WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court on Tuesday cleared the way for President Donald Trump’s plans to downsize the federal workforce despite warnings that critical government services will be lost and hundreds of thousands of federal employees will be out of their jobs.

The justices overrode lower court orders that temporarily froze the cuts, which have been led by the Department of Government Efficiency.

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The court said in an unsigned order that no specific cuts were in front of the justices, only an executive order issued by Trump and an administration directive for agencies to undertake job reductions.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was the only dissenting vote, accusing her colleagues of a “demonstrated enthusiasm for greenlighting this President’s legally dubious actions in an emergency posture.”

Trump has repeatedly said voters gave him a mandate to remake the federal government, and he tapped billionaire ally Elon Musk to lead the charge through DOGE. Musk recently left his role.

Tens of thousands of federal workers have been fired, have left their jobs via deferred resignation programs or have been placed on leave. There is no official figure for the job cuts, but at least 75,000 federal employees took deferred resignation and thousands of probationary workers have already been let go.

In May, U.S. District Judge Susan Illston found that Trump’s administration needs congressional approval to make sizable reductions to the federal workforce. By a 2-1 vote, a panel of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals refused to block Illston’s order, finding that the downsizing could have broader effects, including on the nation’s food-safety system and health care for veterans.

Illston directed numerous federal agencies to halt acting on the president’s workforce executive order signed in February and a subsequent memo issued by DOGE and the Office of Personnel Management. Illston was nominated by former Democratic President Bill Clinton.

The labor unions and nonprofit groups that sued over the downsizing offered the justices several examples of what would happen if it were allowed to take effect, including cuts of 40% to 50% at several agencies.

Among the agencies affected by the order are the departments of Agriculture, Energy, Labor, the Interior, State, the Treasury and Veterans Affairs. It also applies to the National Science Foundation, Small Business Association, Social Security Administration and Environmental Protection Agency.

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By AAMER MADHANI, SEUNG MIN KIM and TARA COPP, Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump’s decision to send more defensive weapons to Ukraine came after he privately expressed frustration with Pentagon officials for announcing a pause in some deliveries last week — a move that he felt wasn’t properly coordinated with the White House, according to three people familiar with the matter.

The Pentagon, which announced last week that it would hold back some air defense missiles, precision-guided artillery and other weapons pledged to Ukraine because of what U.S. officials said were concerns that American stockpiles were in short supply. Trump said Monday that the U.S. will have to send more weapons to Ukraine, effectively reversing the move.

Two of the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity about the sensitive internal discussions, said there was some internal opposition among Pentagon brass to the pause — coordinated by Pentagon policy chief Elbridge Colby — before it was announced.

One of the people described Trump as being caught “flat footed” by the announcement.

The pause in critical weapons deliveries had come at a difficult moment for Ukraine, which has faced increasing — and more complex — air barrages from Russia during the more than three-year-old war. Trump acknowledged that in announcing the reversal on Monday night, saying, “They have to be able to defend themselves. They’re getting hit very hard now.”

Asked by a reporter Tuesday who approved the pause, Trump bristled at the question while he was gathered with his Cabinet. “I don’t know. Why don’t you tell me?”

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Trump’s change in tone on Putin

The president also laid into Russian President Vladimir Putin, suggesting he was unnecessarily prolonging the war that Trump has said he’s determined to quickly conclude. Trump has struggled to find a resolution, with talks between the sides stalled.

The Republican leader has sounded increasingly exasperated with Putin in recent days. The two spoke by phone last week.

“We get a lot of bull—- thrown at us by Putin, if you want to know the truth,” Trump said during Tuesday’s Cabinet meeting. “He’s very nice all the time, but it turns out to be meaningless.”

He has threatened, but held off on, imposing new sanctions against Russia’s oil industry to try to prod Putin into peace talks.

Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said last week that Trump has given him the go-ahead to push forward with a bill he’s co-sponsoring that calls, in part, for a 500% tariff on goods imported from countries that continue to buy Russian oil. The move would have huge ramifications for China and India, two economic behemoths that buy Russian oil.

Trump said Tuesday that he’s “looking at it very strongly.”

