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A humiliation at the White House and what does it tell us? Trump would make a colony of my country | Andrey Kurkov | The Guardian

A humiliation at the White House and what does it tell us? Trump would make a colony of my country | Andrey Kurkov

"It’s warming up in Kyiv. The temperature has risen from -5C to 4C. Sometimes, the sun peeps through breaks in the clouds, but Kyivites are not much cheered by the sunshine. They are not watching for signs of spring as they usually do at this time of year. The atmosphere in the city and in the country as a whole has been one of nervous expectation. This was not an expectation of an end to military action or the signing of a peace treaty with Russia – nothing so specific. Indeed, it was not at all clear what we were waiting for, but it was something connected with Donald Trump and the change in US policy towards Ukraine.

Clarity emerged at today’s macabre theatre at the White House: handshakes, a thumbs up and some fist pumps from the US president, before Trump sat side by side with Volodymyr Zelenskyy to discuss a minerals-for-war-support deal and to humiliate him. At the same time, air raid sirens were sounding in northern and eastern Ukraine. Soon the talks were off and Zelenskyy was gone.

What proceeded, in front of TV cameras, was chilling, extraordinary. Zelenskyy grave, angry, desperate – as befits a leader being obliged to bargain away his nation’s birthright. Trump claiming to be the honest broker, saying: “I am not aligned with anybody. I am aligned with the world.” Be thankful, he tells a man who has seen his people murdered, his territory captured and besieged. “Make a deal or we’re out.”

It got worse. Zelenskyy showed him photos of war atrocities. “I think President Trump is on our side,” he said, with no genuine hope and certainly no expectation that that was true. The vice-president, JD Vance, attacked Zelenskyy for being disrespectful. Both Trump and Vance verbally pummelled him for the cameras, for this is the art of the deal now: loaded, hectoring, callous, bloodless.

But then Ukrainians’ belief in a concrete proposal from Trump to end the war had already been replaced by the conviction that the president had no such plan, but rather, many different ideas about US involvement in the region – ideas that often relate to Ukraine, but sometimes conflict with each other and are never focused on supporting a country that is a victim of Russian aggression.

During the past two weeks, we have watched as the issue of ending the Russian-Ukrainian war has transformed into the issue of rare earth metal mining in our country. As it turned out, in Saudi Arabia the participants in the Russian-US negotiations also discussed the extraction of rare earth metals, only they focused on resources in Russian territories and in the occupied territories of Ukraine. These rare earth metals have pushed the topic of the war and military aid to Ukraine out of the media space. That space is filled with dollars now.

Older Ukrainians, who grew up in the Soviet Union, have recognised in this situation the US that was depicted by Soviet propaganda cartoons as a nation of greedy, irresponsible, grab-what-you-can capitalists, who spat on complex problems and had eyes only for dollar superprofits.

This is an existential war, and a new reality. Trump says Zelenskyy is “not ready for peace”, but Ukraine has no choice but to fight on, whatever the cost. Aid that was previously given for nothing must now be bought. If there is no money, then it is necessary to pay with resources. After three years of full-scale Russian aggression, US geopolitical interests in Ukraine have been replaced by financial interests. Instead of the politician President Biden, the businessman President Trump has entered the arena.

Note that the US proposal on the extraction of rare earth metals in Ukraine, if realised, would allow the US side to sign a similar agreement with Russia and start digging without waiting for the end of hostilities. The notion is an “investment fund”, managed by the US and Ukraine on “equal terms”, into which Ukraine would contribute 50% of future proceeds from state-owned mineral resources, oil and gas “to promote the safety, security and prosperity of Ukraine”. Trump insists it is “very fair”.

Would such an agreement encourage Russia to cease its aggression? No! Does it contain security guarantees for Ukraine? It seems not. Does Ukraine have any choice? Debatable.

In this situation, Britain and the EU become much more important partners for Ukraine than before. While organising favourable access to Ukrainian resources for the US, Trump hopes to hand over to Europe and Britain responsibility for Ukraine’s security in the event of a cessation of hostilities, and responsibility for further military assistance. Given this, it is by no means clear what advantage such an agreement on rare earth metals would give Ukraine.

