President Trump has pardoned former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, who was convicted of corruption-related crimes, including trying to sell a U.S. Senate seat vacated by former President Barack Obama.

Blagojevich served as the state’s governor from 2003-’09. It was a political saga toward the end of his time in office.

In 2008, federal prosecutors accused Blagojevich of turning Illinois’ government into a moneymaking operation for himself by trying to, among other things, shake down a children’s hospital and racetrack owners. When prosecutors charged Blagojevich with corruption over the Senate seat, they presented as evidence a profanity-filled telephone conversation he had that was secretly recorded by the FBI.

“I mean, I’ve got this thing, and it’s [expletive] golden. And I’m just not giving it up for [expletive] nothing,” Blagojevich said.

He argued that he simply engaged in political horse-trading, and he went on a national publicity tour to proclaim his innocence.

Blagojevich was impeached and ousted as governor in January 2009 and then indicted that March. The following year, he appeared and was booted off Donald Trump’s reality TV show, Celebrity Apprentice.

Blagojevich was convicted in 2011 and later sentenced to 14 years in prison. He served eight years, his time behind bars cut short after President Trump commuted Blagojevich’s sentence during his first term in office.

Many leading Illinois Democrats and Republicans criticized the move. The then-chairman of Illinois’ Republican Party said in a statement that in a state where corrupt machine style politics is all too common, it’s important that those found guilty serve their prison sentence in its entirety.

After he was released from prison, Blagojevich and his wife, Patti, held a news conference. He was a freed political prisoner, calling the criminal justice system both broken and unfair.

“We want to express our most profound and everlasting gratitude to President Trump,” Blagojevich said. “How do you properly thank someone who has given you back the freedom that was stolen from you?”

The former Democratic governor also declared himself a “Trump-ocrat.”

President Trump said he was granting Blagojevich a full pardon. He called Blagojevich’s sentence a “terrible injustice” and he called the former Illinois governor, a nice man.

Kristen Chapman had already moved her family from Tennessee to Virginia to try to find a state that would be more welcoming to her transgender daughter, Willow.

After months waiting for an appointment at the gender-affirming care clinic at VCU Health in Richmond, Willow had one on the calendar on Jan. 29. President Trump’s executive order limiting transgender health care for youth came out in the afternoon of Jan. 28.

“Just a few hours before our appointment, VCU told us they would not be able to provide Willow with care,” Chapman says.

Chapman is a plaintiff in a lawsuit against the Trump administration brought by the ACLU and Lambda Legal. The suit seeks to block the order from taking effect, but even before a formal policy was enacted, the order began to be enforced. The White House issued a press release pointing to hospitals that had immediately canceled appointments: NYU Langone in New York City, UCHealth in Denver, Children’s National in Washington, D.C., and others.

“I thought Virginia would be a safe place for me and my daughter. Instead I am heartbroken, tired and scared,” Chapman says on a press call announcing the lawsuit last week.

Conflicting directives

ACLU senior counsel Joshua Block, who was also on the call, says Congress has passed laws prohibiting hospitals and health centers that receive federal funds from discriminating against patients on the basis of sex, and courts have found that those protections extend to transgender patients. “President Trump’s executive orders attempt to direct grant recipients to do precisely what Congress has prohibited them from doing,” Block says. “Congress said don’t discriminate, and President Trump is saying you have to discriminate.”

The day after the lawsuit was filed, 15 attorneys general including from California, Maine, and Wisconsin issued a statement warning hospitals they must not cancel appointments or they would be violating state anti-discrimination laws.

So what is a hospital to do?

The American Hospital Association told NPR they are not providing guidance to hospitals right now about how to navigate this. The Children’s Hospital Association told NPR they are reviewing the order.

The care at issue includes puberty blockers and cross-sex hormone therapy — medications that help transgender teens develop characteristics that align with their gender identity. Use of these treatments is supported by major American medical groups including the American Academy of Pediatrics.

Major funding at risk

The stakes are high for hospitals because Trump’s executive order directs the government to take actions to end transgender care for people under age 19 through “regulatory and sub-regulatory actions.” At the top of the list of laws and programs that might be involved in such actions is “Medicare or Medicaid conditions of participation or conditions for coverage.”

