Last updated: July 16, 2026. This page lists the most egregious violations. See also additional illegal actions.
| Date | Administration Action | Why is this Illegal? | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| January 2025 | Fired 17–18 Inspectors General — Congressionally-created positions tasked with monitoring waste, fraud, and abuse — in identical two-sentence emails five days into the term. | The president is required by law to give Congress 30 days’ advance notice and case-specific reasons for the firings, but gave Congress no information. In September 2025, a federal judge ruled it was “obvious” the president broke federal law. | The judge declined to reinstate the inspectors general because the president could lawfully re-fire them after proper notice — a declared violation without a remedy. |
| March 2025 | Top White House officials shared detailed war plans on a publicly-available messaging service set to auto-delete, and accidentally included a journalist in the communications. The messages were later deleted from the phone of the CIA director after an order from a federal judge to preserve the communications. | This likely violates the Espionage Act, which prohibits the intentional or inadvertent sharing of national defense information. It is also a violation of the Presidential Records Act and Federal Records Act — which outline a procedure for preserving communication related to official government business — as well as disobedience to the Judicial Branch. | It was later revealed that the Defense Secretary shared war plans on a second group chat including his wife, brother, and personal lawyer. A judge ordered officials to notify the National Archives of at-risk messages, but the deleted messages were never recovered. |
| March 2025 | DOGE gained access to government databases that store citizens’ personal information, including names, social security numbers, addresses, medical diagnoses and treatments, income information, union records, proprietary business secrets, and data on ongoing court cases, among others. | This is a violation of the Privacy Act, which governs how the government collects, stores, and shares personal information. In June 2025, a federal judge found the Office of Personnel Management likely violated the Privacy Act by giving DOGE access and ordered it cut off. | In January 2026, the government admitted in court that DOGE staff had moved Social Security data through an unapproved third-party server outside security protocols — the agency cannot verify what was shared — and signed a “voter data agreement” with an advocacy group seeking to overturn election results; an appeals judge wrote that officials “provided patently false information to the district court.” |
| April 2025 | Under a Treasury–DHS agreement, the IRS agreed to share confidential taxpayer information to support deportations, and in August 2025 disclosed the last-known addresses of roughly 47,000 taxpayers to ICE — many based on facially defective requests. | Federal law (26 U.S.C. § 6103) makes taxpayer information confidential under one of the strictest statutes on the books. In February 2026, a federal judge ruled the IRS “violated the IRC approximately 42,695 times” by disclosing taxpayer addresses to ICE. | Court orders block mass transfers of taxpayer data and bar ICE from acting on IRS data in its possession while the government appeals. |
| May 2025 | Linked the Social Security Administration’s master file (Social Security numbers, birth data, and citizenship indicators for everyone with an SSN) to a DHS database, turning it into a mass voter-citizenship-verification system offered to states — which wrongly flagged some citizens as non-citizens, leading to canceled voter registrations. | In June 2026, a federal judge ruled the system violated the Privacy Act, the Social Security Act, and administrative law, writing that the administration “haphazardly combined and repurposed the private information of millions of Americans,” and ordered it dismantled. | The government’s motion to stay the ruling was denied in July 2026; the dismantling order is in effect. |
| December 2025 | USCIS quietly froze adjudication of green-card, work-permit, and other applications for nationals of 39 countries — while collecting over $1 billion in fees for roughly two million applications it refused to process. | A federal judge vacated the secret hold policies, writing that USCIS “has violated the very immigration laws that Congress has charged it with administering” and calling the national-security rationale “pretextual.” | A July 2026 follow-up order directed the agency to resume green-card processing. |
| January 2026 | The CDC unilaterally cut routinely recommended childhood vaccinations from 17 to 11 without consulting its statutory advisory committee, after the HHS Secretary had replaced the committee’s members wholesale. | In March 2026, a federal judge ruled HHS acted unlawfully under the Federal Advisory Committee Act and the Administrative Procedure Act, invalidating the reconstituted vaccine panel and voiding its votes, including downgraded hepatitis B and COVID-19 recommendations. | HHS appealed in April 2026; observers expect the case may reach the Supreme Court. |
| April 2026 | The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel issued a memo declaring the Presidential Records Act unconstitutional, and the White House told staff they no longer had to comply — threatening preservation of hundreds of millions of government records. | The Presidential Records Act is a valid act of Congress; a federal judge ruled it is likely constitutional and ordered the White House, NSC, DOGE, and all presidential advisers to comply in full — including a bar on conducting government business over auto-deleting messaging apps. | The National Archives would not commit to preserving records during the litigation; the injunction has been in force since May 26, 2026. |