A unanimous Supreme Court made it easier Thursday to bring lawsuits over so-called reverse discrimination, siding with an Ohio woman who claims she didn’t get a job and then was demoted because she is straight.

The justices’ decision affects lawsuits in 20 states and the District of Columbia where, until now, courts had set a higher bar when members of a majority group, including those who are white and heterosexual, sue for discrimination under federal law.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote for the court that federal civil rights law draws no distinction between members of majority and minority groups.

“By establishing the same protections for every ‘individual’ — without regard to that individual’s membership in a minority or majority group — Congress left no room for courts to impose special requirements on majority-group plaintiffs alone,” Jackson wrote.

The court ruled in an appeal from Marlean Ames, who has worked for the Ohio Department of Youth Services for more than 20 years.

Ames contends she was passed over for a promotion and then demoted because she is heterosexual. Both the job she sought and the one she had held were given to LGBTQ people.

Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 bars sex discrimination in the workplace. A trial court and the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against Ames.

The 6th circuit is among the courts that had required an additional requirement for people like Ames, showing “background circumstances” that might include that LGBTQ people made the decisions affecting Ames or statistical evidence of a pattern of discrimination against members of the majority group.

The appeals court noted that Ames didn’t provide any such circumstances.

But Jackson wrote that “this additional ‘background circumstances’ requirement is not consistent with Title VII’s text or our case law construing the statute.”

The White House on Tuesday officially asked Congress to claw back $9.4 billion in already approved spending, taking funding away from programs targeted by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.

It’s a process known as “rescission,” which requires President Donald Trump to get approval from Congress to return money that had previously been appropriated. Trump’s aides say the funding cuts target programs that promote liberal ideologies.

The request, if it passes the House and Senate, would formally enshrine many of the spending cuts and freezes sought by DOGE. It comes at a time when Musk is extremely unhappy with the tax cut and spending plan making its way through Congress, calling it on Tuesday a “disgusting abomination” for increasing the federal deficit.

White House budget director Russ Vought said more rescission packages and other efforts to cut spending could follow if the current effort succeeds.

“We are certainly willing and able to send up additional packages if the congressional will is there,” Vought told reporters.

Here’s what to know about the rescissions request:

Will the rescissions make a dent in the national debt?

The request to Congress is unlikely to meaningfully change the troublesome increase in the U.S. national debt. Tax revenues have been insufficient to cover the growing costs of Social Security, Medicare and other programs. The Congressional Budget Office estimates the government is on track to spend roughly $7 trillion this year, with the rescission request equaling just 0.1% of that total.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters at Tuesday’s briefing that Vought — a “well-respected fiscal hawk,” she called him — would continue to cut spending, hinting that there could be additional efforts to return funds.

“He has tools at his disposal to produce even more savings,” Leavitt said.

Members of the House Freedom Caucus, among the chamber’s most conservative lawmakers, said they would like to see additional rescission packages from the administration.

“We will support as many more rescissions packages the White House can send us in the coming weeks and months,” the group said in a press release. “Passing this rescissions package will be an important demonstration of Congress’s willingness to deliver on DOGE and the Trump agenda.”

Sen. Susan Collins, chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, gave the package a less optimistic greeting.

“Despite this fast track, the Senate Appropriations Committee will carefully review the rescissions package and examine the potential consequences of these rescissions on global health, national security, emergency communications in rural communities, and public radio and television stations,” the Maine lawmaker said in a statement.
Vought said he can send up additional rescissions at the end of the fiscal year in September “and if Congress does not act on it, that funding expires.”

“It’s one of the reasons why we are not putting all of our expectations in a typical rescissions process,” he added.

What programs are targeted by the rescissions?

A spokesperson for the White House Office of Management and Budget, speaking on condition of anonymity to preview some of the items that would lose funding, said that $8.3 billion was being cut from the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development. NPR and PBS would also lose federal funding, as would the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, also known as PEPFAR.

The spokesperson listed specific programs that the Trump administration considered wasteful, including $750,000 to reduce xenophobia in Venezuela, $67,000 for feeding insect powder to children in Madagascar and $3 million for circumcision, vasectomies and condoms in Zambia.

Is the rescissions package likely to get passed?

House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., complimented the planned cuts and pledged to pass them.

“This rescissions package reflects many of DOGE’s findings and is one of the many legislative tools Republicans are using to restore fiscal sanity,” Johnson said. “Congress will continue working closely with the White House to codify these recommendations, and the House will bring the package to the floor as quickly as possible.”

