Before January, most Americans had probably never heard of the Bureau of the Fiscal Service (BFS), a Treasury Department agency that distributes payments from the federal government. But over the last month, this corner of government has appeared again and again in the headlines, as aides working with Elon Musk’s quasi-governmental DOGE initiative successfully gained access to BFS’s payment systems. After a flurry of litigation , a temporary restraining order now ba...
Feb 21, 2025•57 min
This week, Scott sat down with his colleagues Tyler McBrien and Roger Parloff, as well as special guest Claire Meynial, U.S. correspondent for Le Point, to talk over the week's big national security news, including: “Make Europe Aghast Again.” Vice President J.D. Vance stunned the Munich Security Conference last week with remarks that criticized European allies for suppressing far-right and anti-immigration voices while playing down threats from China and Russia. Combined with the Trump adm...
Feb 20, 2025•1 hr 16 min
On Jan. 29, President Trump ordered the expansion of facilities at Guantanamo Bay to hold migrants being deported from the United States. It was the latest—and perhaps most aggressive—move to deploy the U.S. military in pursuit of the administration's immigration policies. And it's not at all clear that there's a solid legal basis for doing it. Executive Editor Natalie Orpett sat down with Chris Mirasola, Assistant Professor at the University of Houston Law Center and author of a recent pi...
Feb 20, 2025•37 min
It’s been a wild and wooly week in Ukraine politics: Speeches from American officials have not been consistent with each other, American statements on Ukraine at the Munich Security Conference were not well received by European leaders, and domestic politics in Ukraine are getting worrisome. Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes sits down with Eric Ciaramella of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace to talk about all of these issues and more. We value your feedback! Help us impro...
Feb 19, 2025•1 hr 1 min
Matt Perault, Head of AI Policy at Andreessen Horowitz, joins Kevin Frazier, Contributing Editor at Lawfare and Adjunct Professor at Delaware Law, to define the Little Tech Agenda and explore how adoption of the Agenda may shape AI development across the country. The duo also discuss the current AI policy landscape. We value your feedback! Help us improve by sharing your thoughts at lawfaremedia.org/survey . Your input ensures that we deliver what matters most to you. Thank you for your su...
Feb 18, 2025•40 min
In a live conversation on February 14 , Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes spoke to Lawfare Senior Editors Anna Bower, Scott Anderson, and Roger Parloff and Managing Editor Tyler McBrien about the lawsuits challenging executive actions by President Trump and his administration, including the foreign aid freeze, access to Treasury Department systems by associates of the Department of Government Efficiency, and the firing of the head of the Office of the Special C...
Feb 17, 2025•1 hr 13 min
From August 18, 2021: Earlier this month, Tucker Carlson, whose nightly news show on Fox has become the most popular show in U.S. cable news history, traveled to Budapest to record a special version of his show. The centerpiece of his visit was an interview with Hungary's authoritarian leader, Viktor Orbán. But far from criticizing Orbán or questioning him on Hungary's increasing move away from liberal democracy, Carlson was all compliments, praising the fence that Hungary has built along its bo...
Feb 16, 2025•56 min
From July 14, 2020: In a 2018 poll, 74 percent of Americans said they believed that some group of unelected government and military officials was definitely or probably secretly manipulating or directing national policy. What is the actual history of presidents and Congress clashing with national security and law enforcement institutions? And how has that led to Trump's notion of a deep state out to get him? David Priess spoke with two-time Pulitzer Prize winner David Rohde of The New Yorker, wh...
Feb 15, 2025•52 min
In the last two years, there have been at least four incidents of damaged underwater infrastructure in the Baltic Sea. Be it Russian deliberate sabotage or accidents, NATO is looking for ways to enhance Europe’s maritime security. In this episode, Lawfare ’s Ukraine Fellow Anastasiia Lapatina sits down with Minna Ålander, an Associate Fellow at Chatham House’s Europe Programme, to discuss what Europe can do to protect its waters. We value your feedback! Help us improve by sharing your thou...
Feb 14, 2025•33 min
Only a few weeks have passed since inauguration, but President Trump's barrage of executive orders has already generated dozens of legal challenges . Which raises the question: are the courts up to the job? Executive Editor Natalie Orpett sat down with Benjamin Wittes, Lawfare 's Editor-in-Chief, to discuss his recent article, “ Are the Courts Up to the Situation? ,” published in Lawfare earlier this week. They talked about the courts' role in the face of unprecedented assertions of e...