The order is not tremendously clear, but Medicare and Medicaid are huge funding streams in nearly every hospital in the country, which could explain why the executive order appears to have had a chilling effect on care even while it’s challenged in court. Seattle, New York City, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. all had protests outside children’s hospitals that decided to cancel appointments.

Some hospital systems continued to provide care, including Mass General Brigham in Boston and Oregon Health & Science University in Portland, Or. (At least one hospital that initially canceled an appointment, Children’s Wisconsin, ended up rescheduling that patient amid the legal uncertainty.)

Hailed by conservative think tank

For those who support Trump on restricting health care for transgender youth, it’s a victory.

“I think this is fantastic what President Trump has done to protect children in this country,” says Terry Schilling, president of the American Principles Project, which has urged states and the federal government to limit access to what he calls “sex trait modification procedures.”

Schilling says that “this is a real problem — gender dysphoria exists,” but that medical treatments like hormones and puberty blockers shouldn’t be given to minors.

People who support state bans on gender-affirming care for young people gathered outside the U.S. Supreme Court on Dec. 4, when a case brought against Tennessee’s ban was heard.

Al Drago/Bloomberg via Getty Images

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Al Drago/Bloomberg via Getty Images

“The compromise that the American people have made and [President] Donald Trump has made is that we will allow adults to go through these procedures, but when it comes to children, we’re not going to allow it,” he says.

Still, Schilling acknowledges that the executive order is not sufficient to end gender-affirming care for youth on its own. “I think it’s got a little bit more to play out,” he says.

The Supreme Court is set to rule in the coming months on whether a state gender-affirming care ban for youth constitutes sex discrimination, he notes, and he would like to see Congress act. “We have to get votes in Congress,” he says. “We have to hold senators and members of Congress accountable for these procedures.”

About half of states have gender-affirming care bans for minors on the books; not all of them are in force at the moment.

Legal issues ahead?

With the executive order, the president is trying to attach new conditions to federal grants to hospitals and clinics, explains Katie Eyer, a professor of law at Rutgers University in New Jersey.

“The president doesn’t have any unilateral authority to do this,” she says. That’s a key distinction between this effort and the Hyde Amendment, which limits federal spending on abortion.

Jon Schweppe, policy director at Schilling’s organization, told NPR in November that a Hyde Amendment for gender-affirming care was a goal he hoped the Trump administration would pursue. This executive order is considerably more sweeping than the amendment because it could implicate all federal funding going to a hospital or clinic, not just funding for this particular kind of care.

There’s another difference, Eyer points out. The Hyde Amendment “was established by Congress, went through constitutional challenges and was affirmed,” she says. None of that process has happened in this case.

In ordinary times, she says, hospitals could simply take an order like this to court and trust they would win. But now, there’s a lot of uncertainty about how the courts and Congress are going to respond to this order and other executive orders from the White House, and federal funding could theoretically be cut off to hospitals in the interim. Some recipients of federal health grants have reported intermittent problems receiving reimbursement. The office involved has said it is due to “technical issues,” but it has grantees on edge.

“So that really does put regulated entities [like hospitals] in a predicament,” Eyer says.

The ACLU lawsuit is asking the court for a temporary restraining order while the legal process plays out. In the meantime, hospitals and clinics are making their best guesses on how to proceed, and families and trans young people are waiting.

The main U.S. agency tasked with overseeing the financial products and services used by everyday Americans — from credit cards to checking accounts to home loans — is the latest target of the Trump administration’s effort to remake the federal government.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s new leader has shuttered the agency’s headquarters and told staffers to stay at home and refrain from doing any work.

The Trump administration team run by tech billionaire Elon Musk is also focusing some of its efforts on the CFPB. The Department of Government Efficiency — or DOGE — has accessed the CFPB’s internal computer systems and deleted its public-facing social media accounts. In recent weeks Musk has criticized the CFPB in posts on X, the social media site he owns, at one point posting: “CFPB RIP.”

Here’s what to know about the CFPB.

It was created in response to the 2008 financial crisis

Washington was looking for solutions after the devastating collapse of the U.S. banking system in 2008, which left many Americans with financial losses and raised questions about the operations of the country’s financial institutions.

One year later, then-President Obama proposed creating a new federal agency focused exclusively on protecting consumers from dubious financial products.

