Supreme Court lets Trump move forward with large-scale staff cuts for now | The Excerpt
On Wednesday’s episode of The Excerpt podcast: Paste BN Supreme Court Correspondent Maureen Groppe breaks down the high court's move to lift a federal judge's order pausing the Trump administration's large-scale staffing cuts. The death toll continues to rise in the aftermath of Texas flooding. Plus, Paste BN National Correspondent Dinah Voyles Pulver looks into the forecasting ahead of the storm and whether budget cuts played a role. The massive tax and spending bill is about to deal Harvard and other Ivy League schools a major blow. A Marco Rubio impersonator used AI voice to contact U.S. and foreign officials. Peter Jackson wants to help bring back an extinct New Zealand flightless bird.
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Taylor Wilson:
Good morning. I'm Taylor Wilson, and today is Wednesday, July 9th, 2025. This is Paste BN's The Excerpt. Today taking a look at a high court decision on Trump cuts. Plus, did officials get forecasting right last week ahead of Texas floods? And a group looks into bringing back an extinct New Zealand bird.
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The Supreme Court yesterday sided with the Trump administration for now when it comes to large scale staff cuts. I spoke with Paste BN's Supreme Court correspondent Maureen Groppe for more. Hello, Maureen.
Maureen Groppe:
Hello.
Taylor Wilson:
All right. So Maureen, what did the court decide here?
Maureen Groppe:
The court said that the administration can move ahead with its plans for large scale layoffs and restructuring at multiple federal agencies. It was a short opinion, which is common in these opinions which come from what's called the emergency dock at these quick appeals to the Supreme Court.
But the justices noted that they were not ruling on whether any specific plan for an agency is legal. They only said that the federal judge who had blocked the administration from moving forward in all cases should not have done so.
Taylor Wilson:
All right, and walk us through the arguments from the majority and the dissenting side on this, if you would.
Maureen Groppe:
Well, the underlying issue is whether the changes are so great that agencies can't function as Congress intended. Justice Sonia Sotomayor said she agreed to lift this judge's hold because the justices right now don't have a way of determining whether that's happening at each of the agencies. We only got one dissent; that was from another of the liberal justices, Ketanji Brown Jackson, and she said the district judge considered a lot of evidence that the judge determined, showed that the programs Congress set up are struggling because of the changes at agencies.
Taylor Wilson:
And Maureen, what had a US district Judge in San Francisco decided previously here?
Maureen Groppe:
She said that the changes that the administration wanted to make had to be paused while this litigation goes through the courts to determine if these actions are legal. She had said that the approximately 20 affected agencies don't appear to be able to function as Congress intended under what the administration wants to do.
And one example she gave was that Congress had established the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, but the administration wants to eliminate nearly all of its 222 employees. And the Social Security Administration, which was also established by Congress, has struggled to respond to social security recipients since the administration began cutting staff.
Taylor Wilson:
What did Lawyers for the unions and other challengers argue to the court?
Maureen Groppe:
They said it was important for the court to pause actions in the meantime while this litigation is going on, because it'll be too hard to restore the agencies even if their challenge is ultimately successful. The quote that they used to the Supreme Court was that there will be no way to unscramble that egg.
Taylor Wilson:
And did we get any response from the Trump administration after this move from the high court?
Maureen Groppe:
Yes. The Attorney General Pam Bondi, she praised the court's decision and she said that the justices had stopped lawless lower courts from restricting Trump's authority over the federal workforce. She said on social media that federal agencies can now become more efficient than ever.
Taylor Wilson:
Well, we expect the court to wind down for the summer. What's next for this case going forward?
Maureen Groppe:
Well, the court will continue to act on emergency appeals and in fact, we still have one pending, a related case about changes to one specific agency, the education department. So we're waiting to hear whether the Supreme Court says that the restructuring there, the pretty much elimination of that department in all but name only, can continue.