Pentagon says it’s going to resume shipments to Ukraine

The weapons pause announced last week impacted shipments of Patriot missiles, precision-guided GMLRS, Hellfire missiles and Howitzer rounds and more, taking not only Ukrainian officials and other allies by surprise but also U.S. lawmakers and other parts of the Trump administration, including the State Department.

The Pentagon said late Monday that at Trump’s direction, it would resume weapons shipments to Ukraine “to ensure the Ukrainians can defend themselves while we work to secure a lasting peace and ensure the killing stops.” Still, spokesman Sean Parnell added that its review for Trump to evaluate military shipments worldwide continues as part of “America First” defense priorities.

The Pentagon did not immediately respond to a request for comment on whether Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth consulted with the White House prior to pausing weapons shipments and whether or not those shipments have now resumed.

It’s also unclear which weaponry would now be sent, though Trump said that the U.S. will primarily be assisting Ukraine with defensive weapons.

Counting the weapons

On Tuesday, each of the services and the combatant commands — the multiservice organizations that spearhead U.S. military operations around the world — were still sending up information on their stockpiles of specific munitions to Pentagon leadership, a U.S. official said.

“They are literally still doing the math,” the official said.

The information was being presented on a stoplight chart — where munitions were either in a red, yellow or green status, similar to slides that had been created the week before, the official said. That earlier study had concluded that some munitions were OK to keep sending to Ukraine — but others were reaching concerning levels.

Getting a full visibility on the numbers of actual munitions on hand takes time, the official said, because while Patriot missiles, for example, initially belong to the Army, once they are requested and sent to a combatant command, such as U.S. Central Command, the service loses visibility on those numbers in inventory.

The vast majority of the munitions and weapons the U.S. has shipped to Ukraine have been pulled from the Army, which has monitored levels closely in recent years, particularly for high-demand items like 155mm artillery shells and Patriot missiles for air defenses.

It’s been harder for the Army to ramp up production on those items than had been planned: It was trying to hit a goal of producing 100,000 155mm shells a month by the end of 2025 but won’t meet that goal now until 2026, Army spokesman Steve Warren said.

Ramping up Patriot missile production also has been challenging, Warren said.

Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said in a statement Tuesday that he was glad Trump was resuming deliveries to Ukraine.

“This time, the President will need to reject calls from the isolationists and restrainers within his Administration to limit these deliveries to defensive weapons,” McConnell said. “And he should disregard those at DoD who invoke munitions shortages to block aid while refusing to invest seriously in expanding munitions production.”

Associated Press writers Lisa Mascaro and Matthew Lee contributed to this report.

By MICHAEL PHILLIS and ALEXA ST. JOHN, Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Trump administration is dropping plans to allow continued use of the last type of asbestos legally allowed in U.S. manufacturing after an outcry from asbestos opponents.

The Environmental Protection Agency said in a court filing Monday that it will now defend the Biden administration’s ban of chrysotile asbestos, which is used in products like brake blocks and sheet gaskets.

The carcinogenic chemical has been mostly phased out in the U.S., but last year, the agency under former President Joe Biden sought to finish the decadeslong fight with a comprehensive ban. The EPA in 2024 said “exposure to asbestos is known to cause lung cancer, mesothelioma, ovarian cancer, and laryngeal cancer, and it is linked to more than 40,000 deaths in the U.S. each year.”

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The EPA had said in a federal appeals court filing last month that parts of the ban may have gone “beyond what is necessary to eliminate the unreasonable risk” and that other options such as requiring workplace protection measures might eliminate that risk. The agency said it planned a roughly 30-month process to write new rules.

But industry associations have already filed suit against the Biden administration’s ban. So has the Asbestos Disease Awareness Organization, which fights asbestos-related diseases and believes the ban isn’t as airtight as it needs to be. The nonprofit opposed pausing the case so the EPA could revisit the rule, arguing that any new proposal would likely be met by lawsuits, too.

All the work that’s gone into the current litigation shouldn’t be wasted, the nonprofit said. And a pause would also mean a delay in the rule’s implementation.

