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NBC News' Yamiche Alcindor reports on what President Trump discussed in his wide-ranging press conference with the prime minister of Japan. Reporters questioned the president on DOGE's actions, possible tariffs for Japan and if he would fire investigators involved in January 6 cases.
at the White House this afternoon and the two then held a news conference. Trump said that he may meet with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Washington, D.C., next week as he attempts to broker the end of the Ukraine-Russia war.
The Justice Department and lawyers representing FBI agents who investigated Jan. 6 have reached an agreement that would prohibit anyone in the federal government from publicly releasing the names of those agents while litigation proceeds. Trump's nominees continue to advance despite fierce opposition from Democrats. Former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard is headed toward her first floor vote Monday after sheAgents at Immigration and Customs Enforcement are under increasing pressure to boost the number of arrests and deportations of undocumented immigrants, as President Donald Trump has expressed anger that the amount of people deported in the first weeks of his administration is not higher, according to three sources familiar with the discussions at ICE and the White House. A source familiar with Trump’s thinking said the president is getting “angry” that more people are not being deported and that the message is being passed along to “border czar” Tom Homan, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller and acting ICE Director Caleb Vitello.Rarely has the border been so quiet. During a five-hour ride-along with Customs and Border Protection by vehicle and by boat early this morning around the Rio Grande Valley sector in Texas — at one point one of the busiest areas — migrant encounters have slowed down to a trickle following policies in the latter half of the Biden administration and the new Trump administration. In a sector where just a few years ago the daily average encounters were between around 1,300 and 1,500 a day, now less than 100 per day is the norm, according to Border Patrol Agent Christina Smallwood. During those five hours this morning, not a single migrant was spotted. Overnight, only eight along the whole sector were seen and detained, Smallwood said. Many of the migrants in this area used to be families turning themselves in to seek asylum. But as Trump has largely suspended the ability to ask for asylum, most encounters now are single adults looking to flee Border Patrol, Smallwood said.The Border Patrol agent said she can’t remember seeing the border this quiet in the 17 years she’s been with the agency. She said she believes fewer people are coming as they become more aware of the “consequences,” and “they don’t want to risk all of that just to be returned to their home country.” There are still remnants of the previous influx of larger numbers of migrants: bracelets given by smugglers and left behind, rafts, a children’s sandal, a red winter hat, a teddy bear and other belongings. Border Patrol has said that tensions are higher with the cartels after President Donald Trump designated them a terrorist organization, and that cartels have been posting videos appearing to show drones dropping explosives to intimidate CBP.After hearing arguments in Washington, DC Judge Carl Nichols says he will grant the plaintiff’s request for a temporary pause of the planned administrative leave for thousands of USAID employees. “I will be entering tonight sometime between now and midnight a limited- very limited — TRO that will be directed at the placement of the 2,200 or 2,700 employees on administrative leave, and then the accelerated removal of people from their countries," Nichols said.Head Start official says some programs may have to shut down if they don't receive federal funding by MondayTommy Sheridan, Deputy Director of the National Head Start Association, said some local Head Start programs will have to shut down as early as Monday if they still can’t access the federal grant funds that have been tied up since the White House announced, then promptly rescinded, a freeze that would have affected nearly all federal grant programs last week. During an interview with MSNBC, Sheridan estimated 37 Head Start grant recipients across 20 states and several territories are still unable to access critical federal funds. “We did see some programs have to close down as a result of this over the last week and and luckily, most of those programs have gotten back over services,” Sheridan said. “But we are aware that of the 37 that I just noted, there are a couple who, if they don’t receive funds today, they are going to be looking at having to close down services as of Monday.”Asked why the federal Head Start grant money has been inaccessible, Sheridan said the program falls under the jurisdiction of the Health and Human Services Department and was one of many that attempted to draw down funds from the federal Payment Management Services system last Tuesday in an attempt to recoup as much funding as possible before the White House federal grant freeze took