Live Updates: White House Criticizes Judge for Blocking Musk Team’s Access to Treasury Data

Kristi Noem, the secretary of homeland security, was also asked on CNN about the tent camps that the Trump administration is building at Guantánamo Bay that could potentially house thousands of migrants. She said that the federal government should be “really transparent” and send a message that immigrants without documents should not “wait until we have the opportunity to sweep you up” and that they should “go back” to their home country voluntarily. That contrasted with her earlier comments in the show that tent facility is only intended for migrants who are hardened criminals.

Noem repeated President Trump’s false claim that Venezuela is deliberately releasing prisoners and those with severe mental health issues to the United States, as she defended the immigration blitz under the second Trump administration.

Kristi Noem, the secretary of homeland security, said during an appearance on CNN on Sunday that she supports President Trump’s proposal to shut down FEMA. She also said she supported a wide-reaching “audit” of the agency by Elon Musk’s government efficiency office, and she felt comfortable with Musk having access to Americans’ sensitive, personal information in that endeavor. This comes a day after a federal judge blocked access for Musk’s team.

Noem repeated President Trump’s baseless claim that the Biden administration has deliberately delayed or obstructed disaster payments to red states and counties.

The dozens of lawsuits fall into four main categories.

Immigration

The Trump administration’s crackdown on immigration — both legal and illegal — has resulted in at least 10 lawsuits, seven of which challenge his executive order revoking universal birthright citizenship. The plaintiffs seeking to defend the 14th Amendment’s longstanding guarantee to birthright citizenship include two groups of state attorneys general, nonprofits representing pregnant mothers, and an attorney from Orange County, Calif., who is representing his pregnant wife.

So far, the judges hearing these cases have been skeptical of Mr. Trump’s move, issuing two preliminary injunctions that have put the president’s order on ice. But one of the cases yet to be heard is before Judge Timothy James Kelly of the District of Columbia, who was nominated to the bench by Mr. Trump.

The other lawsuits against the president’s immigration policies challenge immigration agents’ authority to enter houses of worship; a memo that speeds up and broadens the scope of deportations; and an order that makes it harder for refugees to claim asylum in the United States. On Friday, San Francisco and other cities sued to block an executive order that would withhold federal funds from cities that do not assist with enforcing Trump administration immigration policies.

Budget Freezes and Firings

This category of litigation will likely grow as the administration attempts to assert its control over federal employees, lay the groundwork for potential mass firings and withhold spending that has been previously appropriated by Congress.

Mr. Trump’s attempt to freeze as much as $3 trillion in federal funding has run aground in two cases, one filed by a group of nonprofits in conjunction with Democracy Forward, and another by a group of 22 state attorneys general. An effort to gut the United States Agency for International Development is also at least partially on hold.

The administration’s “Fork in the Road” offer, sent by email to roughly two million federal employees by the government’s Office of Personnel Management, encouraging them to resign, was blocked, for now, by a Massachusetts judge on Thursday.

Three lawsuits challenge Mr. Trump’s effort to overhaul the civil service, stripping away job protections from tens of thousands of employees and giving the White House unilateral firing authority if they fail to “faithfully implement administration policies.”

Other lawsuits challenge the Trump administration’s attempts to unilaterally fire a member of the National Labor Relations Board, one of several agencies that are supposed to be independent of the executive branch. A lawsuit to stop Elon Musk’s team from accessing sensitive data at the Treasury Department yielded an agreement to do so for now.

Transgender Rights

Two lawsuits challenge an effort by the Trump administration to force the transfer of transgender women in federal prisons to men’s housing, and to deny them gender-transition medical care. One of those suits led to a restraining order that would temporarily keep the new policy from being carried out.

Out of more than 150,000 federal inmates, fewer than 50 are transgender women who are housed in women’s facilities, according to an administration official.

Other lawsuits address Mr. Trump’s attempts to ban transgender people from serving in the military, to deny federal funding from hospitals that offer gender-transition care to people under the age of 19, and to prevent transgender people from having their identities reflected on their U.S. passports.

Jan. 6 Investigators

Two groups of F.B.I. agents and bureau employees sued to block Mr. Trump from releasing the names of agents and staff members who participated in the investigations into the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021, trying to head off what they fear is a looming purge. On Friday, the government agreed not to release the names while the case was being heard by Judge Jia M. Cobb of the District of Columbia, a nominee of President Biden.