Lynn Ann Dekleva, the agency’s deputy assistant administrator of the Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention, said in a Monday filing that the EPA won’t go through a process to rewrite the rule.

The EPA now says the Biden administration “failed to adequately protect chemical industry workers from health risks posed by chrysotile asbestos.”

“To remedy the previous Administration’s approach, we notified the court that we intend to reconsider the applicability of interim workplace protection requirements during the replacement of asbestos gaskets for all workers,” EPA Press Secretary Brigit Hirsch said in a statement.

Linda Reinstein, president and CEO of the Asbestos Disease Awareness Organization, said she was elated the EPA isn’t going to reconsider the Biden administration’s ban. She speculated that the EPA didn’t like public reaction to its position. But she said the EPA’s new statement doesn’t make sense – the EPA should be talking about a ban, not workplace protections, and it should be protecting all workers, not just those involved with gaskets.

The New York Times was first to report the development.

Chrysotile asbestos is found in products such as brake blocks, asbestos diaphragms and sheet gaskets and was banned under the Toxic Substances Control Act, which was broadened in 2016. The Biden administration said it moved forward with a ban after decades of inadequate protections and delays in setting better standards.

The EPA’s previous move to reconsider the ban had been among dozens of deregulatory actions in the first months of the Trump administration.

“This is just the beginning of the public backlash against the Trump administration’s plans to roll back 31 standards that protect the air we breathe and the water we drink,” said Michelle Roos, executive director of the Environmental Protection Network. “Public health is not up for negotiation.”

The American Chemistry Council trade group declined to comment.

St. John reported from Detroit.

The Associated Press receives support from the Walton Family Foundation for coverage of water and environmental policy. The AP is solely responsible for all content. For all of AP’s environmental coverage, visit https://apnews.com/hub/climate-and-environment

Like just about everyone who grew up at a time when a few networks decided what Americans watched on their television sets, author Todd S. Purdum knew all of the antics of Lucy and Ricky Ricardo, the characters played  by Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, on the ’50s sitcom “I Love Lucy.”

“It was unavoidable in syndication,” says Purdum, 65, on a recent video call. Though he’s too young to have seen its original run, “I Love Lucy” always seemed to be on, he says.

Lucille Ball as Lucy was the star around whom Arnaz as Ricky, and William Frawley and Vivian Vance as neighbors Fred and Ethel Mertz, orbited in each of the 180 episodes of “I Love Lucy” that originally aired from October 1951 to May 1957.

And it’s Lucy whose voice and visage come first to mind when “I Love Lucy,” which played in reruns for decades after it ended, is remembered today.

For good reason, too. Ball was a brilliant comedian, her timing impeccable, her pratfalls hilarious, her physical comedy perfection. And no matter how frustrated or worked up Lucy might have made Ricky, played by her real-life husband Arnaz, by the end of each episode she was always back in his good graces.

Over the years, Purdum gradually learned more about Arnaz. He read his 1976 memoir, “A Book.” He knew elements of his Cuban origins, his reinvention after immigrating to the United States as a teenager, first as the leader of a Latin dance band, later as an actor, his twin careers by the time he met and married Ball in November 1940.

And Purdum knew that Arnaz had played a significant role in the creation of “I Love Lucy” and the formation of Desilu Productions, which in addition to “I Love Lucy” also made many more TV shows including “The Untouchables,” “Mission: Impossible,” and “Star Trek.”

“But I didn’t really understand the full depth of the fascinating aspects of his life in Cuba and his family life,” Purdum says. “And then the whole role that he played in the early days of television.”

“Desi Arnaz: The Man Who Invented Television” is the book Purdum began to write when in 2020 the pandemic upended a career in journalism that included several decades as a New York Times reporter followed by stints at Vanity Fair and the Atlantic.

The book rebalances the history of the relationship of Arnaz and Ball, both on screen and off, giving Arnaz’s side of the story in more depth and detail than earlier biographies. It also explores ways in which Arnaz, through good fortune and a canny business sense, changed the making of television in ways that still influence the industry today.