For these other federal agencies, the groups that are challenging the changes, they vow to keep fighting and so we're likely to see specific challenges to plans at specific agencies.
Taylor Wilson:
Maureen Groppe covers the Supreme Court for Paste BN. Thanks, Maureen.
Maureen Groppe:
Thanks for having me.
Taylor Wilson:
As of early this morning, we know of at least 109 deaths linked to last week's Texas floods and more than 180 people remain missing. That includes five girls and a camp counselor from Camp Mystic, which was ravaged by the storm, killing dozens of children there.
Gregg Abbott:
Texas is in this with the people. In the hill country right here we are not leaving until this job is finished.
Taylor Wilson:
That was Texas Governor Greg Abbott yesterday.
Among the tens of thousands of government employees impacted by the Supreme Court's ruling Maureen and I talked about are NOAA employees with the exclusion of an elite cohort of employees who are part of the Commissioned Officer Corps. But did cuts have anything to do with preparedness for floods last week? That's a more complicated question. I spoke with Paste BN National Correspondent Dinah Voyles Pulver for more.
Thank you, as always, for joining me, Dinah.
Dinah Voyles Pulver:
Happy to be here, Taylor.
Taylor Wilson:
So Dinah, what actually caused this storm system and the subsequent flooding? What do we know as of now? What did you hear from meteorologists?
Dinah Voyles Pulver:
One rephrase that they're all using a lot is perfect storm. It was just a circumstance where several things came together at once in the worst possible way. Tropical Storm Barry had made landfall a few days earlier in Texas. The moisture and some of the storms related to Barry were moving north into Texas.
Meanwhile, a few days earlier, there had also been this moisture from Flossie from the Pacific side that had moved into the region. There was a lot of moisture in the air and the one balloon launch they did, they had near record levels of moisture in the atmosphere. At the same time, there was a low level jet in the upper atmosphere that was also moving through.
And the terrain there where they are in that section of Texas, it slopes up, and something that they call an escarpment. When the land slopes up like that and a weather system comes across, it can provide the lift, and that lift creates instability that creates storms. So with the storms and the moisture in the environment, it just collaborated together to make this incredible rainfall.
Taylor Wilson:
Well, Dinah, this week a lot of folks are wondering what happened with the forecasting last week. How accurate were the forecasts ahead of these floods and do experts feel information was spread, I guess, quickly enough by officials?
Dinah Voyles Pulver:
Well, the people who are familiar with how the National Weather Service works feel very confident that the National Weather Service was doing what it could to get the information out there in time. They were warning. Two or three days ahead, they warned that there was going to be rain. The day before, on the 3rd, they were saying there could be flash flooding and there could be up to 5 to 7 inches of rain.
The rain was indeed in some places higher than 7 inches, but in some places it was lower. And that's one of the challenges for the National Weather Service is that they do not have the kind of models that can exactly predict exactly where a storm is going to fall. It's generally understood that if they say 5 to 7 inches of rain in an isolated location, then the rain could be even higher than that. They were putting out these forecasts and warning several counties that there could be flash flooding and that people should be aware.
And I think one of the biggest questions here going forward is going to be what exactly did the local officials do with the information they got from the National Weather Service? There's been some debate about when the warnings were issued, and some people say that they got warnings on their phone. Other people say, they were saying they didn't get warnings. So there's a lot of questions left to be answered yet about what they knew and when and how that information was disseminated to people. This is an issue that comes up again and again in our country after extreme rainfall events.
Taylor Wilson:
Well, you and I, Dinah, have talked right here on the show plenty about Trump administration cuts and their potential impact on weather forecasting and more in this area. Did weather service cuts have an impact here? What do we know as of now?
Dinah Voyles Pulver:
We do know that they called in extra people and the offices are short-staffed. They have several vacancies in the San Antonio, Austin National Weather Service Office. And those have come about because of the probationary layoffs and the incentivized retirements. Some of the experts I talked to expressed concern about the overall atmosphere in the weather service, with morale at maybe an all time low because of the numbers of positions that have been lost.