Charlie Savage, Zach Montague, Madeleine Ngo and Eileen Sullivan contributed reporting.

“The courts really are the front line,” said Skye Perryman, the chief executive of Democracy Forward, which has filed nine lawsuits and won four court orders against the Trump administration.

The multipronged legal pushback has already yielded quick — if potentially fleeting — results. Judicial orders in nine federal court cases will, for a time, partially bind the administration’s hands on its goals. Those include ending automatic citizenship for babies born to undocumented immigrants on U.S. soil; transferring transgender female inmates to male-only prisons; potentially exposing the identities of F.B.I. personnel who investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol; coaxing federal workers to accept “deferred resignation” under a tight deadline; and freezing as much as $3 trillion in domestic spending.

The judiciary’s response to the legal challenges is continuing through the weekend. On Friday afternoon, Judge Carl Nichols, a district judge nominated by Mr. Trump. said he would issue a temporary restraining order halting the administrative leave of 2,200 employees at the U.S. Agency for International Development and the looming withdrawal of nearly all of the agency’s workers from overseas.

Also, late on Friday night, Judge John D. Bates, a nominee of President George W. Bush, rejected a request by a coalition of unions for an emergency order blocking Elon Musk’s team from accessing Labor Department data. While that case is ongoing, Judge Bates’s ruling was the first victory for Mr. Trump’s new administration in federal court. In the early hours of Saturday, U.S. District Judge Paul A. Engelmayer, one of President Obama’s nominees, restricted access by Mr. Musk’s government efficiency program to the Treasury Department’s payment and data systems, saying access would risk “irreparable harm.”

Judges have not minced words. In Seattle last week, a district judge issued the second nationwide injunction blocking Mr. Trump’s order to end universal birthright citizenship. “The Constitution is not something with which the government may play policy games,” Judge John C. Coughenour said. Such a change, he added, could be made only through amending the Constitution. “That’s how the rule of law works.”

But while the executive branch is entrusted with the capacity for swift, decisive action, the judiciary is slow by design, and the legal opposition to Mr. Trump’s opening moves may struggle to keep up with his fire hose of disruption.

“Last night I was eating dinner with my family with an earpiece in my ear listening to a conference call and trying to be a dad at the same time,” Attorney General Rob Bonta of California said in an interview on Friday. “It’s hard work, but we’re not asking anyone to feel sorry for us. This is what we signed up to do.”

Mr. Trump’s first three weeks in office have yielded scores of executive orders to upend American foreign aid, domestic spending and social policy, many in open defiance of existing law. Without buy-in from or even consultation with the legislative branch of government, the president has wielded unilateral executive power in an attempt to dismantle parts of the government, override regulations governing civil service, overturn more than a century of precedent on immigration law, seek possible vengeance on his perceived enemies, and roll back liberal advances made in diversity and equity and transgender rights.

“No president should be able to rewrite 120-plus years of interpretation of the Constitution with a stroke of a pen,” said Dan Rayfield, Oregon’s attorney general, in an interview. “That is the existential threat.”

Some legal experts see the executive branch’s deliberate effort to push the boundaries of legality as a bare-knuckle strategy to overwhelm the president’s opposition and eventually win at least some precedent-shattering decisions from the conservative Supreme Court.

“The administration seems to have wanted challenges that consume a ton of resources — of opponents, courts and public attention — even as members of the administration know the provisions do not square with the law that exists,” said Judith Resnik, a professor at Yale Law School.

To Mr. Trump’s backers, the president’s orders are well within the powers outlined in the Constitution’s second section on the executive branch. It is the judicial pushback, they say, that is overstepping the constitutional boundaries laid out in the third section on the judiciary.

“President Trump is not stealing other branches’ powers,” said Mike Davis, who heads the Article III Project, a conservative advocacy group. “He is exercising his Article II powers under the Constitution. And judges who say he can’t? They’re legally wrong. The Supreme Court is going to side with Trump.”

Narrow as the popular vote margin was, White House officials say Mr. Trump’s victory in November was a mandate to exercise extraordinary power.

“Every action taken by the Trump-Vance administration is fully legal and compliant with federal law,” Harrison Fields, a White House spokesman, said in a statement. “Any legal challenge against it is nothing more than an attempt to undermine the will of the American people.”

