A judge temporarily halted a directive by the Trump administration that imposed a cap on overhead costs that go to universities and other institutions that host federally funded research projects.

The directive, which went into effect Monday, sparked an outcry of criticism from research institutions that argued the new rule would have devastating consequences. It was immediately challenged in court by 22 Democratic state attorneys general, as well as by several leading research universities and related groups in a second lawsuit. 

U.S. District Court Judge Angel Kelley subsequently ruled in favor of the 22 state attorneys general, granting their request for a temporary restraining order that prohibits agencies from taking any steps to implement, apply or enforce the new rule that imposed a cap on facilities and administrative costs that are part of federally funded research grants.

The rule capped overhead costs associated with National Institutes of Health (NIH) funded research grants at 15%. 

When a grant is awarded to a scientist by the NIH, an additional percentage, on top of the allocated research funding, goes to the facility housing their work to cover these ‘indirect costs.’ According to an announcement about the new funding cap from the Trump administration, that percentage has historically been around 27% to 28% for each grant. But in some cases, negotiated rates can be even higher, such as at the University of Michigan where the negotiated rate for indirect costs is 56%.

The lawsuit from the attorneys general argued the move violated federal law governing the procedures federal agencies must follow when implementing new regulations. They also argued that the move usurped the will of Congress, which, in 2018, passed legislation prohibiting the NIH or the Health and Human Services Department from unilaterally making changes to current negotiated rates, or implementing a modified approach to the reimbursement of indirect costs.

Kelley’s temporary restraining order requires the Trump administration agencies that are impacted by the new rule to file reports within 24 hours to confirm the steps they are taking to comply with her order. Meanwhile, Kelley set an in-person hearing date on the matter for Feb. 21.

Fox News Digital reached out to the White House for comment on the restraining order, but did not hear back at press time. However, after the directive went into effect on Monday, White House spokesperson Kush Desai told Fox News Digital, ‘Contrary to the hysteria, redirecting billions of allocated NIH spending away from administrative bloat means there will be more money and resources available for legitimate scientific research, not less.’ 

Earlier on Monday, U.S. District Judge John J. McConnell said the Trump administration had violated his order halting a federal aid funding freeze that sought to pause ‘all activities related to obligation or disbursement of all Federal financial assistance,’ to ensure federal disbursements aligned with the president’s executive actions.

McConnell ordered the government to ‘immediately restore frozen funding,’ noting that plaintiffs had provided adequate evidence to show the Trump administration ‘in some cases [has] continued to improperly freeze federal funds and refused to resume disbursement of appropriated federal funds,’ despite his ‘clear and unambiguous’ order lifting the freeze.

Vice President JD Vance said Tuesday that U.S. artificial intelligence (AI) systems must not become tainted with ‘ideological bias’ and cautioned against coordinating with ‘hostile foreign adversaries’ on AI capabilities. 

Vance appeared Tuesday at the AI Action Summit in Paris, where world leaders, top tech executives and policymakers teamed up to hash out tech policy and its intersection with global security, economics and governance. The appearance marked his first foreign trip as vice president. 

While the Trump administration has signaled it plans to take an approach that favors deregulation of AI, Vance’s appearance at the summit coincides with recent attempts from the European Union to enforce harsher regulations aimed at promoting greater safety. 

Meanwhile, the U.S. and the UK abstained from signing an international document at the conference signed by 60 other countries that aims to prioritize ‘ensuring AI is open, inclusive, transparent, ethical, safe, secure and trustworthy.’ It was immediately unclear why both countries chose not to sign the document. 

Here is what is known from Vance’s remarks about the Trump administration’s priorities for the future of AI. First, Vance called for AI systems developed in the U.S. to remain free of ‘ideological bias’ and vowed that the U.S. would ‘never restrict our citizens’ right to free speech.’ 

That is because Vance said he trusted Americans to create their own thoughts and opinions, absorb information and exchange those thoughts in the ‘open marketplace of ideas.’

‘We feel very strongly that AI must remain free from ideological bias and that American AI will not be co-opted into a tool for authoritarian censorship,’ Vance said Tuesday. 

Vance also pushed for a ‘deregulatory flavor’ to emerge at the conference while cautioning against the pitfalls of ‘excessive regulation’ that could hamper a transformative industry. He also vowed that the U.S. would back pro-growth AI policies. 