Trump’s claims that US mining on Ukrainian territory will be a sufficient guarantee of Ukraine’s security because Russia will not risk attacking US economic interests do not stand up to criticism. The Chinese state-owned COFCO corporation invested in a new grain and oil handling complex in Ukraine’s Mykolaiv port, but Chinese involvement did not protect the port from being targeted by Russian missiles. It has not been operational since March 2022 and the region is losing about 40% of its revenues.

The fact that Trump has been so complimentary about Vladimir Putin, and so hostile to Zelenskyy, says everything. “I think he will keep his word,” Trump assured the world. “I have known him for a long time.” Trump’s phrase that peace will be achieved “fairly soon or it won’t happen at all” indicates that he will not waste too much time on negotiations with Putin if they drag on, or if Putin puts forward conditions that are unacceptable to Ukraine. Some conditions have already been announced by Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, who reminded us that Russia still plans to seize the entirety of the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions.

Zelenskyy was brave, but we are supplicants now. Trump and the Kremlin have made it abundantly clear that Ukraine’s participation in these negotiations between the US and Russia is not necessary or desirable. Like so much else, the principle announced by Biden, “Nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine”, has been trampled underfoot. Zelenskyy was called to the White House to sign, but not speak.

Trump has had his way. He has transformed Ukraine from a subject into an object, and after this White House humiliation some Ukrainians are convinced that the extraction of rare earth metals on Trump’s terms would turn our country into a “colony” of the US. Still, many Ukrainians would prefer to live in a US colony than in a Russian one, if that’s the choice.

• Andrey Kurkov is a Ukrainian novelist and the author of Death and the Penguin"

A humiliation at the White House and what does it tell us? Trump would make a colony of my country | Andrey Kurkov | The Guardian

Might Makes Right: Matt Duss on Trump’s Foreign Policy Doctrine, from Ukraine to Gaza | Democracy Now!

Might Makes Right: Matt Duss on Trump’s Foreign Policy Doctrine, from Ukraine to Gaza | Democracy Now!

Trump gets into irate screaming match with Zelensky in Oval Office

Judge pauses firing of many probationary federal workers in union lawsuit - The Washington Post

Judge blocks Trump administration’s mass firings of federal workers

"A federal judge ruled that the terminations at agencies including the Department of Defense were probably illegal.

Salvador Rizzo

February 27, 2025 at 6:23 p.m. ESTYesterday at 6:23 p.m. EST

SAN FRANCISCO — A federal judge on Thursday ordered the Office of Personnel Management to rescind directives that initiated the mass firing of probationary workersacross the government, ruling that the terminations were probably illegal, as a group of labor unions argued in court.

U.S. District Judge William Alsup ordered OPM to rescind its previous directives to more than two dozen agencies, including the Department of Defense, the Park Service, the Bureau of Land Management, the National Science Foundation and others identified in a lawsuit. The ruling — a temporary restraint on the government that will be revisited in the coming weeks — is one of the biggest roadblocks so far to President Donald Trump’s effort to slash the federal workforce.

“Congress has given the authority to hire and fire to the agencies themselves. The Department of Defense, for example, has statutory authority to hire and fire,” Alsup said from the bench as he handed down the ruling Thursday evening in federal court in San Francisco. “The Office of Personnel Management does not have any authority whatsoever, under any statute in the history of the universe, to hire and fire employees at another agency. They can hire and fire their own employees.”

Judge pauses firing of many probationary federal workers in union lawsuit - The Washington Post

Georgia Secretary of State Asks DOJ, DHS to Suppress Voters

AOC's Truth Bomb Sends MTG Into A RAMPAGE

Lawrence: Elon Musk got caught lying, and Donald Trump made the lie bigger

Trump says tariffs for Mexico, Canada, and China to go into effect next week – live

"US president blames illegal drugs from Mexico and Canada as reason for tariffs going into effect on 4 March; China to be charged an additional 10%

5h ago

‘These incidents encapsulate Trump’s transactional and corrupt approach to governing – and the ways wealthy autocrats including Prince Mohammed will be able to exploit the president.’ Photograph: Cristóbal Herrera/EPA

2h ago07.54 EST

Trump is using the presidency to seek golf deals. Hardly anyone’s paying attention

‘These incidents encapsulate Trump’s transactional and corrupt approach to governing – and the ways wealthy autocrats including Prince Mohammed will be able to exploit the president.’ Photograph: Cristóbal Herrera/EPA

In his first month in office, Donald Trump destroyed federal agencies, fired thousands of government workers and unleashed dozens of executive orders. The US president also found time to try to broker an agreement between two rival golf tournaments, the US-based PGA Tour and the LIV Golf league, funded by Saudi Arabia.