“It seemed, at a moment when the culture was interested in re-examining the lives of people who might have been overlooked in their day, that he would make an interesting subject,” Purdum says of the decision to take up the story he tells in the book.

“And the more I got to know, the more I was impressed.”

Desi discovers TV

In many ways, “I Love Lucy” sprang from the desires of Ball and Arnaz to have more time together by collaborating on something with the stability of an ongoing TV show.

Given the success that “I Love Lucy” later found, it might have seemed a small thing to contact the right people, cast the show, and get it on the air.

It was, in fact, anything but simple.

The first hurdle, as Purdum writes, was a fear that audiences would not welcome an interracial couple or Arnaz’s accented English into their homes every week.

“One thing I found interesting about Desi was he didn’t take the first ‘no’ as the definitive answer,” Purdum says. “So if CBS said, ‘No, we don’t want this,’ he kept going.

Arnaz organized a cross-country comedy tour for him and Ball as a kind of proof of concept for the TV show they wanted to make, Purdum says. “Taking the vaudeville tour to do an end-run around them and prove that the audience would accept it, that’s a pretty clever move.”

The network and ad execs who held the purse strings also initially insisted that Arnaz and Ball make the show in New York City, like nearly every other TV show at the time.

There was no easy way to broadcast a show across the continent as television and the 1950s began, so programs aired live from New York in the Eastern and Central time zones, where the majority of the population then lived, with copies later broadcast to the less-populated western states.

Arnaz and his team proposed something entirely different for “I Love Lucy.” They would shoot it live in Hollywood with three film cameras simultaneously capturing the action on the set. It would quickly be edited and then provided a few days later to air in the entire country in the crisp black-and-white of 35 millimeter film.

“He didn’t do it by himself, but he’s leading the charge that filmed the show with the three-camera system and synchronization,” Purdum says of what remains a standard way of shooting sitcoms today.

“This led to filming becoming the norm,” he says. “I mean, live television still persisted for news and special events, but quickly other people, especially for half-hour sitcoms, wanted to film television programs.

“And that led to the transfer of the center of the business from New York to L.A.”

Value in the vault

The original contract to make “I Love Lucy” also granted Arnaz full ownership of the episodes after they aired. At the time, the networks didn’t see any value in a show past its original broadcast. The idea of reruns or syndication didn’t exist and even Arnaz wasn’t sure what he’d be able to do with the filmed episodes.

“He acknowledged that he didn’t quite know,” Purdum says. “There’s some suggestion that he thought they could maybe be valuable for foreign sales. But he’s the first to acknowledge that he had a lot of bravado for pretending he knew what this would amount to.”

A kind of instinct was there from the start, he says of Arnaz’s ability to sense what television might become.

“There’s a quote he gave to Earl Wilson, the Broadway columnist, in 1958, about how someday you’ll have a TV as big as your wall, as big as your house,” Purdum says. “So there was a part of him that clearly was visionary. He was also the beneficiary of, I don’t say dumb luck, but informed luck.

“One of the lines I love in E.B. White’s essay ‘Here Is New York,’ about people who come to New York from other places, is ‘No one should come to New York to live unless he is willing to be lucky,’” Purdum says..

“I think there was a part of Desi that was willing to be lucky. He made his own luck.”

A great love affair

“I Love Lucy” ended in the spring of 1957. The marriage of Arnaz and Ball ended in divorce three years later.

The couple had experienced success beyond their dreams with the show. Their Desilu Productions studio was booming. They had two young children, Lucie and Desi Jr., whom they adored.

But the grind of making a weekly TV show combined with Arnaz’s heavy drinking and constant infidelity, and the almost daily clamor of the couple’s battles, finally took its toll on a relationship their friends had always considered one of “great love affairs of all time,” Purdum says.

“They never stopped loving each other,” he says. “They couldn’t be together. They had a great deal of capacity to hurt each other, it seems to me, but they never stopped having this essential connection.”

Years earlier in their relationship, it was easy to see how much they were in love, Purdum says.

“You can see on the show, their obvious attraction to each other, their obvious chemistry,” he says. “It’s pretty palpable.