Members of the House Freedom Caucus, among the chamber’s most conservative lawmakers, said they would like to see additional rescission packages from the administration.

“We will support as many more rescissions packages the White House can send us in the coming weeks and months,” the group said in a press release. “Passing this rescissions package will be an important demonstration of Congress’s willingness to deliver on DOGE and the Trump agenda.”

Sen. Susan Collins, chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, gave the package a less optimistic greeting.

“Despite this fast track, the Senate Appropriations Committee will carefully review the rescissions package and examine the potential consequences of these rescissions on global health, national security, emergency communications in rural communities, and public radio and television stations,” the Maine lawmaker said in a statement.

Immigration officials said Tomás Hernández worked in high-level posts for Cuba’s foreign intelligence agency for decades before migrating to the United States to pursue the American dream.

The 71-year-old was detained by federal agents outside his Miami-area home in March and accused of hiding his ties to Cuba’s Communist Party when he obtained permanent residency.

Cuban-Americans in South Florida have long clamored for a firmer hand with Havana and the recent apprehensions of Hernández and several other former Cuban officials for deportation have been extremely popular among the politically powerful exile community.

“It’s a political gift to Cuban-American hardliners,” said Eduardo Gamarra, a Latin American expert at Florida International University. But many Cubans fear they could be next on Trump’s list, he said, and “some in the community see it as a betrayal.”

While President Donald Trump’s mass deportation pledge has frightened migrants from many nations, it has come as something of a shock to the 2.4 million Cuban-Americans, who strongly backed the Republican twice and have long enjoyed a place of privilege in the U.S. immigration system.

Amid record arrivals of migrants from the Caribbean island, Trump in March revoked temporary humanitarian parole for about 300,000 Cubans. Many have been detained ahead of possible deportation.

Among those facing deportation is a pro-Trump Cuban rapper behind a hit song “Patria y Vida” — “Homeland and Life” — that became the unofficial anthem of anti-communist protests on the island in 2021 and drew praise from the likes of then Republican Sen. Marco Rubio, now Secretary of State. Eliéxer Márquez, who raps under the name El Funky, said he received notice this month that he had 30 days to leave the U.S.

Thanks to Cold War laws aimed at removing Fidel Castro, Cuban migrants for many decades enjoyed almost automatic refugee status in the U.S. and could obtain green cards a year after entry, unlike migrants from virtually every other country.

Support for Trump among likely Cuban-American voters in Miami was at an all-time high on the eve of last year’s election, according to a poll by Florida International University, which has been tracking the Cuban-American community since 1991. Trump rarely mentions Cubans in his attacks on migrant targets including Venezuelans and Haitians. That has given many Cubans hope that they will remain immune to immigration enforcement actions.

Democrats, meanwhile, have been trying to turn the immigration crackdown to their advantage. In April, grassroots groups erected two giant billboards on Miami highways calling Rubio and Republican Reps. Mario Díaz-Balart, María Elvira Salazar and Carlos Giménez “traitors” to the Cuban-American community for failing to protect tens of thousands of migrants from Trump’s immigration policies.

In March, Giménez sent Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem a letter with the names of 108 people he said were former Cuban state agents or Communist Party officials living unlawfully in the U.S.

“It is imperative that the Department of Homeland Security enforce existing U.S. laws to identify, deport and repatriate these individuals who pose a direct threat to our national security, the integrity of our immigration system and the safety of Cuban exiles and American citizens alike,” Giménez wrote, adding that the U.S. remains a “beacon of hope and freedom for those escaping tyranny.”

Giménez’s target list was compiled by Luis Dominguez, who left Cuba in 1971 and has made it his mission to topple Cuba’s government. In 2009, when the internet was still a novelty in Cuba, Dominguez said he posed as a 27-year-old female sports journalist from Colombia to lure Castro’s son Antonio into an online romance.

With support from the right-wing Foundation for Human Rights in Cuba, he started combing social media and relying on a well-oiled network of anti-socialist sources, inside Cuba and outside the country, to dox officials allegedly behind human rights abuses and violations of democratic norms. To date, his website, Represores Cubanos — Cuban Repressors — has identified more than 1,200 such state agents, some 150 in the United States.

“They’re chasing the American dream, but previously they condemned it while pursuing the Cuban dream,” Dominguez said. “It’s the typical double life of any Communist regime. When they were in power they criticized anything about the U.S. But now that they’re here, they love it.”

Dominguez, 62, said he regularly shares his findings with federal law enforcement but a spokesman for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement didn’t comment on the agency’s relationship with the activist.