WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump has repeatedly tested the boundaries of executive power since his return to office and is exploring uncharted legal territory with threats to carry out mass firings during the federal government shutdown, legal experts and lawmakers said.

The Republican president this year has aggressively pursued cuts to the federal government and has repeatedly raised the prospect of using the shutdown, now in its seventh day, as justification for permanent layoffs. But his administration has not acted on it.

That, experts said, may be because neither federal courts nor the federal employee board that oversees workers has determined whether federal agencies may permanently cut staff during a shutdown.

“We are in largely uncharted territory,” Nick Bednar, a University of Minnesota professor who is an expert in administrative law, said this week.

Since 1981, the US has had 15 federal government shutdowns that furloughed hundreds of thousands of workers. But no president has sought to use a shutdown as the basis for large-scale firings.

Whether courts would back Trump’s reasoning depends on how they interpret the Antideficiency Act, an 1884 law that requires a shutdown when Congress has not approved funding — an authority the Constitution assigns to the legislative branch.

Trump took office pledging to remake and sharply reduce the federal government, and his administration has already moved to force out some 300,000 workers this year.

It has sent mixed signals about plans to cut staff during the shutdown. Trump said on Sunday that layoffs were taking place “right now.” But White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said the next day he was referring to workers furloughed since funds expired on October 1 — a temporary, unpaid leave rather than permanent job losses — and that the administration was still considering the permanent cuts.

“There are some legal questions about that that are unresolved,” said Senator Gary Peters of Michigan, the top Democrat on the Senate panel that oversees government affairs.

“I think the courts will make a determination,” said Senator Mike Rounds, a Republican appropriator from South Dakota, “The president is going to do whatever he can to push whatever issues he believes appropriate to get past this impasse.”

The White House and Office of Management and Budget did not respond to requests for comment.

POTENTIAL LEGAL LIABILITY
Two large unions representing federal employees, AFGE and AFSCME, filed a lawsuit that seeks to block the administration from laying off workers during a shutdown. They argued the 1884 law bars such firings because the planning and administrative work they require are not permitted under its narrow exemption for activities to preserve “life and property.”

The White House has offered a range of reasons for the potential firings. Leavitt recently told NPR’s “Morning Edition” the goal is to “cut back to save money in a responsible way that respects the American taxpayer’s money, especially when we are in this financial crunch right now.”

Bednar, the law professor, said precedent gives federal agencies “broad discretion” to invoke mass layoffs – called reductions in force – in response to budget shortfalls, and federal courts could extend that discretion to shutdowns.

But Emory University appropriations law Professor Matthew Lawrence said any official who approves mass firings outside the Antideficiency Act’s legal parameters could face felony liability.

“Presumably, right now, there are officials within government trying to ask OMB why they think this is legal, and can they provide enough assurance that the agency doesn’t have to worry about violating the law and the Constitution,” Lawrence said.

No one has ever been prosecuted under the law, he added, but violations remain subject to a five-year statute of limitations.

APPEALS FOR FEDERAL WORKERS HIT BY TRUMP CHANGES
If the Trump administration does fire federal workers during the shutdown, those employees can appeal, federal employment attorneys said.

One avenue is the Merit Systems Protection Board, a panel that reviews appeals from federal workers who believe they were terminated because of their political views or other reasons spelled out in the law.

But Matthew Biggs, president of a union that represents 6,500 NASA employees, said the administration had “gutted the very institutions” that federal employees would normally turn to. The board can issue initial decisions but lost its quorum in the spring to decide appeals, in part because Trump fired a member appointed by former President Joe Biden.

Biggs said his union’s “fundamental issue” in the shutdown fight is whether lawmakers take steps to guard money approved by Congress from attempts by the administration to use it in ways other than intended.

Another path for federal employees is to dispute how they were fired. Civil service law requires agencies to prepare a detailed list of positions targeted for cuts, taking into account factors such as location and employee tenure. Agencies can take weeks or months to tick off the steps, according to the non-partisan Partnership for Public Service.

“It’s difficult to imagine that these agencies believe that it wouldn’t be challenged,” said Michelle F. Bercovici, a federal employment attorney, about potential firings. — Reuters

STOCKHOLM – US-based scientists John Clarke, Michel Devoret and John Martinis won the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics for “experiments that revealed quantum physics in action”, paving the way for the development of the next generation of digital technologies.

“My feelings are that I’m completely stunned. Of course it had never occurred to me in any way that this might be the basis of a Nobel Prize,” Clarke told the Nobel press conference by telephone on Tuesday.

“I’m speaking on my cell phone and I suspect that you are too, and one of the underlying reasons that the cell phone works is because of all this work.”

‘NEW SURPRISES’ IN CENTURY-OLD FIELD OF QUANTUM MECHANICS
Quantum mechanical behaviors are well studied at the level of the incredibly small – atoms and sub-atomic particles – but are often seen as bizarre and unintuitive compared with classical physics and its far larger scale.

The Nobel winners carried out experiments in the mid-1980s with an electronic circuit built of superconductors and demonstrated that quantum mechanics could also influence everyday objects under certain conditions.

“It is wonderful to be able to celebrate the way that century-old quantum mechanics continually offers new surprises. It is also enormously useful, as quantum mechanics is the foundation of all digital technology,” Olle Eriksson, chair of the Nobel Committee for Physics, said.