“Clearly, there was just a sheer animal magnetism, a physical attraction that must have been very real,” he says. “It’s always been remarked that Lucy was the rare female comedian who was absolutely radiant. She had been a showgirl at times.

“And Desi, the pictures of him as a young man, before age and alcohol took their toll, he was devastatingly handsome.”

The couple may have also been drawn together by early traumas each experienced as children. Arnaz’s family fled Cuba after a change in the government and had to restart their lives from scratch in the United States.

“Lucy also had what I think you could call unprocessed childhood trauma,” Purdum says. “Her father died before she was three. She shunted around to different relatives.”

Both also became responsible, financially and otherwise, for their mothers, he adds.

“On some level, that was something that caused tension, but it also must have drawn them together,” Purdum says. “Because they felt a mutual obligation to be the breadwinners and caregivers for their extended family.”

In some ways, the paradox of “I Love Lucy” was that the show Arnaz and Ball created to save their marriage contributed to the opposite outcome, he adds.

“It didn’t single-handedly break up their marriage, but it helped create the stresses and tensions,” Purdum says. “And the 24-7 working together, that probably only exacerbated the tensions, and in the end was part of what drove them apart.”

The industry leaves Desi

In the years that followed, as “I Love Lucy” became ubiquitous in reruns everywhere, Arnaz’s fortunes slowly declined as Ball’s held steady with several Desi-less spinoffs and reboots of the show that made her a superstar.

Arnaz eventually sold his share of Desilu Productions to Ball and struck out to create his own shows as an independent producer. “The Mothers-In-Law” was a modest success. A sitcom with Carol Channing never got off the ground.

“Bernie Weitzman, a Desilu executive, said [Arnaz] didn’t leave the industry, the industry left him,” Purdum says. “Because he was what they call in the insurance business an assigned risk, a bad risk.”

Alcoholism, the absence of Ball as his creative partner, and the under-recognition of all of his innovations in the television industry further contributed to the decline of Arnaz as a Hollywood player.

“The people who had dealt with him intimately knew the role he was playing,” Purdum says. “But the broader industry probably tended to typecast him as just a funny, accented second banana. There was a gulf between the people who really knew the role he played and the people who were too willing to assume that he was just an appendage to Lucy.”

Not that Ball ever failed to hail her husband during and after their marriage for all that he’d created.

“Lucy, to the end of her life, was always the first one to give him credit,” Purdum says. “In fact, Lucie Arnaz told me that when Amy Poehler approached her about what is a very good documentary, her interest and first angle was Lucy as the first female mogul in Hollywood.

“And Lucie Arnaz said you have to know that she took no joy in that,” he says. “She just did it dutifully because she had to keep the company going, and it wasn’t anything she was proud of or liked. She considered that was really Desi doing all of that.”

Ricky loved Lucy

The second season premiere of “I Love Lucy” is an episode titled “Job Switching,” though most people just think of it as the one where Lucy and Ethel get jobs at the chocolate factory.” It’s considered one of the most classic moments in television history as Lucy and Ethel are overwhelmed by the speed at which chocolate candies come flying down the factory conveyor belt at them.

It’s also one of the great Ricky episodes, Purdum says, though the storyline of Ricky and Fred taking on kitchen duties for a day is less remembered.

“He and Fred are making dinner, and he’s got an arroz con pollo on the stove with four pounds of rice for four people,” Purdum says. “The rice explodes and he’s slipping, and he fell once by accident and realized what a laugh it got and then arranged to fall two more times before the scene ended.”

As the title suggested, “I Love Lucy” was a show seen through Ricky’s eyes, which in hindsight further underscores the importance of his contributions to the work.

“He’s like, ‘Are you kidding me?’” Purdum says of Ricky’s reactions to each new situation Lucy gets herself into. “He’s the window, our pathway, into the life of Lucy of the Ricardos, and that’s a very, very important role.

“If he weren’t ultimately sympathetic, if the character were a jerk, it wouldn’t work,” he says. “You have to know that he gets exasperated with her. But I think of that comment from Martin Leeds, the Desilu executive:

“‘There was nothing she could do that he wouldn’t love her.’ “

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