‘We believe that excessive regulation of the AI sector could kill a transformative industry just as it’s taking off, and we’ll make every effort to encourage pro-growth AI policies and I’d like to see that deregulatory flavor making its way into a lot of the conversations at this conference,’ he said. 

Other world leaders who attended the AI Action Summit include French President Emmanuel Macron, Indian Prime Minister Shri Modi and Chinese Vice Premier Zhang Guoqing.   

Vance also issued a warning to other foreign governments about ‘tightening the screws’ on U.S. tech companies with international footprints, claiming the Trump administration would not tolerate such limitations. He also cautioned against working with adversaries who have ‘weaponized A.I. software to rewrite history, surveil users and censor speech.’ 

Vance said Tuesday that the U.S. will block such efforts, and ensure that American AI and chip technology is protected from theft and misuse. 

‘I would also remind our international friends here today that partnering with such regimes — it never pays off in the long term,’ Vance said.

While Vance said that the U.S. wants to partner with other nations on this front, Macron said Europe could take a ‘third way’ approach in AI innovation and not rely on either the U.S. or China. Macron also called for enhanced ‘international governance’ on AI policy. 

‘We want a fair and open access to these innovations for the whole planet,’ Macron said. 

Vance’s comments coincide with some recent actions from the Trump administration to advance AI in the U.S. 

In January, Trump unveiled a new $500 billion AI infrastructure project called Stargate, a datacenter joint venture between investment holding company Softbank, and tech companies OpenAI and Oracle that Trump labeled the ‘largest AI infrastructure project in history.’ 

The project includes an initial investment of $100 billion that is slated to grow to $500 billion over Trump’s term in office, and will build ‘colossal’ data centers in the U.S. to power AI. 

The Associated Press and Fox News’ Michael Dorgan contributed to this report. 

Steve Bannon, a longtime ally of President Donald Trump, pleaded guilty on Tuesday to a charge that he defrauded donors who gave money to a private campaign to build a wall along the U.S. southern border.

Bannon was sentenced to three years conditional discharge but will avoid jail time as part of a plea agreement.

When reporters asked Bannon how he felt as he left the courtroom, he responded: ‘Like a million bucks.’

Bannon’s lawyer told reporters outside the court that there was no way his client could get a fair trial.

This is a breaking news story; check back for updates.

Republicans lawmakers are renewing efforts to gut federal funding to NPR and PBS amid the Trump administration’s upheaval of the federal bureaucracy.

Rep. Claudia Tenney, R-N.Y., is leading a bill in the House of Representatives that would halt taxpayer dollars from going to either media broadcaster and reroute existing federal funds to reducing the national debt, according to legislative text previewed by Fox News Digital.

‘As a former newspaper owner and publisher, I understand the vital role of balanced, non-partisan media. Unfortunately, these taxpayer-funded outlets have chosen advocacy over accuracy, using public dollars to promote a political agenda rather than report the facts,’ Tenney told Fox News Digital.

The legislation’s Senate counterpart is being led by Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, who told Fox News Digital, ‘Americans have hundreds of sources of news and commentary, and they don’t need politically biased, taxpayer-funded media choosing what they should see and hear. PBS and NPR are free to compete in the marketplace of ideas using donations, but their public subsidy should end.’

Republicans have long targeted NPR and PBS, accusing both outlets of sharing a liberal bias while receiving government funding.

Less than 1% of NPR’s funding comes directly from the federal government, though other funding comes indirectly from grants and dollars allocated to local member stations who then pay fees back to NPR. More than a third of its funding comes from corporate sponsorships.

PBS also gets a mix of federal funds through other avenues.

However, the GOP’s demands to end federal allocations to both outlets now come at a time when the executive branch is fervently searching for places to block government spending that does not align with the Trump administration’s agenda.

Elon Musk, who is leading Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) initiative, has been critical of NPR in the past.

‘Defund NPR. It should survive on its own,’ Musk wrote on his X platform earlier this month.

Soon after he acquired X, Musk briefly hit NPR with a ‘State-Affiliated’ media label, which is normally reserved for the media arm of authoritarian governments.

Tenney’s bill is one of multiple efforts targeting NPR and PBS during this Congress. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., who chairs the DOGE subcommittee under the House Oversight Committee, said she wants the heads of each organization to come testify before her new panel.