Backers of the idea argued that because several federal agencies were regulating the consumer banking system, there were gaps in oversight that left consumers vulnerable or confused. The new agency would consolidate those regulatory responsibilities in one place.

Some Republicans and banks opposed the idea, but its creation was included in the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, which was passed by Congress and signed by Obama in 2010.

What does the CFPB do?

An independent bureau within the Federal Reserve, the CFPB’s job is to ensure that the financial products and services offered to American consumers are fair and transparent.

It implements U.S. consumer finance laws and issues new rules for lenders and other financial institutions, such as one announced last year to wipe medical debt from credit reports. The CFPB also goes after companies it suspects of dishonest or illegal activity.

“At its core, it’s a law enforcement agency,” Rohit Chopra, the former director of the CFPB appointed by President Biden, told NPR on Monday. “It takes big financial institutions to court who cheat consumers, whether it’s a credit reporting agency or a large bank or a credit card giant.”

In December, the CFPB sued Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo for allegedly failing to protect customers from fraud on the payment app Zelle. Last month it sued Capitol One for failing to pay more than $2 billion in interest to its customers for advertising a high-yield checking account that actually paid an interest rate close to zero.

The agency says that, since its inception, it’s helped consumers to the tune of $21 billion through monetary compensation, loan principal reductions, canceled debt and more.

The CFPB had a budget of $823 million in the 2025 fiscal year. Its funding comes through quarterly transfers from the Fed itself, which the CFPB requests.

The CFPB has faced criticism for years — including from Trump

The agency has long faced pushback from the banking industry and some Republicans, including Trump himself.

During Trump’s first term, his administration took steps to weaken the CFPB, after the Republican vowed during his 2016 presidential campaign that he would “get rid” of Dodd-Frank.

Office of Management and Budget director Mick Mulvaney said in 2018 that the administration would “fulfill the Bureau’s statutory responsibilities, but go no further.”

Kathy Kraninger, one of the CFPB directors during Trump’s first term, was criticized for relaxing certain rules for financial institutions. Trump also proposed slashing CFPB’s funding.

In a post on X on Sunday, acting CFPB director Russell Vought said the CFPB had been “a woke & weaponized agency against disfavored industries and individuals for a long time. This must end.”

What’s next for the CFPB?

In addition to shuttering CFPB offices and telling staff to remain at home, Vought said in a post on X over the weekend that the agency would “not be taking its next draw of unappropriated funding because it is not ‘reasonably necessary’ to carry out its duties.”

For now, CFPB can use the money it has in its reserve fund to continue to pay salaries and operating expenses.

The Republican staff of the U.S. Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs said in a post on X that “[a]ccountability at the CFPB is long overdue” and that Vought would “bring responsibility back to the CFPB & refocus its mission to serve the American people.”

Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, who helped launch the CFPB, said in a series of posts on X that the CFPB was created by Congress and that no one in the Trump administration “can illegally shut down its work.”

Warren warned that gutting the CFPB would mean that “CEOs on Wall Street will once again be free to cheat you out of your savings.”

A federal judge in Rhode Island has found that the Trump administration has continued to improperly freeze some federal funds, despite a temporary restraining order issued late last month blocking its efforts to pause payments for grants and other federal programs.

In a five-page order issued Monday, U.S. District Court Judge John McConnell, Jr. wrote that the administration, in several instances, has continued “to improperly freeze federal funds and refused to resume disbursement of appropriated federal funds.”

The Trump administration has said the freeze is necessary in order to review federal funding to make sure it aligns with the president’s agenda. But in his order, McConnell said the freeze was “likely unconstitutional and has caused and continues to cause irreparable harm to a vast portion of this country.”

Monday’s order came in response to a lawsuit brought by attorneys general in 22 states and the District of Columbia. In his decision, McConnell ordered the administration to “immediately restore frozen funding” and “immediately end any federal funding pause” that affects the challengers.

The case is one of two lawsuits filed against the administration in response to the attempted funding pause, originally detailed in a memo by the Office of Management and Budget in late January.

In addition to the order in Rhode Island, a federal judge in Washington, D.C. has also issued a temporary restraining order against the administration — blocking the memo from taking effect and barring the administration from carrying it out “under a different name.”