Quantum technology is already ubiquitous, with transistors in computer microchips an everyday example.

“This year’s Nobel Prize in Physics has provided opportunities for developing the next generation of quantum technology, including quantum cryptography, quantum computers, and quantum sensors,” the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which awards the prize, said in a statement.

Quantum computers use principles of quantum mechanics to make complex calculations, predict outcomes and perform analysis that in some cases could take traditional computers millions of years.

The field is considered to have the potential to help solve some of humanity’s most pressing concerns, such as tackling climate change. But it also faces challenges, including improving the accuracy of its chips, and timelines for commercially viable quantum computing remain disputed.

TWO OF WINNING TRIO HAVE LINKS TO GOOGLE
British-born Clarke is a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, in the United States.

Devoret, who was born in France and was congratulated on X by French President Emmanuel Macron, is a professor at Yale University and the University of California, Santa Barbara, also in the United States, where Martinis is also a professor.

Martinis, an American, headed Google’s Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab until 2020. At Google, Martinis was part of the research team who in 2019 said they had achieved “quantum supremacy”, in which a computer harnessing the properties of sub-atomic particles did a far better job of solving a problem than the world’s most powerful supercomputer.

Devoret, besides his professorship, is also the chief scientist of Google Quantum AI. It is the second straight year that a Nobel has been won by scientists with Google ties. The 2024 chemistry prize was awarded to Demis Hassabis and John Jumper at Google DeepMind while Geoffrey Hinton, who worked for Google for more than a decade, won for physics the same year.

PHYSICS SECOND NOBEL PRIZE AWARDED THIS WEEK
The Nobel physics prize is awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and includes a prize sum totalling 11 million Swedish crowns ($1.2 million) that is shared among the winners if there are several, as is often the case.

The Nobel Prizes were established through the will of Alfred Nobel, who amassed a fortune from his invention of dynamite. Since 1901, with occasional interruptions, the prizes have annually recognised achievements in science, literature, and peace. Economics was a later addition.

Physics was the first category mentioned in Nobel’s will, likely reflecting the prominence of the field during his time. Today, the Nobel Prize in Physics remains widely regarded as the most prestigious award in the discipline.

Past winners of the Nobel physics prize include some of the most influential figures in the history of science, such as Albert Einstein, Erwin Schrodinger, Max Planck and Niels Bohr, the latter three all pioneers of quantum theory.

In keeping with tradition, physics is the second Nobel to be awarded this week, after two American and one Japanese scientist won the medicine prize for breakthroughs in understanding the immune system. The chemistry prize is due next, on Wednesday.

The science, literature and economics prizes are presented to the laureates by the Swedish king at a ceremony in Stockholm on December 10, the anniversary of Alfred Nobel’s death, followed by a lavish banquet at city hall.

The peace prize, which will be announced on Friday, is awarded in a separate ceremony in Oslo. — Reuters

WASHINGTON – Air traffic control staffing issues are delaying flights for a second straight day at numerous US airports as the government shutdown reaches its seventh day, the Federal Aviation Administration said in a notice on Tuesday.

More than 3,000 flights have been delayed, according to flight tracking data, as staffing shortages have impacted a widening number of airports, including Houston, Nashville, Dallas, Chicago O’Hare and Newark.

The FAA is reducing the number of arriving flights per hour at Chicago O’Hare, citing staffing, with average delays of 41 minutes, and there are also staffing issues at Atlanta Air Route Traffic Control Center.

Arriving flights were being held for up to 30 minutes at Newark due to the staffing issues, the FAA said, while Washington Reagan might see new slowdowns due to low staffing on Tuesday.

Nashville air traffic control is facing significant staffing issues and will curtail operations later on Tuesday, the FAA said. Approach control will be taken over later by Memphis Center, it added.

Both political parties are pointing the finger at each other for the impacts. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Democrats were to blame for the aviation slowdown, while California Governor Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, said President Donald Trump was responsible.

Severe weather is also impacting flights across the country.

Some 13,000 air traffic controllers and about 50,000 Transportation Security Administration officers must still turn up for work during the government shutdown, but they are not being paid. Controllers are set to receive a partial paycheck on October 14 for work performed before the shutdown.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said on Monday the FAA had seen a slight increase in controllers taking sick leave and air traffic staffing has been cut by 50% in some areas since the shutdown started last week.

“If we don’t have controllers, we’re going to make sure the airspace is safe. So what we do is we’ll slow traffic,” Duffy said on Tuesday on Fox News’ “Fox and Friends.”

FlightAware, a flight tracking website, said more than 3,000 US flights had been delayed on Tuesday, including 225 at Nashville, or 20% of its flights, and more than 570 flights at Chicago O’Hare, or more than 20% of its flights.

Southwest Airlines has delayed more than 500 flights and American Airlines 400 flights, FlightAware data showed.

In 2019, during a 35-day shutdown, the number of absences by controllers and TSA officers rose as workers missed paychecks, extending checkpoint wait times at some airports. Authorities were forced to slow air traffic in New York, which put pressure on lawmakers to quickly end the standoff.

The US has faced air traffic control shortages for more than a decade, and many controllers had been working mandatory overtime and six-day weeks even before the shutdown. The FAA is about 3,500 air traffic controllers short of targeted staffing levels. — Reuters