Taylor Wilson:
Dinah, should we be thinking about what happened last week as an isolated freak weather event or is this part of a broader climate conversation?
Dinah Voyles Pulver:
This is definitely part of the broader climate conversation. We have seen evidence in the NOAA records of an increase in the number of these sorts of extreme rainfall events. They may occur less often than they used to because we also have longer droughts, but when we do get these record rainfall events, they have more water.
We've seen this happen in Vermont. We saw this happen in Minnesota last summer. We've seen it happen in Tennessee and we've seen it happen in Kentucky. Anything that comes across the Gulf is pulling in more moisture because the Gulf is warmer. It's proven science that a warmer atmosphere holds more water. So when these systems come in off the Gulf over Texas, over Louisiana, they've got more water typically than they would have maybe 30 or 40 years ago.
And you see that reflected in many of the rainfall records. Many of the rainfall records in the entire arc from Texas to the Northeast reflect that their heaviest rainfalls have been in the last 30 years. And scientists definitely link that to the warming Gulf and warming temperatures overall.
Taylor Wilson:
Right. Another fascinating piece from you Dinah. Folks you should go check out the full version with the link in today's show notes. Dinah Voyles Pulver covers the climate and environment for Paste BN. Thank you, Dinah.
Dinah Voyles Pulver:
Thanks, Taylor.
Taylor Wilson:
President Donald Trump is expected to visit Texas on Friday.
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While Harvard University has become a favorite punching bag of President Trump. The massive tax and spending bill he signed last week is about to deal the school another blow. The law raised taxes on the endowments of the wealthiest colleges and universities in the US from 1.4% to as much as 8%. Harvard, which has already been cut off from billions in federal funding since Trump regained office, is one of a handful of school's hardest hit by the new tax burden. As a result of the policy shift, Harvard could potentially lose hundreds of millions of dollars a year. You can read more with a link in today's show notes.
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An imposter using an artificially generated voice impersonated Secretary of State Marco Rubio and contacted multiple foreign ministers and American politicians. A diplomatic cable sent last week from the department warned that the imposter contacted at least three foreign ministers, a US governor and a US member of Congress, The Washington Post first reported.
According to the post, the impersonator used an account on Signal to impersonate Rubio. The administration previously found itself in scandal for the use of Signal to share detailed secret plans for US strike on Iran-backed militants in Yemen by a group chat consisting of top administration officials that accidentally included The Atlantic Magazine's editor in chief.
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Film Director Peter Jackson wants to bring back a long extinct bird species in his native New Zealand. He's an investor in Colossal Laboratories and Biosciences, the private firm that recently brought back a modern day incarnation of the dire wolf and is working to de-extinct the wooly mammoth.
And the Lord of the Rings director told Paste BN he asked the group why they're not focused on the MOA. And they've now announced a new project to do just that. The giant flightless bird went extinct in New Zealand some 600 years ago. You can read more about what this project will entail and what the bird looked like with a link in today's show notes.
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And later today, President Trump's budget priorities were signed into law on our nation's birthday, July 4th. Among the biggest and perhaps most contentious policies, billions earmarked to fund Trump's mass deportation strategy.
Riley Beggin:
There are earmarks in there to hire at least 10,000 new ice agents, new CPP agents, expand detention spaces, $46 billion for construction of the wall at the southern border. So this is really going to amplify and fund the president's interest in a mass deportation campaign.
Taylor Wilson:
That was Paste BN Senior Congress reporter, Riley Beggin... Tune in later today beginning at 4:00 p.m. Eastern time to hear her full conversation with my colleague Dana Taylor on who the bill's winners and losers are.
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And thanks for listening to The Excerpt. You can get the podcast wherever you get your audio, and if you're on a smart speaker, just ask for The Excerpt. I'm Taylor Wilson, and I'll be back tomorrow with more of The Excerpt from Paste BN.