If concluded, the deal would directly benefit Trump’s family business, which owns and manages golf courses around the world. And it would be the latest example of Trump using the presidency to advance his personal interests.

On 20 February, Trump hosted a meeting at the White House between Jay Monahan, the PGA Tour commissioner, and Yasir al-Rumayyan, chair of LIV Golf and head of Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, along with the golf star Tiger Woods. It was the second meeting convened by Trump at the White House this month with PGA Tour officials involved in negotiating with the Saudi wealth fund.

A day before his latest attempt at high-level golf diplomacy, Trump travelled to Miami to speak at a conference organized by the Saudi Public Investment Fund, which is managed by Al-Rumayyan but ultimately controlled by the kingdom’s de facto ruler and crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman.

Trump’s sports diplomacy in the Oval Office and cozying up to Saudi investors in Miami did not get much attention compared with his whirlwind of executive orders and new policies. But these incidents encapsulate Trump’s transactional and corrupt approach to governing – and the ways that wealthy autocrats including Prince Mohammed will be able to exploit the US president. While Trump will often boast he is making good deals for the US, his relationship with Saudi Arabia and its crown prince is largely built on benefits for Trump’s family and its extensive business interests.

You can read the full report here:

04.51 EST

UK PM Starmer to meet Trump for Ukraine talks

UK prime minister Keir Starmer is in Washington where later today where he will have his first meeting with President Trump since the inauguration.

With Trump aligning with Moscow even more explicitly than he did during his first administration, and threatening to wind down the Nato guarantees that have underpinned the security of western Europe since the second world war, the stakes could not be higher.

Starmer, despite leading a party whose activists mostly loathe Trump and everything he represents, has managed to establish a warm relationship with the president and today will give some clues as to what extent he can sustain that, and protect the UK from the tariff warfare that Trump is threatening to unleash on the EU.

But Starmer is one of three European leaders in Washington this week (Emmanuel Macron was there on Monday, Volodymyr Zelenskyy is there tomorrow) and today’s meeting is also part of a wider story about the fracturing of the US/Europe alliance. It is definitely in trouble; but what is not yet clear is whether after four years of Trump it will still be functioning effectively.

Starmer spoke to reporters on his flight to the US on Wednesday. Pippa Crerar, the Guardian’s UK political editor, was on the plane and, as she reports, Starmer said he wants Trump to agree that, in the event of a peace settlement in Ukraine, the US will offer security guarantees that will make it durable. He has already said that Britain would contribute troops to a European so-called “tripwire” peace-keeping force, there to defend Ukraine and deter Russia. But European soldiers would need US air and logistical support to be effective, and Starmer is looking for assurances on this topic.

You can follow all the latest from Starmer’s DC visit in our dedicated live blog:"

Trump says tariffs for Mexico, Canada, and China to go into effect next week – live

Opinion | If Trump Alone Can Fix It, What Is Elon Musk Doing? - The New York Times

If Trump Alone Can Fix It, What Is Elon Musk Doing?

Feb. 27, 2025, 5:02 a.m. ET

Damon Winter/The New York Times

"As Donald Trump searched for a running mate in May of 2016, his oldest child, Donald Trump Jr., tried to bring John Kasich, the governor of Ohio, into the fold. His supposed offer, according to reporting in The Times: that Kasich, as vice president, could be president in everything but name. He would run foreign and domestic policy and be, in essence, the most powerful vice president in American history.

As for his father, Donald Jr. explained, his job would be making America great again.

Both the Trump campaign and the Kasich camp denied that this exchange ever took place. “It’s completely ridiculous,” said Jason Miller, Trump’s spokesman at the time. “There was never an offer made. It’s completely made up.” Trump issued a denial as well. “John Kasich was never asked by me to be V.P.,” he said on Twitter.

