to ensuring election integrity even though there is virtually no evidence of fraud with mail ballots.
A report by the Brookings Institution published in 2025 found that mail voting fraud occurred in only 0.000043% of total mail ballots cast.
US acknowledges for the first time that it has deployed weapons in space
Air Force Secretary Troy Meink told the Air and Space Cyber Conference in Maryland on Monday that the U.S. has fielded “on-orbit space control weapons capable of defending the Joint Force against hostile adversary action.”
He didn't say what the weapons are or how they work. In 2024 the U.S. said Russia was developing a new anti-satellite weapon that could be launched from space. At the time the White House said the danger wasn't imminent, but it raised concerns about threats to U.S. infrastructure that depends on satellite communications.
Meink, who has overseen the Space Force, predicted the service would look "radically different" by 2032 — for example, with one-way attack drones replacing artillery as the "primary killer."
“We are increasing readiness against existing threats,” he said.
Tech CEOs call for AI regulation. Trump and Congress are not rushing to act
The technology industry's increasingly urgent warnings about the potential harm of artificial intelligence are slamming into political intransigence in Washington, offering a fresh test of the federal government's willingness and ability to confront what may become a defining issue of the era.
Trump is leading the opposition to recent calls by tech leaders seeking greater government oversight.
The president dismissed efforts to limit the technology on Monday as a “conspiracy.” House Speaker Mike Johnson has largely deferred to the White House.
Democrats, meanwhile, are pressing for a more robust response, convening in private on Tuesday in the House to discuss AI. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., is hosting his colleagues for a briefing with experts on Wednesday.
The contrasting responses illustrate a yawning disconnect emerging between a tech sector warning of AI’s existential threats to humanity and a federal government often struggling to accomplish basic functions under the weight of intense partisanship and election-year pressure.
DHS voter probe may break state laws and wrongly implicate US citizens, whistleblower alleges
A last-ditch Trump administration effort to hunt for noncitizen voters ahead of November's elections is requiring federal employees to misrepresent themselves on voter lookup tools in a way that likely violates state laws, according to a federal whistleblower's statement released Monday.
The Department of Homeland Security probe known as the “Unlawful Voter Initiative” also asks employees to create federal law enforcement records about voters based on unreliable data, the account warns. That could potentially wrongly implicate U.S. citizens in official documentation that could spur further investigation.
The anonymous, nearly 30-page disclosure was published Monday by Democratic Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York and Democratic Sen. Alex Padilla of California, the ranking member of a Senate committee overseeing federal elections.
Padilla and Schumer said Monday the initiative was an example of Trump attempting to interfere in elections and the short timelines would impede officials from conducting proper investigations. They noted that the data DHS has on voters can be unreliable and differ from state records, making any federal findings based on that data potentially problematic.
Federal Reserve is expected to raise its benchmark rate, defying Trump’s demands
The Federal Reserve is widely expected to lift its short-term interest rate Wednesday for the first time in three years to fight stubbornly high inflation, a move that would put the central bank at odds with President Donald Trump's support for a cut.
An increase in the Fed's rate, currently about 3.6%, isn't guaranteed because Fed Chair Kevin Warsh doesn't provide the signals about next moves that his predecessors did. Still, most analysts and economists expect a hike after a speech two weeks ago at the Fed's annual conference in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, in which Warsh argued that the Fed had not yet achieved its goal of putting inflation in check.
A rate hike would throw another sharp shift into a volatile period for the economy and financial markets. As recently as March, the Fed had forecast it would cut its rate once this year. But with the Iran war flaring up again and causing sharp increases in oil and gas prices, inflation is likely to remain higher than the Fed's 2% target for even longer.
Supreme Court rejects Trump mail ballot restrictions ahead of midterms
The Supreme Court on Monday rejected President Donald Trump's bid to restrict mail ballots for the midterm elections, capping a flurry of last-minute legal action with voting already underway.
The decision allows states to continue sending out mail ballots under the same processes they’ve used for years and have accounted for nearly a third of votes cast.
It represented a stark defeat for Trump on an issue he consistently has emphasized as vital to ensuring election integrity even though there is virtually no evidence of fraud with mail ballots.
The Supreme Court majority wrote that the administration’s push to implement the restrictions this year is likely to lose in court, though the brief emergency order didn’t detail its reasoning. Two justices, Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, publicly dissented.
The Trump administration had asked the justices, once again at the center of a roiling political controversy, to clear the way for restrictions before the pivotal November contests for control of Congress.
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