effect. The result was a system-wide crash that left Head Start and other HHS programs locked out with no access to federal funding as 1,000s of requests made through the system during last Tuesday’s chaos remain under review. "It’s a system that normally operates pretty quickly, but it was, it really got quite messy very quickly, and now we’re still playing catch up," Sheridan said.JD Vance posted a lengthy X thread doubling down on his call for former DOGE staffer Marko Elez to be reinstated. Elez resigned from his post after the: “Are you going to tell to apologize for saying ‘Normalize Indian hate’ before this rehire? Just asking for the sake of both of our kids.” Khanna appeared to reference the three children Vance shares with his wife Usha, who is Indian-American. Vance replied with a three-part post firing back at Khanna that ended with how he doesn’t worry about his kids making mistakes or being internet trolls, but he does worry “they’ll grow up to be a US Congressmen who engages in emotional blackmail over a kid’s social media posts. You disgust me.”Three Democratic states sued the Trump administration on Friday over its order to ban federal funding for gender-affirming care for transgender people under 19. Washington state Attorney General Nick Brown filed the federal lawsuit in the Western District of Washington. The attorneys general of Oregon and Minnesota, and three doctors, also joined as plaintiffs. The complaint argues that the order discriminates against transgender people. Trump signed an executive order last month directing federally run insurance programs, including Medicaid and TRICARE for military families, to exclude coverage for such care. It also calls on the Department of Justice to pursue litigation and legislation to oppose it. Medicaid programs in some states cover gender-affirming care. The new order suggests that the practice could end, and targets hospitals and universities that receive federal money and provide the care.During a press conference, Trump said he expected to fire “some” of the FBI investigators who worked on cases involving the Capitol riot on January 6, 2021.Some Food and Drug Administration employees received unexpected phone calls from their managers this week regarding the Trump administration’sIn the phone conversations, managers informed the employees that they would be ordered back to the office by March 17. Discussions about office policies are typically more formal and conducted over email, one of the employees said. Because of that, both workers — who asked that their names not be published to protect their jobs — said they felt that the calls were scare tactics aimed at pressuring them to accept the buyout offer that the Trump administration has offered.“It felt like an attempt to scare people into taking the buyout deal before it was too late,” one source said.have taken the offer so far, according to the White House. The FDA has more than 18,000 employees, according toAsked about his conversations with Elon Musk, whom Trump has launched on a far reaching cost-cutting mission across the federal government, the president said the two men have not spent time dwellig on the details of the project. “We have not discussed that much,” Trump told reporters during a press conference at the White House on Friday. “I’ll tell him to go here, go there. He does it. He’s got a very capable group of people, very, very, very, very capable. They know what they’re doing.” Describing their working relationship, Trump said he had “instructed” Musk to “go into education, go into military, go into other things as we go along.”The president said he will “pick out a target” for DOGE to enter, and claimed the team is unearthing “massive” government fraud, waste and abuse. There could be “some areas of high intelligence” that Trump said he would tackle himself.San Francisco officials filed a federal lawsuit on Friday against the Trump administration, arguing Trump’s executive orders that promise to withhold federal funding from sanctuary cities and prosecute local law enforcement officials who refuse to comply with federal immigration enforcement efforts are unconstitutional. The suit, co-led by San Francisco and Santa Clara County officials in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, comes as the latest in a series of sanctuary cities and state attorneys general suing the Trump administration over recent immigration-related executive orders.“They’ve targeted sanctuary localities and states with executive orders and agency actions meant to illegally compel local jurisdictions into carrying out the President’s priorities and allowing the federal government to commandeer local law enforcement officers as ICE agents, the federal actions made clear that cities like San Francisco will be defunded if we do not give up our local authority and autonomy and comply,” said San Francisco City Attorney David Chiu during a press conference announcing the lawsuit. “I want to be clear, the Trump administration is asserting a right it does not have. They are trying to tell us how to use our resources and to commandeer our local law enforcement. This is the federal government coercing local officials to bend to their will or face defunding or prosecution, and that is illegal or authoritarian,” said Chiu.During a press conference with Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba, Trump was asked about reports that DOGE has access to Treasury Department payment systems, including information that includes Americans' social security numbers, home addresses and bank accounts.