A federal appeals court dismissed the appeal charges brought against President Donald Trump aides Waltine Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira by former Special Counsel Jack Smith in his classified documents case, Fox News Digital has learned. 

The 11th Circuit Court of Appeals dismissed the case against Nauta and De Oliveira on Tuesday morning, two weeks after the Justice Department moved to drop the charges.

Nauta, Trump’s valet, and De Oliveira, the property manager of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida, had pleaded not guilty to federal charges alleging they conspired to obstruct the FBI investigation into classified documents found at Mar-a-Lago. 

The Justice Department had filed a motion in January to drop all criminal proceedings against Nauta and De Oliveira, putting an end to Smith’s probe more than two years after it began.

Former Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed Smith, a former Justice Department official, as special counsel in November 2022. 

Smith, a former assistant U.S. attorney and chief to the DOJ’s public integrity section, led the investigation into Trump’s retention of classified documents after leaving the White House and whether the former president obstructed the federal government’s investigation into the matter. 

Smith also was tasked with overseeing the investigation into whether Trump or other officials and entities interfered with the peaceful transfer of power following the 2020 presidential election, including the certification of the Electoral College vote on Jan. 6, 2021. 

Smith charged Trump in both cases, but Trump pleaded not guilty.

The classified records case was dismissed in July 2024 by U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida Judge Aileen Cannon, who ruled that Smith was unlawfully appointed as special counsel. 

Smith charged Trump in the U.S. District Court for Washington, D.C., in his 2020 election case, but after Trump was elected president, Smith sought to dismiss the case. Judge Tanya Chutkan granted that request. 

Both cases were dismissed. 

The Justice Department, in January, fired more than a dozen key officials who worked on Smith’s team prosecuting the president, after then-acting Attorney General James McHenry said they could not be trusted in ‘faithfully implementing the president’s agenda.’ 

Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove has also directed acting FBI Director Brian Driscoll to identify agents involved in Jan. 6 prosecutions for internal review. 

President Donald Trump’s nominees to run the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) are part of a group of scientists who just launched a new research journal focused on spurring scientific discourse and combating ‘gatekeeping’ in the medical research community. 

The journal, titled the Journal of the Academy of Public Health (JAPH), includes an editorial board consisting of several scientists who complained of facing censorship during the COVID-19 pandemic.

JAPH’s co-founders include Martin Kulldorff, a former Harvard Medical School professor who is a founding fellow at Hillsdale College’s Academy for Science and Freedom, and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a professor of health policy at Stanford University who is also Trump’s nominee to be the next NIH director. Kulldorff and Bhattacharya became known during the pandemic for authoring The Great Barrington Declaration, which sought to challenge the broader medical community’s prevailing notions about COVID-19 mitigation strategies, arguing that – in the long run – the lockdowns that people were facing would do more harm than good.

Dr. Marty Makary, a surgeon and public policy researcher at Johns Hopkins University, who is Trump’s nominee to be the next director of the FDA, is on the journal’s editorial board as well.  

JAPH is adopting a novel approach by publishing peer reviews of prominent studies from other journals that do not make their peer reviews publicly available. The effort is aimed at spurring scientific discourse, Kulldorff said in a paper outlining the purposes of the journal’s creation.

The journal will also seek to promote ‘open access’ by making all of its work available to everyone in the public without a paywall, he said, and the journal’s editorial leadership will allow all scientists within its network to ‘freely publish all their research results in a timely and efficient manner,’ to prevent any potential ‘gatekeeping.’

‘Scientific journals have had enormous positive impact on the development of science, but in some ways, they are now hampering rather than enhancing open scientific discourse,’ Kulldorff said. ‘After reviewing the history and current problems with journals, a new academic publishing model is proposed – it embraces open access and open rigorous peer review, it rewards reviewers for their important work with honoraria and public acknowledgment and it allows scientists to publish their research in a timely and efficient manner without wasting valuable scientist time and resources.’

Kulldorff, Bhattacharya, Makary and others on the new journal’s leadership team have complained that their views about the COVID-19 pandemic were censored. These were views that were often contrary to the prevailing ideas put forth by the broader medical community at the time, which related to topics such as vaccine efficacy, natural immunity, lockdowns and more.

‘Big tech censored the [sic] all kinds of science on natural immunity,’ Makary said in testimony to Congress following the pandemic. During his testimony, Makary also shared how one of his own studies at Johns Hopkins during the pandemic that promoted the effectiveness of natural immunity, which one scientific journal listed as its third most discussed study in 2022, ‘was censored.’

