The Department of Education said Friday that it was moving to cut off all federal funding for Maine’s public schools because the state had ignored President Donald Trump’s executive order banning transgender athletes from girls’ sports teams.

The agency also said it had asked the Justice Department to pursue “enforcement action” against Maine, which the Trump administration has been targeting since the president picked a fight with the state’s Democratic governor, Janet Mills, over transgender athletes in February.

The administration had set Friday as the deadline for Maine to comply; last month, after a brief investigation, it declared that the state’s education system was violating Title IX, the federal law that prevents sex discrimination.

Mills has maintained that the state’s human rights law — which prohibits discrimination based on gender identity as well as religion, race and other protected characteristics — can be changed only by the Legislature, not by executive order. She has not expressed her own views on transgender athletes participating in girls’ and women’s sports publicly, though she has said it was an issue “worthy of a debate.”

The Education Department said in a statement that it would “initiate an administrative proceeding to adjudicate termination” of the state’s K-12 funding, which totaled $249 million in the 2024 fiscal year.

“The department has given Maine every opportunity to come into compliance with Title IX, but the state’s leaders have stubbornly refused to do so, choosing instead to prioritize an extremist ideological agenda over their students’ safety, privacy, and dignity,” Craig Trainor, the department’s acting assistant secretary for civil rights, said in the statement.

In a letter to the Education Department on Friday, Sarah A. Forster, an assistant state attorney general, said that Maine would not agree to change its law and conceded that the two sides had reached an impasse.

“Nothing in Title IX or its implementing regulations prohibits schools from allowing transgender girls and women to participate on girls’ and women’s sports teams,” she wrote. “Your letters to date do not cite a single case that so holds. To the contrary, various federal courts have held that Title IX and/or the Equal Protection Clause require schools to allow such participation.”

The Maine Principals’ Association, which supervises interscholastic athletics, has said that among the 151 public and private high schools it oversees statewide, there are two transgender girls currently competing on girls’ teams.

Pentagon sacks chief of Greenland base

The U.S. military announced Thursday that it had removed the commander of its Pituffik base in Greenland, adding that it would not tolerate any actions that go against President Donald Trump’s agenda.

The decision to remove Col. Susannah Meyers was announced in a statement by the U.S. Space Force that was posted on social media by Sean Parnell, the chief spokesperson for the Pentagon.

While the statement didn’t cite a specific reason for her removal, Parnell said that “actions to undermine the chain of command or to subvert President Trump’s agenda will not be tolerated.”

Parnell’s post contained a link to an article by Military.com, an independent news organization, that said Meyers had sent an email to base staff distancing herself from Vice President JD Vance’s visit March 28.

Vance visited the base as part of Trump’s push to take over Greenland, an island that is a semiautonomous part of Denmark, for national security reasons.

Trump gets first physical of new term

President Donald Trump, the oldest man to be inaugurated as president, was visiting Walter Reed National Military Medical Center for a physical Friday, the first of his new administration.

“I have never felt better, but nevertheless, these things must be done!” Trump, 78, posted on his social media site Monday, when he announced that he would be examined.

The physical could offer the first glimpse of the health of Trump, who has often been guarded about even the most basic medical information since he was shot in an assassination attempt at a campaign rally in July.

He has long been phobic about germs and disease. According to many of his former presidential and business aides, Trump has tried to avoid ever appearing sick.

Man charged after threatening Trump

Shawn Monper, 32, of Butler, Pennsylvania, is accused of making threatening comments on YouTube over several weeks targeting the Republican president, Elon Musk and Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, the department said on Friday.

Investigators say Monper got a firearms permit shortly after Trump’s January inauguration and then commented online that he had bought “several guns and been stocking up on ammo since Trump got in office.”

Attorney General Pam Bondi thanked law enforcement for arresting “this individual before he could carry out his threats against President Trump’s life and the lives of other innocent Americans.”