“Well, it doesn’t, but they get it very easily. We don’t have very good security in our country," the president answered.But first, Johnson needs to unify his small and fractious Republican majority before the House can even begin working on the bill. Johnson is eager to project imminent success as he faces pressure to get his ducks in a row from the GOP-controlled Senate, where the chamber’s budget committee plans to move forward next week with a dueling resolution that takes a different approach. But House Republicans are divided on the parameters of a party-line bill that seeks to address tax, border and energy policy — from how much spending to cut, which programs to slash, how much red ink to add and how to structure a tax overhaul.Letter by letter, crews are currently scraping off the signage displaying “U.S. Agency for International Development” from the Ronald Reagan Building in Washington where the agency's headquarters once was.Trump said he may meet next week Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Washington, as he seeks to bring the long-running war between Ukraine and Russia to an end. "I will probably be meeting with President Zelenskyy next week, and I will probably be talking to President Putin," Trump said during his Oval Office meeting with Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba."I’d like to see that war end for one primary reason. They’re killing so many people."Trump has urged an end to the war for months and dwelled on the devastation wrought by the years of fighting.Rep. Debbie Dingell, D-Mich., slammed Elon Musk’s broad access to the U.S. Treasury payments data and indicated she would not be open to discussing the Republicans' spending bill until House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., has addressed Musk’s access to such data. “People should be outraged” Dingell told MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell. “This kind of data that is being collected on them, everything from their Social Security numbers to their home addresses to their health information. … I’m not going to read anything until we know they’re going to come talk to us and say what’s on the table.” Congressional conservatives are seeking to pass a reconciliation bill that would fund the government by a March 14 deadline. “I want to say that right now Mike Johnson’s got to come and talk to people in the house,” Dingell said, referencing the Democratic push for clarity on Musk’s access to American data “They’ve got to be talking to the Senate. We don’t know exactly what’s going on.”Samantha Power, the former administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development, warned that the Trump administration’s dismantling of the agency, which provides international humanitarian aid, could bolster China’s global influence. “It’s no secret we’re in a period of intense strategic competition with the People’s Republic of China,” Power told MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell. “The PRC has become more active over the last decade and a half through the Belt and Road initiative, but also through programs that mimic some of what USAID is doing. … They see the value of gaining this political capital and winning hearts and minds in this way.”Trump issued an executive order halting all foreign aid distribution; amid a stop-work order, thousands of USAID employees and contractors have been being fired or furloughed. Plunged into uncertainty, USAID announced this week that nearly all global hires would be placed on administrative leave. NBC has reported that shipping containers filled with aid supplies have been sitting untouched at various ports, and clinical drug trials for infectious diseases around the world have been halted. ‘There is American food in warehouses that is just sitting there because of the stop-work order,” Power said. “It is just devastating for American interests. It’s devastating for America’s reputation as a country that keeps its word.”arguing that the end of USAID will be a win for global autocrats, said China will “relish the strategic opening that this offers them.” “This is going to create an opening just about everywhere USAID has worked,” she said, pointing to China’s launch of a $4 million global mine clearing program to address the gaps left in USAID’s absence. Power also slammed Republicans who have pivoted to false theories about how USAID spends its congressionally appropriated budget, saying “falsehoods about projects that are allegedly going on here or there have come in such a short time to define USAID’s reputation, including with Republican supporters of USAID who have stood with the agency over decades.”Trump has tapped Vance, along with national security adviser Michael Waltz, to oversee a deal to sell and save TikTok, the Chinese social media company facing a ban in the U.S., two people familiar with the arrangement