Trump’s eventual choice, Gov. Mike Pence of Indiana, took a traditional approach to the role, never overstepping his bounds or challenging the authority of the president until the very end, when Trump asked him to break the Constitution on his behalf.

Now, in his second term, it seems the president has embraced the idea that he can divide the responsibilities of the job to share with another person. He could serve as head of state — where he’ll use his cultural and political influence to “make America great again” — and someone else could serve as head of government to manage the executive branch.

Enter Elon Musk.

Musk has been given control of much of the executive branch under the auspices of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency. His subordinates wield a tremendous amount of power, destroying entire agencies and firing tens of thousands of civil servants at will. If Musk were a cabinet official, he would be among the most powerful and influential cabinet officials in American history.

But Musk is not a cabinet official. He has no official role other than that of special adviser. He is something like a constitutional officer, but he was not confirmed to his position by the Senate (as the Appointments Clause would demand). It is not even clear if Trump is giving Musk direct orders or if Musk is operating autonomously, cloaked in the authority of the president but working outside the limits and restrictions placed by the Constitution.

Either way, it’s clear that Musk is a kind of co-president, wielding extra-constitutional power over the executive branch. It is true that there have been times in American history during which individuals have wielded the power of the presidency without any formal role in government. Edith Wilson famously (or perhaps infamously) acted as de facto president after her husband, President Woodrow Wilson, suffered a debilitating stroke in 1919.

But Musk’s role is something unique. The president is not incapacitated. He is still engaged in the work of foreign affairs and other matters of state. And he has imbued Musk with the authority to act as head of government, so much so that Musk felt confident enough on Wednesday to address the president’s cabinet as if he were, in a real sense, the boss.

There is a deep irony here. If there is an operating philosophy driving the Trump White House, it is that of the unitary executive — the idea that the president is the sole and exclusive wielder of a broad and expansive executive power. This includes the power to dismiss federal employees at will as well as the power to resist congressional statutes or judicial decisions that encroach on executive authority.

One key source for the idea of the unitary executive is Alexander Hamilton’s case for an “energetic” executive in Federalist No. 70. “A feeble Executive implies a feeble execution of the government,” Hamilton wrote. “A feeble execution is but another phrase for a bad execution; and a government ill executed, whatever it may be in theory, must be, in practice, a bad government.” The executive needs energy, he continued, and unity — as opposed to a plurality or multiplicity of executives — is the ingredient that makes an active and energetic president possible.

There are a few issues here. The first is a matter of constitutional interpretation. In addition to Hamilton, the unitary executive theory leans heavily on Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution, which states that “The executive power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.” Proponents of the unitary executive theory believe that this phrasing, “the executive power,” grants the president a set of inherent and implied powers including near absolute authority over foreign affairs. But this reading of the Executive Vesting Clause runs into a small problem: the specificity of the rest of Article II. The framers took care to enumerate the various powers of the presidency, a choice that does not make sense if they had written a general grant of authority for the president.

In fact, as Julian Davis Mortenson notes in a 2020 article for the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, there is strong evidence from contemporaneous 18th-century sources that the Vesting Clause did little more than “convey the authority to execute the laws.” This power, he observes, “was an empty vessel that authorized only those actions previously specified by the laws of the land.” And a quick glance at the records of the Constitutional convention support an even narrower reading of the Vesting Clause: that it only exists “to settle the question whether the executive branch should be plural or single and to give the executive a title.”

The second issue relates to the other load-bearing pillar of the unitary executive theory, the Take Care Clause, which provides that the president “shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” For supporters of the unitary executive, this means that the president has total control over his subordinates; otherwise, how would he know if the laws were being “faithfully executed”? And among the most extreme unitarians, the Take Care Clause completely insulates the executive from statutory direction and legislative oversight because the president, and only the president, is charged with ensuring faithful execution of the laws.

But this runs counter to what we know about the actual practice of American government in the first decades under the Constitution. For example, lawmakers in the first Congress, many of whom had a direct hand either in writing the Constitution or in fighting for its ratification, saw nothing in Article II that prevented them from creating offices in the executive branch that lay outside the direct control of the president. In a 2019 article for the Notre Dame Law Review, Christine Kexel Chabot shines light on the Sinking Fund Commission, an independent agency — established by Alexander Hamilton, passed by Congress and signed into law by President George Washington — that “carried out open market purchases of U.S. securities with substantial independence from the president.” The president himself could not initiate such purchases “without approval of a majority of the Commission,” and he had little power to replace or remove members of the commission.

