• National Guard: Troops began to deploy in Washington, D.C., as part of President Trump’s plan to crack down on crime there.
• Museums: The White House said it would review exhibitions at the Smithsonian Institution. It said the museums would have 120 days to replace “divisive or ideologically driven language.”
• Economy: A key inflation measure rose in July as businesses grappled with tariffs.

By Evan Gorelick

I’m a writer for The Morning.

• Climate science. In the name of deregulation, the Trump administration rejected the scientific consensus that greenhouse gases threaten public health. Trump’s budget eliminates funding for a Hawaii lab that has collected climate data for 70 years. The administration is shuttering the E.P.A.’s scientific research arm. It also retired an extreme-weather project that tracked the costs of natural disasters and said it would stop updating a database that companies use to calculate their emissions.
• The census. Trump has ordered a new population count that excludes illegal immigrants; his allies hope it will lift their allotment of seats in Congress. It may not have that result — and Trump may not have the authority to call a mid-decade recount — but the census affects federal funding and tells us who we are as a nation. The administration also ended several Census Bureau surveys, disbanded expert advisory committees and pushed out 1,300 employees.
• Gender and D.E.I. The government scrubbed more than 8,000 web pages after Trump signed executive orders targeting diversity initiatives and what he calls “gender ideology.” In one instance, the administration tried to delete a federal database that included information on whether teens identified as transgender. When a court required that the government keep it online, the C.D.C. added a note: “This page does not reflect biological reality and therefore the Administration and this Department rejects it.”

• Inspectors general. The president has fired or demoted more than 20 people in independent offices responsible for making sure the government works properly. The remaining employees told Luke Broadwater, one of our White House correspondents, that they are now reluctant to pursue investigations that could elicit political blowback.
• The Fed. Trump has repeatedly threatened to oust Jerome Powell, chair of the Federal Reserve, for refusing to lower interest rates. The independence of central bankers is protected by law, and White House meddling can boost inflation and hurt growth in the long run, writes Colby Smith, who covers the Fed.
• Health officials. Trump’s health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., fired all 17 experts from the C.D.C.’s vaccine advisory committee. They held that vaccines, including Covid shots, were safe and effective. Kennedy disagrees.
• Courts. Judges are supposed to interpret laws impartially, away from political pressures. But Trump has attacked judges who have scuttled his agenda. Last month, the Justice Department filed a misconduct complaint against one who ruled against Trump’s deportation plans.

• About a dozen Trump-deployed National Guard troops appeared near the Washington Monument yesterday evening. They took photos of themselves with visitors, and they left after roughly two hours.
• To justify his takeover of Washington, Trump cited several false and misleading claims about homicides and youth crime. Here’s a fact check.
• Trump said he needed to send in troops to secure the capital. He had a different reaction on Jan. 6, Luke Broadwater writes.

• Trump will meet Vladimir Putin at a military base in Anchorage on Friday, a White House official said.
• The German chancellor will convene a video call tomorrow with Trump, Volodymyr Zelensky and several European allies. They have been imploring Trump not to cut a peace deal with Putin behind their backs.
• At a 1945 meeting, the world’s superpowers redrew the European map without input from the affected countries. Some fear a repeat in Alaska, Steven Erlanger writes.
• Russian forces advanced in Ukraine, seeking an edge on the battlefield before the summit.

• An annual collection of U.S. human rights reports cut or blunted previous references to abuses by close partners of the Trump administration including El Salvador and Israel.
• A federal appeals court gave teams affiliated with DOGE access to potentially sensitive data on millions of Americans, overruling a lower court.
• The head of the U.F.C. said Trump was moving ahead with plans to host a fight at the White House next July 4.
• Mexico has sent 26 people accused of being cartel operatives to the U.S., seemingly to alleviate pressure from Trump to combat the flow of fentanyl across the border.

• Kabul, Afghanistan’s capital, has become so dry that its six million people could be without water by 2030. The government is scrambling for solutions but lacks cash.
• Investigators have found evidence that Russia is at least partially responsible for hacking a U.S. federal court system that contains sensitive records on national security crimes.
• Zakaria Zubeidi, a Palestinian, was recently freed from Israeli prison. In a Times interview, he questions what his time as a militant, a theater leader and a prisoner achieved.

• New video shows the Uvalde school police chief trying to negotiate with a gunman barricaded in a room with dozens of children in 2022. The commander faces trial on charges of abandoning or endangering the children.

• A federal judge ordered ICE to improve the conditions inside migrant holding cells in New York City.
• The A.I. start-up Perplexity made an unsolicited offer worth about $35 billion to buy Google’s Chrome web browser.

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