told NBC News. His week began in his native Ohio, where, on the second anniversary of the toxic East Palestine train derailment, he committed the administration to completing cleanup efforts and defended Trump’s call for tariffs on Mexico, Canada and China. It continued with Vance nudging his former Senate colleagues to support a pair of Trump’s most controversial Cabinet nominees. And it ended today with Vance calling for the rehiring of a Department of Government Efficiency staffer who resigned after Up next week: the first overseas trip of Vance’s vice presidency, with an itinerary that includes an artificial intelligence summit in Paris and the Munich Security Conference in Germany.Trump said he plans to announce"reciprocal trade” with a range of countries “next week,” arguing these are necessary “so that we’re treated evenly.” “We don’t want any more, any less,” Trump said during a meeting in the Oval Office with Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba. The president said tariffs are on the table if trade is not “reciprocal” and that he hopes to work on reducing a roughly $100 billion deficit with Japan. “We want to get that down to even,” said the president. “I think we will be able to do that easily. I want to get other countries to equality.”The chief information officer of the Senate Sergeant at Arms Office has sent a notice to Senate offices warning them not to use DeepSeek, citing the app's terms of service and that the company’s servers are located outside the United States and are “outside the purview of U.S., EU, and UK laws.”is a Chinese-based artificial intelligence company that last month unveiled an open-source AI model rivaling those released by American companies in the last few years. The notice, which was obtained by NBC News, has the subject line: “DeepSeek Artificial Intelligence: Beware of the High Risks.”The CIO also warns Senate offices about the potential pitfalls of using AI, and warns: “Individuals should not put personal or sensitive data into any Al database because the data could be used by the Al platform to train the platform, and the data will be added to the platform’s knowledge base.” “Al products should not be used for Senate work,” the CIO says, citing potential inaccuracies in the output of some AI services. The CIO has"risk assessed" a number of AI services, but notes, “These services should only be used for research and evaluation using non-sensitive data.”The Justice Department and lawyers representing FBI agents who investigated Jan. 6 have reached an agreement that would prohibit anyone in the federal government from publicly releasing the names of those agents while litigation proceeds. U.S. District Judge Jia Cobb approved the order and it is now binding. The Justice Department now has a full list of names of all FBI agents who investigated Jan. 6 cases. A lawyer for the Justice Department said in court yesterday that there is no plan to share that list outside the DOJ or with the public. If the government wants to pull out of this agreement for any reason, they have to give the agents two days' notice to allow them time to seek judicial intervention. The court will now go forward with a briefing on a motion for a preliminary injunction that would indefinitely block the release of these names — that schedule is expected to run through the end of March.Martin wrote that Musk had flagged"individuals and networks who appear to be stealing government property and/or threatening government employees." Martin promised to"begin an inquiry" and said that"if people are discovered to have broken the law or even acted simply unethically, we will investigate them and we will chase them to the end of the Earth to hold them accountable."Federal employee unions have asked a judge to issue a temporary restraining order to pause the Trump administration’s efforts to shut down the U.S. Agency for International Development. “Defendants have violated the Constitution and federal law through their systematic shutdown of USAID,” lawyers for the employees wrote in their motion. “If the shutdown is allowed to continue, Plaintiffs and their members will suffer increased risks to their physical safety, irreparable harm to their health and family lives, exposure to legal liability, and devastating financial consequences, among other injuries," they added.administrative leave,Marco Rubio will be going to the Munich Security Conference, and then to Israel, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar and Saudi Arabia from Feb. 13 to 18, a senior State Department official said, noting that the trip plans are fluid. Yesterday, Rubio referred to Gaza as uninhabitable due to unexploded ordnance and weapons depots left by Hamas. “President Trump has offered to go in and be a part of that solution,” but “it’s very difficult to do that when you have populations on top of you,” Rubio told reporters in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic.“In order to fix a place like that, people are going to have to live somewhere else in the interim,” Rubio said. “And there are countries in the region who express a lot of concern about the Palestinian people. We encourage them to step forward and provide a solution and an answer to that problem.”, Vice President JD Vance said he disagreed with DOGE's decision to fire an employee after The Wall Street Journal reported on the employee's past racist social media posts. "I obviously disagree with some of Elez’s posts, but I don’t think stupid social media activity should ruin a kid’s life. We shouldn’t reward journalists who try to destroy people. Ever. So I say bring him back," Vance said. He added that more valid reasons for firing the staffer, named Marko Elez, would have been if he's"a bad dude or a terrible member of the team.", “Just for the record, I was racist before it was cool," and"You could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity."Members of Congress who wanted to meet with acting Education Secretary Denise Carter were denied access to the Department of Education building in Washington, D.C., this morning. The lawmakers, all Democrats, tried to enter after holding a press conference in front of the building. They were denied entry, with a lone police officer not letting them through the doors. Reps. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., Jahana Hayes, D-Conn., Mark Takano, D-Calif., Maxwell Frost, D-Fla., and others repeatedly questioned the security guard.The officer responded, “You mean you’re going to … steamroll in here?"“By what authority can you deny members of Congress their oversight role?" Takano asked. Asked for comment, an Education Department spokesperson said, “The protest was organized by members of Congress who were exercising their First Amendment rights, which they are at liberty to do. They did not have any scheduled appointments, and the protest has since ended.”The White House now says that the total number of essential personnel at the U.S. Agency for International Development is 611, not 290. An internal notice sent by the White House yesterday said,"We anticipate that there will be modifications to this list over the course of the foreign assistance review. We will continue to communicate updates as they become available."that the agency workforce would be reduced to about 290 workers from more than 5,000 foreign service officers, civil servants and personal service contractors."The Constitution, and federal and international law prohibit the government from using Guantánamo as a legal black hole," the letter says."We therefore request that the government provide our organizations access to the noncitizens detained at Guantánamo so that those individuals will have access to legal counsel, and so advocates and the public can understand the conditions under which the government is detaining them." A lawyer involved in crafting the letter, which was signed by more than three dozen organizations, said a letter like this is often the precursor to a lawsuit if access is denied. “The administration cannot hide what it’s doing by shipping immigrants off to the notorious Guantanamo prison. Transparency is the key to the rule of law and everyone should be concerned about that being undermined,” said Lee Gelernt, a lawyer for the ACLU who has brought multiple cases against the government for infringing on immigrant rights.Thursday night that she received a letter from Trump informing her that she has been removed from the FEC “immediately.” Weintraub wrote, “There’s a legal way to replace FEC commissioners — this isn’t it.” Weintraub, who first joined the FEC in 2002, is serving an expired term, and it is common for commissioners to continue to serve after their six-year term ends. It does not appear that Trump has the power to unilaterally remove an FEC commissioner, even if his or her term has expired. Erin Chlopak, senior director for campaign finance at the Campaign Legal Center and a former FEC assistant general counsel, told NBC News that the statute governing the FEC does not lay out a process for removing an FEC commissioner. But the statute does say that FEC commissioners can continue to serve after their terms expire until their successor is confirmed by the Senate and takes office. Chlopak noted that Trump has not nominated someone to replace Weintraub.“By nominating a new commissioner, and having that commissioner going through the ordinary process of advice and consent with the legislative branch, he could have easily and lawfully replaced her,” Chlopak said. “And he seemingly deliberately chose not to do that.” Asked for comment about Trump's attempt to fire Weintraub, deputy White House press secretary Harrison Fields said in a statement to NBC News, “Our message to Ellen Weintraub is simple: you don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here. The President has made a decision on who he’d like to chair the Federal Election Commission , and it’s not her. Grandstanding over this decision won’t change the President’s mind.” The White House did not directly address questions about Trump’s authority to remove an FEC commissioner and did not immediately respond to a question about whom Trump would like to see as the next FEC chair.Trump announced he will sign an executive order that will end federal support for paper straws, a Biden-era policy that was part of a broader plan to end federal reliance on single-use plastics. “I will be signing an Executive Order next week ending