That should, in fact, be for the courts to determine — if Mr. Trump abides by their decisions. On Friday, Democratic attorneys general went back to court to demand that a federal judge enforce his restraining order that was meant to keep billions of dollars in federal grant funds flowing. They said that the Trump administration had not complied.

Final judgments won’t come any time soon. Judge Coughenour’s injunction blocking Mr. Trump’s executive order to end automatic citizenship for children born on U.S. soil has already been appealed by the Justice Department to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

The ascent of some cases through the trial courts, to the appellate courts, and then to the Supreme Court could take months. Those lengthy battles will be political as well as legal, pitting a president who sees himself as the almost invincible leader of a populist movement against attorneys general, almost all Democrats, with their own ambitions, some legal scholars say.

“The attorneys general swung into action quickly. If they eventually prevail in court and in public opinion, they will reap political dividends for their perceived defense and vindication of their citizens’ rights,” said Akhil Reed Amar, a professor at Yale Law School.

If the attorneys general are using the campaign against Mr. Trump to burnish their own political futures, Mr. Amar added, that too is by design. “Our Constitution was designed so that ambition would counter ambition,” he said. “That is how the framers drew up the blueprint.”

Those pursuing the cases say they are unsurprised by the task ahead. Parallel efforts by Democracy Forward and the Democratic attorneys general to prepare for a second Trump presidency have been underway since early 2024. Now, coalitions of plaintiffs huddle on Slack long after midnight to prepare complaints in response to the administration’s latest moves. For the most part, the attorneys general have presented a united front, with some occasional last-minute jostling to decide who will get top billing as one of the leaders of the case, and in which venue it will be filed.

The one surprise factor? Elon Musk, the billionaire businessman who has been handed extraordinary — and possibly illegal — powers to cut and reshape the government, with no real title or Senate confirmation.

Matthew J. Platkin, New Jersey’s attorney general, called Mr. Musk “the one wild card” thrown at them.

“I’m not even sure Trump knows what he is doing,” Mr. Platkin said of Mr. Musk. “He’s an unelected billionaire running around government, slashing huge amounts of the work force and behaving in all kinds of potentially illegal ways.”

In legal filings, the Justice Department has argued that Mr. Musk’s associates are acting lawfully as employees detailed to agencies across the government and that they are under the authority of acting cabinet members.

The states have “special solicitude” as plaintiffs, a doctrine that draws on a 2007 Supreme Court ruling. That doctrine, which has carried less weight in recent years, makes it easier for states to bring lawsuits claiming that their rights or the rights of their citizens have been violated. It may be harder for those same states to apply that doctrine in claims against Mr. Musk’s teams, which operate at the federal level and affect the states less directly, according to lawyers familiar with the effort by attorneys general.

But that wrinkle did not stop Judge Engelmayer from siding, for now, with Letitia James, attorney general of New York, and 18 other Democratic attorneys general in their effort to keep Mr. Musk’s teams out of sensitive Treasury Department systems.

They argued that giving the government efficiency team access would violate the Constitution, and harm states that rely on the Treasury Department to fund child support payments and recover debts.

“I think right now we’re in the midst of a constitutional crisis,” said Ms. James, when the lawsuit was announced last week.

Ms. Resnik, the Yale Law School professor, said that while she expected the legal system to be “resilient,” it was hard to overstate the stakes for the judiciary in the coming weeks and months.

“Unbounded power is the antithesis of the U.S. Constitution,” she said. “That point is on display every time you enter the U.S. Supreme Court, where etched in stone are the words: ‘equal justice under law.’”

Jenna Russell, Laurel Rosenhall, Charlie Savage, Chris Cameron, Jacey Fortin and Hurubie Meko contributed reporting. Seamus Hughes contributed research.

“As acting director, I am committed to implementing the president’s policies, consistent with the law, and acting as a faithful steward of the bureau’s resources,” Mr. Vought wrote in the email, which was obtained by The New York Times.

The agency, created by Congress in 2011 as a financial industry watchdog, cannot be closed without congressional action, but its director can freeze most of its actions by halting enforcement, weakening or repealing regulations and softening its supervision of banks and other lenders. The agency did not immediately respond to an emailed request for comment on Saturday.

The agency has issued a number of high-profile regulations and enforcement actions over the years, seeking to strengthen safeguards on mortgages, credit cards, loans and other consumer finance. Most recently, the bureau sued Capital One in mid-January, arguing that the bank misled customers in promoting a high-yield savings account that it then kept at a near-zero interest rate.

