The acting administrator of the Department of Government Efficiency is a low-profile executive who has expertise in health care technology and had worked in the first Trump administration.

The White House on Tuesday afternoon identified Amy Gleason as the acting leader of DOGE, which has been pushing agencies to fire employees, cancel contracts and make other budget cuts.

Although DOGE’s cuts have been championed by billionaire Elon Musk and his associates, the White House has insisted that Musk is overseeing the effort as a senior adviser to President Donald Trump, not a DOGE employee.

The identity of who was technically running DOGE had been a mystery, even though an executive order signed by Trump last month called for the appointment of an administrator to report to the White House. A government lawyer on Monday told a judge that he didn’t know who that person was, and White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt had declined to identify the person earlier Tuesday in a press briefing.

“There are career officials and there are political appointees who are helping run DOGE on a day-to-day basis,” she said.

Gleason, 53, worked from 2018 through 2021 in the United States Digital Service, an agency that has been renamed the US DOGE Service, according to her LinkedIn profile. In that role, she worked with the White House on the federal response to the coronavirus pandemic.

She returned to the agency in January after Trump took office. DOGE and Gleason did not respond to an email seeking comment on Tuesday.

Gleason was scheduled to be on vacation in Mexico on Tuesday and told associates that she was not aware ahead of time that the White House planned to make public her role, according to people familiar with the situation, who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retaliation.

‘Gold card’ offered to rich foreign investors

President Donald Trump said Tuesday that he plans to offer a “gold card” visa with a path to citizenship for $5 million, replacing a 35-year-old visa for investors.

“They’ll be wealthy and they’ll be successful, and they’ll be spending a lot of money and paying a lot of taxes and employing a lot of people, and we think it’s going to be extremely successful,” Trump said in the Oval Office.

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said the “Trump Gold Card” would replace EB-5 visas in two weeks. EB-5s were created by Congress in 1990 to generate foreign investment and are available to people who spend about $1 million on a company that employs at least 10 people.

Lutnick said the gold card — actually a green card, or permanent legal residency — would raise the price of admission for investors and do away with fraud and “nonsense” that he said characterize the EB-5 program. Like other green cards, it would include a path to citizenship.

Judge orders refugee program to continue

A federal judge in Seattle on Tuesday blocked President Donald Trump’s suspension of the nation’s refugee admissions system, saying that while the president has broad authority over who comes into the country, he cannot nullify the law passed by Congress establishing the program.

The ruling came in a lawsuit brought by individual refugees whose efforts to resettle in the U.S. have been halted as well as major refugee aid groups, who argued that they have had to lay off staff because the administration froze funding for processing refugee applications overseas as well as support, such as short-term rental assistance for those already in the U.S.

U.S. District Judge Jamal Whitehead, a 2023 ap

pointee of former President Joe Biden, said after hearing arguments Tuesday that the president’s actions amounted to an “effective nullification of congressional will” in setting up the nation’s refugee admissions program. He promised to offer a fuller rationale in a written opinion in the next few days.

Justice Department lawyer August Flentje indicated to the judge that the government might quickly appeal.

U.S. to create illegal residents registry

The Trump administration is creating a registry for all people who are in the United States illegally, and those who don’t self-report could face fines or prosecution, immigration officials announced Tuesday.

Everyone who is in the U.S. illegally must register, give fingerprints and provide an address, the Department of Homeland Security said in a statement. It cited a section of the Immigration and Nationality Act — the complex immigration law — as justification for the registration process, which would apply to anyone 14 and older.

The announcement comes as the administration seeks to make good on campaign promises to carry out mass deportations of people in the country illegally and seal the border to future asylum-seekers.

“An alien’s failure to register is a crime that could result in a fine, imprisonment, or both,” the statement said. “For decades, this law has been ignored — not anymore.”

On its website, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service said it would soon create a form and process for registration.

It was not immediately clear how many people living in the country illegally would voluntarily come forward and give the federal government information about who they are and where they’re living. But failure to register would be considered a crime, and the administration has said its initial priority target for deportation is people who’ve committed crimes in the U.S.

Judge orders federal grants to resume

A federal judge agreed Tuesday to continue blocking President Donald Trump’s administration from freezing grants and loans potentially totaling trillions of dollars.

U.S. District Judge Loren AliKhan in Washington, D.C., issued a preliminary injunction requested by groups representing thousands of nonprofits and small businesses. It’s the first such order since the Trump administration announced a sweeping pause on federal aid, stirring up a wave of confusion and anxiety across the U.S.

The judge said the administration “cannot pretend that the nationwide chaos and paralysis from two weeks ago is some distant memory with no bearing on this case.”

Last month, the White House said it would temporarily halt federal funding to ensure that the payments complied with Trump’s agenda. Government lawyers argued that the court lacks the constitutional authority to block a funding pause.

Organizations represented by the advocacy group Democracy Forward argued that the funding freeze violates their First Amendment rights.

Feds given 2 days to resume foreign aid

A federal judge on Tuesday gave the Trump administration less than two days to release billions of dollars in U.S. foreign aid, saying the administration had given no sign of complying with his nearly two-week-old court order to ease its funding freeze.

The lawsuit was filed by nonprofit organizations over the cutoff of foreign assistance through the U.S. Agency for International Development and State Department, which followed a Jan. 20 executive order by President Donald Trump targeting what he portrayed as wasteful programs that do not correspond to his foreign policy goals.

U.S. District Judge Amir H. Ali on Feb. 13 had ordered the administration at least temporarily to get funding flowing again, including to make good on its bills. Despite the order, USAID staffers and the businesses and nonprofit groups say they know of no payments that have gotten through.

— From news services