the ridiculous Biden push for Paper Straws, which don’t work. BACK TO PLASTIC!” Trump wrote on his social media platform Truth Social this morning.aimed at reversing environmental protection and clean energy policies. In his first week in office, Trump signed orders to roll back oil-drilling restrictions in Alaska and broadly expand America's reliance on fossil fuels for energy production.” and “develop” the Gaza Strip have handed Islamic terrorist groups a rallying cry to recruit and inspire attacks against Americans at home and abroad, security experts and former intelligence officials say. Trump’s comments this week, proposing that the United States would control the Palestinian enclave while its residents would be forced to relocate abroad, have caused“I think every CIA station chief in the Middle East woke up this morning with a migraine headache, because there’s a potential for a generational counterterrorism nightmare here,” Marc Polymeropoulos, a former CIA officer who worked in the region, said Wednesday in an interview on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Campbell told reporters this morning that she and her counterparts in other states"expect" a federal judge in Boston to rule in favor of the lawsuit she's leading against Trump's birthright citizenship executive order., which aims to end automatic birthright citizenship for the children of some immigrants under the 14th Amendment of the Constitution,"targets innocent newborns."A coalition of 18 attorneys general is seeking to overturn the order, including Campbell, New Jersey Attorney General Matthew Platkin and Connecticut Attorney General William Tong. Judge Leo Sorokin will hear arguments this morning on whether to temporarily block the order, as federal judges in Washington state and Maryland have already done. The order was intended to go into effect next week.The Democratic National Committee filed an amicus brief in an election lawsuit today, urging a Georgia court to block new rules that required hand-counting of ballots and allowed local boards power to conduct “reasonable inquiry” into election results. The brief — the committee's first legal action under new chair Ken Martin —argues that the two rules violate rule-making processes and exceed the power of the state election board that implemented them. Trump allies on the board voted to approve a series of controversial rules weeks before the 2024 election. A judge temporarily halted the rules before they could be fully implemented, pending further litigation.One rule required election officials to open ballot boxes after voting was finished to count by hand the number of ballots in them, sparking concerns that it was opening up the election process to delayed results and more opportunities for mistakes. Another rule also gave local election boards the power to conduct"reasonable inquiry" into election results ahead of certification. The new rules were criticized by election officials in the state, including Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who warned at the time the rules were illegal, would slow the reporting of results and cause “chaos.” "As Republican officials in Georgia have made clear, these new rules were made up by Republicans in the run-up to November’s election and don’t make our elections fairer or stronger, they are an attempt to sow distrust in our elections," Martin said in a statement.LOS ANGELES — The Trump administration’s federal hiring freeze has stopped the onboarding of thousands of seasonal federal firefighters, including those who work for agencies called on to help battle theEven though Trump’s Jan. 20 executive order says the freeze does not apply to positions related to “public safety,” federal firefighters are not exempt, according to a person who works in hiring at the Bureau of Land Management.And in the United States, voters elected a president in November who has disdain for alliances and prefers to deal with countries individually, and who in his first term accused Japan and South Korea of “freeloading” under the U.S. security umbrella.at the White House, in the first major indication of how the new U.S. administration will interact with the two Asian democracies.In a letter to acting Education Secretary Denise Carter, the two Democratic senators and 14 others expressed concern that Elon Musk's staff at DOGE, which is not an official government agency, “have gained access to federal student loan data, which includes personal information for millions of borrowers.” “This deeply troubling report raises questions about potential exposures of Americans’ private data, the abuse of this data by the Trump Administration, and whether officials who have access to the data may have violated the law or the federal government’s procedures for handling sensitive information,” the letter said. The group of senators requested that the department answer a list of questions regarding DOGE and access to these databases by Feb. 13.Acting FBI Director Brian Driscoll has turned over the names of all FBI employees who worked on Jan. 6 cases to the Justice Department, he said in a memo to agency staff last night. The original data he provided only had employee ID numbers to reduce the risk that the