In a Saturday evening post on X, Mr. Vought, an author of Project 2025, the conservative blueprint for radically remaking the federal government, wrote that he had notified the Federal Reserve that the finance bureau “will not be taking its next draw of unappropriated funding because it is not ‘reasonably necessary’ to carry out its duties.” (The agency is directly funded by the Federal Reserve, outside the usual congressional appropriations process.)

“The Bureau’s current balance of $711.6 million is in fact excessive in the current fiscal environment,” he added in his post. “This spigot, long contributing to CFPB’s unaccountability, is now being turned off,” he said, using the agency’s initials.

On Saturday, some members of the union representing the consumer protection bureau’s employees protested outside the agency’s Washington building with signs mocking Elon Musk, whose government efficiency effort has wreaked havoc across various federal agencies. Several members of Mr. Musk’s team arrived at the agency on Friday morning and gained access to its headquarters and computer systems.

Later that day, Mr. Musk posted “CFPB RIP,” with an emoji of a gravestone, on X. Hours after Mr. Musk’s post, the home page of the bureau’s website was updated with a “404: Page not found” message.

“Did Elon Musk hire you?” asked Representative Becca Balint of Vermont.

“This is an outrage,” Representative Mark Takano of California shouted as he and his colleagues were physically blocked from entering the building. “We have oversight responsibilities,” he said during the unsuccessful attempt to enter.

The clash, captured on video by multiple members, was yet another episode that became a flashpoint in the intensifying battle over the administration’s efforts to reshape the federal bureaucracy.

“They are blocking members of Congress from entering the Department of Education! Elon is allowed in and not the people? ILLEGAL,” Representative Maxwell Frost of Florida wrote in a post.

It is unclear, however, if the federal employee violated any laws by refusing entry. While members of Congress do have an oversight role over federal agencies, that power is typically exercised through hearings and enforcement of policies.

And while the Constitution grants Congress the power to establish federal government offices, it is unclear whether individual members are granted unfettered access to those buildings.

Lawmakers have expressed frustration with the broader transformation underway within the federal government, where Elon Musk — the world’s wealthiest man and the head of what Mr. Musk has labeled the Department of Government Efficiency — has been granted an unusual degree of influence.

The standoff follows a campaign promise by President Trump to dismantle and eventually shut down the Department of Education, which he has characterized as an agency injecting extreme ideology on race and gender into the nation’s public schools.

“We will move everything back to the states, where it belongs,” he said during one campaign speech. “They can individualize education and do it with the love for their children.”

Since taking office, a number of broader actions by Mr. Trump have directly affected the Department of Education and its work force.

Last month, employees across the Education Department were put on administrative leave. The department cited guidance from the Office of Personnel Management, which had instructed federal agencies to submit plans for reducing staff associated with diversity, equity and inclusion efforts by the end of the day on Jan. 31.

Alarmed by the action and threats of more efforts to overhaul the department, Democratic lawmakers sent a letter late Wednesday seeking a meeting with Denise L. Carter, the acting education secretary. When their request went unanswered, they showed up at the department’s headquarters on Friday morning, only to find themselves denied entry.

No official explanation was given for the refusal of entry, and lawmakers grew more agitated at the arrival of armed federal officers. The Education Department did not respond to requests for comment on Saturday.

“We aren’t dangerous,” Mr. Frost wrote in a social media post. “We are here to represent our people.”

Similar scenes played out throughout the week at other agencies where Democratic lawmakers were locked out, including Treasury Department offices, the U.S. Agency for International Development and the Environmental Protection Agency.

Judge Engelmayer said in his decision that there was a risk of “irreparable harm” in allowing Treasury access by political appointees and “special government employees,” which includes Mr. Musk and members of his team. Access to those systems, he said, could leave highly sensitive financial information vulnerable to leaks and hacks.

In a separate statement, the White House called the judge an “activist” and the ruling “absurd and judicial overreach” for effectively locking the treasury secretary out of his role.

“These frivolous lawsuits are akin to children throwing pasta at the wall to see if it will stick,” Harrison Fields, a spokesman, said in a statement. “Grandstanding government efficiency speaks volumes about those who’d rather delay much-needed change with legal shenanigans than work with the Trump administration of ridding the government of waste, fraud, and abuse.”