‘Because of my views on COVID-19 restrictions, I have been specifically targeted for censorship by federal government officials,’ Bhattacharya added in his own testimony to Congress the same year.

Kulldorff, who has also complained about censorship of his views on COVID-19, argued he was asked to leave his medical professorship at Harvard that he held since 2003, for ‘clinging to the truth’ in his opposition to COVID-19 lockdowns and vaccine mandates.

‘The JAPH will ensure quality through open peer-review, but will not gatekeep new and important ideas for the sake of established orthodoxies,’ Andrew Noymer, JAPH’s incoming editor-in-chief told Fox News Digital. 

‘To pick one example, in my own sub-field of infectious disease epidemiology, we have in the past few years seen too little published scholarship on the origins of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID. Academic publishing as it exists today is too often concerned with preservation of what we think we know, too often to the detriment of new ideas.’

Bhattacharya and Makary did not wish to comment on this article.

PARKERSBURG, W.V – This darling little town of 30,000 holds an astounding $36 trillion dollars of debt, but it’s not the people’s fault. Allow me to explain.  

Back in 1957, the Bureau of the National Debt was placed in this remote Appalachian city in case of national emergency, which presumably meant nuclear war. So, while New York, Chicago ,and DC were mushroom clouded, the federal government could continue banking. 

This is why, on Tuesday morning, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency will arrive in this pleasant hamlet to gain access to more of the comings and goings of America’s money.

The actual thing that exists here in Parkersburg is called the Central Accounting Reporting System (CARS). Some locals told me is resides in the basement of an old building in town. It’s all a little vague and spooky. 

What Musk and his team want is access to the real numbers, the payouts on our debt, our collections, what money is going where. This is where the answers reside. Every single day, the thousand or so federal employees in Parkersburg track and report on that debt.

On Monday evening at the Hotel Blennerhassett, built in 1889 and still an imposing and elegant centerpiece of the area, the impending visit from DOGE was already the talk of the town.  

‘This is a huge part of this city’s economy,’ one local retired attorney told me, adding, ‘We don’t know what’s going to happen to it.’ 

Local Democratic officials have been raising similar alarm bells, as well. Jeff Fox, the Wood County Democratic Party Chair said, ‘Our community relies heavily on the employment provided by the U.S. Treasury here in Parkersburg. The prospect of DOGE’s intervention raises serious questions about job security for our residents.’ 

Fair enough, except that all Musk’s DOGE team is seeking is access to data. There is nothing to suggest that the plan here is to fire anyone, except maybe for Musk’s sometimes overzealous rhetoric. 

And honestly, it is that trolling rhetoric that seems to be leading to the confusion. 

Musk and his team have taken to using a signature scene of the Gen X classic Office Space to explain DOGE. It is the Bobs, brought in to fire people, interrogate them as to ‘what they actually do here.’

But the point of those scenes was not that it was vital that Initech become more efficient, as the tech bros would have it. It was that Peter, the protagonist, wanted more than efficiency for his life. That is precisely why he confused them. 

On the ground in Parkersburg, I cannot provide you with a black and white story of good and evil, of graft and honesty. It’s more complicated than that. It always is. 

There is no apparent reason to think that Musk’s minions are rolling up to the Bureau of Fiscal Service, right across the street from the hotel, with a briefcase full of pink slips. What I saw today was a full parking lot of federal employees’ nice cars outside the building. These are people showing up.

Instead, what Musk really wants is a look under the hood of federal debt, and Parkersburg is absolutely its service station. There may be legitimate concerns about sensitive information contained within, but if President Trump has tasked Musk to suss it out, then he’s allowed to do that. 

I drove across the mountains to Parkersburg in my spunky red Mitsubishi Lancer because it’s the kind of place I like to report on. This DOGE intervention was icing on the cake. 

I don’t know what, if anything, local reaction will be to Musk’s DOGE invasion of Parkersburg Tuesday, but I’m here so I can find out.

Our federal government is probably the biggest and most important thing that has ever existed in the world. It won global wars hot and cold, it landed on the Moon, its glory knows no bounds. 

But all of that was funded in Parkersburg, West ‘By God’ Virginia, and this week, Donald Trump and Elon Musk will be going through the receipts. 

Nobody likes an audit, but maybe it’s time.