NOAA’s research division could be cut

Trump administration officials are recommending the elimination of the scientific research division at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, according to internal documents obtained by The New York Times and several people with knowledge of the situation.

The proposal from the Office of Management and Budget would abolish the Oceanic and Atmospheric Research office at NOAA, one of the world’s premier Earth sciences research centers.

A budget allocation of just over $170 million, down from about $485 million in 2024, would hobble science as varied as early warning systems for natural disasters, science education for students in kindergarten through high school, and the study of the Arctic, where temperatures have increased nearly four times as fast as the rest of the planet over the past four decades.

Programs that retained funding, including research into tornado warnings and ocean acidification, would be relocated to the National Weather Service and National Ocean Service offices.

The outline for the 2026 budget passback, which would need to be approved by Congress, suggests “significant reductions to education, grants, research, and climate-related programs within NOAA.”

U.N. agency faces cuts for lack of funding

The U.N. humanitarian agency said it is cutting its 2,600 staff operating in more than 60 countries by 20% because of “brutal cuts” in funding that have left it with a nearly $60 million shortfall.

U.N. humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher said in a letter obtained Friday by The Associated Press that “the humanitarian community was already underfunded, overstretched and literally, under attack” before the recent funding cuts.

Fletcher said OCHA had an overall budget of around $430 million for 2025, noting that several countries have announced or implemented cuts to the agency’s extra-budgetary resources. He singled out the United States.

“The U.S. alone has been the largest humanitarian donor for decades,” he said, and the biggest contributor to OCHA’s extra-budgetary resources, paying about 20% — which amounts to $63 million for 2025. He did not say whether the U.S. had cut that amount.

President Donald Trump has dismantled the U.S. Agency for International Development, which was responsible for humanitarian aid, and has drastically curtailed funding that has kept millions of people alive around the world.

Protections to end for 10k immigrants

The Trump administration will end temporary protections for more than 10,000 people from Afghanistan and Cameroon, putting them on track for deportation in May and June, Department of Homeland Security officials said Friday.

The people had been living in the United States legally under temporary protected status, which is meant to shield migrants from being returned to countries facing conflict or natural disasters. People who have the protected status are also allowed to work in the United States.

The Trump administration has targeted TPS as part of its broad crackdown on immigration. Trump officials say the program is being used improperly, to allow people to stay in the United States indefinitely. Already this year, the administration has tried to cut off Venezuelans from TPS and shortened the time that Haitians can have the protections.

The effort could face legal challenges. Earlier this month, Judge Edward M. Chen, a federal court judge in San Francisco, temporarily blocked the Trump administration from ending TPS for Venezuelans.

U.S. to probe N.J. immigrant policies

The top federal prosecutor in New Jersey said she had directed lawyers in her office to investigate the state’s Democratic governor and attorney general over a statewide policy that limits how much help local police can provide federal immigration officers.

The prosecutor, Alina Habba, called the inquiry a “warning for everybody” in announcing it late Thursday during an appearance on Fox News. She said she was singling out Phil Murphy, the governor, and Matthew J. Platkin, the attorney general, for scrutiny.

Anybody who gets “in the way” of President Donald Trump’s efforts to deport migrants will be charged “for obstruction, for concealment,” Habba, the interim U.S. attorney in New Jersey, warned.

The move is part of a broader effort by Trump, a Republican, to use the Justice Department to punish Democratic state and city officials who refuse to help carry out the administration’s immigration agenda and to quash so-called sanctuary policies.

Trump wants to end clock changing

President Donald Trump on Friday urged Congress to “push hard for more Daylight at the end of a day” in his latest dig at the semiannual changing of clocks.

Trump, in a post on his Truth Social media network, said it would be “Very popular and, most importantly, no more changing of the clocks, a big inconvenience and, for our government, A VERY COSTLY EVENT!!!”

The Republican president’s position calling for more daylight would push the schedule forward, keeping the country on daylight saving time. His post came a day after a Senate panel heard testimony examining whether to set one time all year instead of shifting.

— From news services