Mr. Musk said on X that the Treasury Department and his team had agreed upon a list of adjustments to be made to the payroll system that were “obvious and necessary changes,” including incorporating a do-not-pay list and mandating categorization codes and notes in comment fields outlining reasons for payments.

In response to a post from the conservative podcaster Charlie Kirk, who said the Trump administration should consider defying the order if it becomes permanent, Mr. Musk suggested without evidence that the judge’s decision was part of a “super shady” scheme to protect scammers.

The judge’s decision barred Mr. Musk and his team from access to the systems at least until Friday, when a hearing before a different judge was scheduled in the matter. Those workers who have been allowed access since Jan. 20 must “destroy any and all copies of material downloaded from the Treasury Department’s records and systems,” according to the order.

It was unclear if the Trump administration and Mr. Musk’s team would take steps to comply with the emergency order.

Last month, just after President Trump took office, a top Treasury Department official, David Lebryk, refused to give Mr. Musk’s team access to the government’s payment system. He was placed on administrative leave and later announced his retirement.

It is a risk that cybersecurity experts have been sounding alarms over in the past 10 days, as Mr. Musk’s band of young coders demanded access to the Treasury’s innermost systems. That access was ultimately granted by Scott Bessent, the newly confirmed Treasury secretary.

But other than vague assurances that the new arrivals at the Treasury’s door had proper clearances, there was no description of how their work would be secured — and plenty of reason to believe that it would make it easier for Chinese and Russian intelligence services to target the Treasury’s systems.

That was the central argument made by 19 attorneys general as they sought a temporary restraining order to get Mr. Musk’s workers out of the Treasury systems. And Judge Engelmayer endorsed it on Saturday, limiting access to existing Treasury officials until a hearing next week in front of a different federal judge.

The government has maintained that Mr. Musk’s team has been limited to reviewing “read-only” data in the Treasury Department’s systems, though the administration is now placing appointees in positions where they could do much more.

The concern about the targeting of the department is hardly hypothetical: In December, the agency said in a letter to Congress that a Chinese intelligence group had broken into its systems and stolen unclassified material. A full assessment of that damage has not been made public. But it was a reminder that the Treasury Department — as much at the Pentagon and its contractors, the C.I.A. and the White House — is high on Beijing’s target list. And any new access to the agency’s systems potentially creates a new way in for intruders.

In the days before the order, concerns over the potential security vulnerabilities created by Mr. Musk’s project were rampant. The Washington Post reported that a subcontractor to Booz Allen Hamilton, the firm that runs much of the Treasury’s threat detection center, had issued a written warning; it was retracted after its contents were leaked.

Outside experts have described, in detail, what could happen when an outsider gains sudden access to a locked-down system: Personal data could leak, payments could be diverted and information about political rivals could be collected.

Bruce Schneier, a cybersecurity expert at Harvard and the author of a series of books on security vulnerabilities, including “Click Here to Kill Everybody,” called the entry of Mr. Musk’s force “the most consequential security breach” in American history.

Mr. Schneier noted that the intrusion came “not through a sophisticated cyberattack or an act of foreign espionage, but through official orders by a billionaire with a poorly defined government role.”

Mr. Musk, of course, is attuned to cybersecurity issues. Starlink, the satellite system run by his company SpaceX, kept Ukraine in communications after the Russian invasion and is considered highly secure. So are the reusable rocket operations of SpaceX, which China’s space engineers have been eager to replicate.

So federal officials say that they have been shocked by the carelessness with which Mr. Musk’s workers pierced government systems, including two that are repositories of millions of sensitive records: the Treasury and the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, both of which have been major targets of China’s intelligence services.

“The Treasury Department is a significant foreign policy actor in its own right,” James Goldgeier and Elizabeth N. Saunders wrote on Friday in Foreign Affairs. The authors, who are fellows at the Brookings Institution, noted the agency plays a central role in sanctions policy. The major sanctions targets — China, Russia, Iran and North Korea — are also the primary cyberadversaries for the United States.

“If Musk’s team has access to and can rewrite the code directing U.S. government payments, the cybersecurity and privacy risks would be massive,” they wrote. “Hostile intelligence services are likely already at work trying to assess which Musk team members might be sloppy with their digital devices or vulnerable to entrapment or coercion.”