employees' identities would be released to the public. But Driscoll said he was directed to send the actual names by the office of acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove, who had previously called Driscoll insubordinate."Given our significant concerns regarding your personal safety and security, we provided the lists on the classified enclave with caveats that appropriately identify the information as law enforcement sensitive," Driscoll wrote in the memo."We also reiterated once against our concerns for the safety of our personnel, and the risks posed to you and your families should these lists become public." Driscoll did not explain why he turned over the names, but he could be removed as acting director at any point or fired from the bureau. He is not yet eligible for a government pension.Trump is facing legal hurdles in his efforts to shrink the federal government. The latest coming from a federal judge who is pausing the implementation of the White House’s buyout offer to all federal workers until Monday after employee unions filed suit arguing it violates federal law. NBC’s Peter Alexander reports and Kristen Welker, moderator of"Meet the Press," joins"TODAY" with analysis.On Monday, a team at IBM that is contracted to manage human resources data for more than 500,000 federal employees received an unusual request to provide “read-only” access for the HR records for all 14,000 employees of the General Services Administration, according to a source familiar with the contract. The email was from IBM’s regular contact at the GSA, the agency that manages federal property. But the request was odd since the agency already had “read and write” access to the data. The request and the questions it raised were one example of the suspicion and speculation in Washington as Trump and Elon Musk conduct an unprecedented effort to shrink the federal workforce and slash federal programs that is shrouded in secrecy.Democrats have criticized Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency for failing to disclose the names of its staff members, its criteria for laying off certain government workers and its rationale for cutting programs. Which government data they are accessing remains not fully known. As of Wednesday, NBC News has confirmed that DOGE officials have been active at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which oversees health care for more than 139 million people; the U.S. Agency for International Development; the Department of Veterans Affairs; and the U.S. Treasury.In the morning, Trump will hold bilateral meetings and have lunch with the prime minister. In the early afternoon, they are scheduled to hold a joint press conference.Until recently, Elon Musk seldom posted about the U.S. Agency for International Development on X, where he is wont to share his thoughts on nearly every subject. Then on Sunday came a flurry of posts wherein the world’s richest person, the Trump-appointed head of the new Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, described USAID, the foreign humanitarian assistance agency, as “a viper’s nest of radical-left marxists who hate America,” “evil” and “a criminal organization.”Musk’s sudden — and consequential — interest in USAID did not emerge from a vacuum: The agency has long been a target of criticism that its aid programs masked nation-meddling and overspent American tax dollars abroad. Some conspiracy theories alleged that the global humanitarian programs were a cover for biowarfare research or that USAID’s funding enriched an elite few who control the world.A spokesperson for the court said the order would “impose sanctions on its officials and harm its independent and impartial judicial work.” “The Court stands firmly by its personnel and pledges to continue providing justice and hope to millions of innocent victims of atrocities across the world, in all Situations before it,” the spokesperson said. “We call on our 125 States Parties, civil society and all nations of the world to stand united for justice and fundamental human rights.”and several Hamas leaders at the same time. Neither Israel nor the U.S. has ever recognized the jurisdiction of the ICC.PANAMA CITY — Panama President José Raúl Mulino said yesterday the U.S. was spreading “lies and falsehoods” after the State Department claimed U.S. government vessels would be able to pass through the Panama Canal without paying. The comments were likely to exacerbate tensions between the two countries after the U.S. had cited progress on military cooperation and confronting alleged Chinese influence over the canal.Vought, a co-author of Project 2025 who faced strong Democratic opposition, was confirmed by a vote of 53-47.The first procedural vote on Gabbard's nomination is set for Monday. If she gets a simple majority, her nomination will then most likely be subject to 30 hours of debate.After Gabbard, the Senate will turn to votes on nominees Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for health and human services secretary, Howard Lutnick for commerce secretary, Brooke Rollins for agriculture secretary and Kelly Loeffler for administrator of the Small Business Administration.
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