Feb 13, 2025•47 min
This week, Scott sat down with his Lawfare teammates Tyler McBrien and Nastya Lapatina and Lawfare friend Joel Braunold, Managing Director of the S. Daniel Abraham Center for Middle East Peace, to talk over the week's big national security news stories, including: “Mi Gaza Es Su Gaza.” President Donald Trump shocked the world last week when, in a joint press briefing with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, he announced plans for the United States to “own...
Feb 12, 2025•1 hr 25 min
Jack Goldsmith, the Learned Hand Professor at Harvard Law School and co-founder of Lawfare , joins Alan Rozenshtein, Associate Professor of Law at the University of Minnesota and Senior Editor at Lawfare , to talk about his recent Lawfare article discussing last year's Supreme Court decision in Trump v. United States and its implications for executive power. They discuss how the ruling extends beyond presidential immunity, the broader shift toward a maximalist theory of executive aut...
Feb 12, 2025•52 min
Chris Miller, a professor at the Fletcher School at Tufts University and Nonresident Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and Marshall Kosloff, Senior Fellow at the Niskanen Center and co-host of the Realignment Podcast, join Kevin Frazier, a Contributing Editor at Lawfare and adjunct professor at Delaware Law, and Alan Rozenshtein, Senior Editor at Lawfare and associate professor of law at the University of Minnesota, to discuss AI, supply chains, and the Abundance Agenda. We val...
Feb 11, 2025•45 min
In a live conversation on February 7 , Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes spoke to Lawfare Senior Editors Anna Bower, Quinta Jurecic, and Roger Parloff about the lawsuits against executive actions by President Trump and his administration, including the actions by DOGE to gain access to executive agencies, the attempt to dissolve USAID, the attempt to produce a list and potentially fire FBI agent and employees who were involved with the Jan. 6 investigations, and mor...
Feb 10, 2025•54 min
From August 22, 2023: In 2003, President Bush created the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR, and in the twenty years since, the program has been credited with saving over 25 million lives and stabilizing health systems around the world. On Sept. 30, 2023, the program will expire if Congress doesn’t act, putting millions of people at risk of losing access to HIV/AIDS treatment. Lawfare Associate Editor of Communications Anna Hickey sat down with Emily Bass, a writer and ...
Feb 09, 2025•41 min
From August 31, 2020: Earlier this month, the Trump administration re-imposed tariffs on aluminum imports from Canada, signaling a new salvo in the now years-long trade war it has been waging with countless U.S. trading partners. But what gives the president the authority to pursue such measures unilaterally, even when he lacks support from members of his own party in Congress? To talk through this question, Scott R. Anderson sat down with Kathleen Claussen of the University of Miami School of L...
Feb 08, 2025•56 min
On today’s podcast, Lawfare Associate Editor for Communications Anna Hickey spoke to Nayna Gupta, Director of Policy at the American Immigration Council, about the Laken Riley Act, the first piece of legislation signed by President Trump in his second term, its start as a messaging bill in the last Congress, and its impact on the immigration detention system. We value your feedback! Help us improve by sharing your thoughts at lawfaremedia.org/survey . Your input ensures that we...
Feb 07, 2025•34 min
Lawfare Foreign Policy Editor and Georgetown professor Daniel Byman sits down with Holly Berkley Fletcher, a former Senior Africa Analyst at the Central Intelligence Agency, to discuss the complex and tragic situation in Sudan and her recent Lawfare article on the subject, “ The Sudan War and the Limits of American Power .” They talk about the initial hope following the overthrow of Omar al-Bashir in 2019, the subsequent military conflicts in Sudan, the country’s humanitarian crisis, the role of...
Feb 06, 2025•29 min
This week, Scott sat down with his Lawfare colleagues Benjamin Wittes, Molly Reynolds, and Anna Bower to talk through another big week of national security news, including: “Checked Out and Off Balance.” Over its first two weeks in office, the Trump administration has pushed against the traditional limits of congressional authority by unlawfully impounding funds, terminating federal employees contrary to statute, and seeking to dismantle at least one federal agency contrary to statute. But the R...
Feb 05, 2025•1 hr 17 min
On Jan. 28, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) sent out an email offering a “deferred resignation program” to over 2 million federal employees, encouraging them to resign effective Sept. 30. The offer is only open until Feb. 6—and in the intervening days since OPM announced the program, federal employees have received a blizzard of followup emails offering confusing and rapidly changing information. Writing in Lawfare , Nick Bednar has examined the OPM offer an...