The authors also noted that if Mr. Musk’s team has been granted security clearances, as the White House insists, it would most likely be with minimal to no vetting, a process that usually takes months.

During the Obama administration, Chinese intelligence services pierced the Office of Personnel Management’s files on the security clearances of more than 20 million Americans. American officials assume Chinese agents combined that data with stolen records from Starwood hotels and the Anthem health system to draw a picture of where the officials were traveling and who they worked with.

“Foreign adversaries typically spend years attempting to penetrate government systems like these, using stealth to avoid being seen,” Mr. Schneier said. “In this case, external operators with limited experience and minimal oversight are doing their work in plain sight and under massive public scrutiny,” with high-level access to “America’s most sensitive networks.”

Mr. Musk’s group says that it is using “radical transparency” as it examines the spending patterns of government agencies. But little is known about how those on his team are getting access to information or whether they are making changes to systems that might introduce security vulnerabilities. The Trump administration has not revealed the names of most of the young Musk recruits, nor explained what kinds of clearances they have.

In a letter this week to Senator Ron Wyden, the Oregon Democrat who raised concerns about the cost-cutting team’s work, Jonathan Blum, a Treasury official, said there was no reason for concern.

“Treasury has no higher obligation than managing the government’s finances on behalf of the American people,” he wrote, “and its payments system is critical to that process. In keeping with that mission, Treasury is committed to safeguarding the integrity and security of the system.”

He said the protections in the system were “robust and effective” and under constant review.

The State Department formally notified Congress of its intention on Friday. That same day, the Pentagon put out two news releases, one saying it was selling to Israel 3,000 Hellfire air-to-ground missiles worth $660 million, and another saying it was sending $6.75 billion of bombs and guidance kits. The Pentagon did not issue a news release for the sale of artillery shells, which as a direct commercial sale did not require the department to put out a detailed statement. U.S. officials also included additional bombs. Together, all the sales are worth $8.4 billion.

The Biden administration announced the $8 billion sale in early January, then sent the entire package to the House Foreign Affairs Committee and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for informal review. During that process, lawmakers can ask the State Department detailed questions about the sales before making a decision on whether or not to approve them.

The two top Republican lawmakers on the committees gave their approval, and a Democratic senator eventually did too, but Representative Gregory W. Meeks of New York, the top Democrat on the House committee, decided to use the review process to ask more questions.

The State Department moved ahead with the package after it had sat in informal review for more than 20 days, the typical amount of time granted to senior lawmakers for their consideration of arms sales to Israel. The normal informal review time varies depending on the partner country.

The sales will almost certainly continue unhindered, since Congress would need to muster a two-thirds vote in both houses to halt the orders.

Following the announcement that the sales would move ahead despite his hold, Mr. Meeks sharply criticized what he characterized as an erosion of longstanding precedent, accusing the Trump administration of sidelining Congress in its decision to proceed with the arms transfer.

“I continue to support Israel’s critical military needs as it faces a range of regional threats,” Mr. Meeks said in a statement. But his backing, he made clear, was not unconditional. He had engaged in what he described as “close consultation” with administration officials on the sales, raising a number of concerns — only to find his inquiries met with silence. The administration, he said, had failed to provide meaningful documentation or justification for its decision.

The administration’s move to carry out the sales was lawful, but Mr. Meeks said it showed “blatant disregard of longstanding congressional prerogative.” More than a bureaucratic slight, he argued, it was a fundamental challenge to the balance of power among coequal branches of government.

In 2019, during his first administration, Mr. Trump declared an “emergency” over Iran, allowing Mike Pompeo, then the secretary of state, to move forward with sending weapons to the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia despite the fact that Congress was still asking questions about the arms in the initial review process. Mr. Pompeo’s move led to an investigation by the State Department’s inspector general.

Friday’s notification was sent absent an emergency declaration. In 2023, the Biden administration used a similar mechanism to circumvent congressional oversight for arms sales to Israel by invoking the same emergency provision.

Separate from the $8 billion package, Congress is reviewing a request by Israel for a license to buy 5,000 assault rifles from American gun makers. The State Department could soon submit more requests for assault rifle licenses to Congress for informal review. During the Biden administration, the State Department held up a license that would permit Israel to buy 24,000 U.S.-made assault rifles. In direct commercial sales, a foreign country asks the State Department for a license to buy weapons from a company.