Feb 05, 2025•48 min
Today’s episode is a recording of Feb. 3 livestream that Senior Editor Scott R. Anderson hosted with George Ingram and Tony Pipa, both Senior Fellows in Global Economy and Development at the Brookings Institution, and Jonathan Katz, Senior Director of the Anti-Corruption, Democracy, and Security project also at Brookings—all three of whom are also alumni of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). Among other topics, they discussed the USAID’s tumultuous experience over the first t...
Feb 04, 2025•56 min
Nema Milaninia, a former prosecutor at the International Criminal Court and International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia and a current partner at the law firm King & Spalding, joins Lawfare Managing Editor Tyler McBrien to discuss legislation in the U.S. Congress and recent executive actions taken by the Trump administration to, once again, sanction the International Criminal Court. Milaninia discusses what is motivating the most recent sanctions campaign, brok...
Feb 03, 2025•44 min
From May 9, 2022: Many individuals seeking asylum or other forms of immigration relief in the U.S. are subject to a program run by Immigration Customs Enforcement, or ICE, called the Intensive Supervision Appearance Program, which uses various kinds of tracking technologies as a way of keeping tabs on individuals who are not detained in ICE custody. Stephanie Pell sat down with Sejal Zota, legal director of Just Futures Law, to talk about this program and the kinds of tracking technologies it em...
Feb 02, 2025•36 min
In a live conversation on January 30 , Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes spoke to Lawfare Senior Editors Anna Bower, Quinta Jurecic, and Roger Parloff and contributing editor Renee DiResta about the confirmation hearings of Kash Patel to be FBI director, Tulsi Gabbard to be the director of national intelligence, and Robert F. Kennedy to be the health and human services secretary. Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/lawfare . Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/p...
Feb 01, 2025•1 hr 7 min
For today’s episode, Lawfare General Counsel and Senior Editor Scott R. Anderson sat down with Chris Mirasola, an assistant professor at the University of Houston Law Center and former Defense Department lawyer, to talk through the ways that the Trump administration is using the military to enforce its new immigration policies. They discussed the steps the Trump administration has taken thus far, from transporting migrants on military flights to threatening to send them to Guantanamo Bay; the le...
Jan 31, 2025•44 min
This week, the Office of Management and Budget announced a breathtakingly broad freeze on federal funds—before scrambling to clarify that freeze and seemingly rolling it back only two days later. The crisis touches on profound questions about the congressional power of the purse and limitations on presidential power under the Impoundment Control Act. To explain what’s going on, Lawfare Senior Editor Quinta Jurecic spoke with Eloise Pasachoff, a professor at Georgetown Law School, and Zachary Pri...
Jan 30, 2025•50 min
This week, Scott was joined by his colleagues Kevin and Eugenia—in what is sadly her last episode before leaving Lawfare —as well as special guest Peter Harrell for a deep dive into the week’s national security news, including: “Tariff or Takeoff.” The Trump administration got into what is arguably its first major international spat this week when Colombia’s refusal to accept a U.S. military flight returning migrants to that country led President Trump to threaten an array of punitive measures, ...
Jan 29, 2025•1 hr 16 min
Peter Hyun, then-Acting Chief of the Enforcement Bureau at the Federal Communications Commission, discusses with Lawfare Contributing Editor Justin Sherman the FCC’s data security and cybersecurity enforcement authorities and how those authorities fit into addressing national security threats to the communications supply chain. He covers some recent enforcement actions and issues in this area, ranging from the FCC’s data breach notification rule to submarine cables to rip-and-replace efforts tar...
Jan 29, 2025•38 min
In today’s episode, Lawfare Senior Editor Alan Z. Rozenshtein speaks with his University of Minnesota Law colleague, Nick Bednar, about the wave of Day 1 executive orders affecting the civil service. Bednar recently analyzed these orders in a piece for Lawfare . They discuss what the orders say, how they might be challenged in court, and what this means for the next four years and beyond. To receive ad-free podcasts, become a Lawfare Material Supporter at www.patreo...
Jan 28, 2025•1 hr 5 min
In a live conversation on January 23 , Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes spoke to Lawfare Senior Editors Scott R. Anderson, Anna Bower, Quinta Jurecic, and Alan Rozenshtein and assistant law professor at Pace University Amelia Wilson about the first batch of executive orders by President Trump in his second term, including suspending enforcement of the TikTok ban, the use of the military at the border, the birthright citizenship order, and the legal challenges some ...
Jan 27, 2025•56 min