Nearly 50 years later, in Kendall v. United States — a case in which the postmaster general refused to pay the legally required amount of money to a mail contractor — the Supreme Court held that Congress could impose duties on federal officers that the president cannot circumvent or ignore. The executive power may be vested in a president, Justice Smith Thompson wrote, “but it by no means follows that every officer in every branch of that department is under the exclusive direction of the President.” What’s more, “it would be an alarming doctrine that Congress cannot impose upon any executive officer any duty they may think proper which is not repugnant to any rights secured and protected by the Constitution, and in such cases the duty and responsibility grow out of and are subject to control of the law, and not to the direction of the President.”

The expansive reading of the Take Care Clause favored by unitarians is also undermined by a thorough reading of the history of the language. As Andrew Kent, Ethan J. Leib and Jed Handelsman Shugerman show in a 2019 article for the Harvard Law Review on the idea of “faithful execution,” the history “points to faithful execution being a restrictive duty rather than an expansive power — and that this requirement was as likely to be imposed on high-level officeholders as it was upon low-level officers, who were ordered not to veer from their assigned jobs, not to self-deal, and to do their jobs with diligence and care.”

The fact of the matter is that at every stage of its existence — from its creation at the hands of Congress to the present — the executive branch and federal bureaucracy have been a joint project of the other branches of government. The president offers direction, yes, but so do Congress and the courts. The federal bureaucracy has never had sole parentage, and neither the president nor the Legislature nor the courts can claim sole responsibility.

Supporters of the unitary executive will say that this joint custody arrangement undermines accountability, but it’s just the opposite. The fact that different parts of the government can exercise authority over the bureaucracy — the fact that Congress as much as the president can shape its conduct and operation — is constitutionalism in action. It is a joint custody arrangement that illustrates the basic fact that ours is a government of shared power and shared responsibility, in which each constitutional actor is empowered to check and influence the other.

That’s where the irony comes in.

President Trump may be working from an expansive theory of executive power, but in delegating so much of his authority to Musk — in creating a de facto co-president — he is both undermining that power and demonstrating Hamilton’s real insights about the importance of a singular executive.

Hamilton writes that “plurality in the Executive” tends to “conceal faults and destroy responsibility.” We’re seeing this play out with DOGE, where it is often unclear who is responsible for what. Hamilton says that “the multiplication of the Executive adds to the difficulty of detection…. It often becomes impossible, amidst mutual accusations, to determine on whom the blame or the punishment of a pernicious measure, or series of pernicious measures, ought really to fall. It is shifted from one to another with so much dexterity, and under such plausible appearances, that the public opinion is left in suspense about the real author.”

It is hard to imagine a better description of our current situation, in which the presence of what are essentially two presidents has blurred lines of accountability for “pernicious measures.”

As a result of this delegation of authority, the executive branch under Trump is also plagued with the question of whose orders are legitimate. Last week, Musk asked every federal employee to respond to an email that orders them to state their accomplishments over the past week. The punishment for not replying? You lose your job. But on whose authority can Musk make that demand and issue that threat? This is why several cabinet secretaries and department heads have told the civil servants under their direction not to respond.

There is a major political problem here as well. By ceding presidential authority to Musk, Trump is putting his fate in Musk’s hands. He is handing over the viability of his presidency to a figure who is accountable to no one but himself. If and when disaster strikes, Musk can walk away.

After all, he isn’t really the president. The buck will stop with Trump and the Republican Party because, if Musk cannot be held politically liable, they will be.

Jamelle Bouie became a New York Times Opinion columnist in 2019. Before that he was the chief political correspondent for Slate magazine. He is based in Charlottesville, Va., and Washington. @jbouie"

Opinion | If Trump Alone Can Fix It, What Is Elon Musk Doing? - The New York Times

GOP Gambles on Budget Plan That Helps the Rich and Cuts Aid to the Poor - The New York Times

Republicans Gamble on a Regressive Economic Agenda

"The House Republican budget plan would pair tax cuts that primarily benefit the rich with cuts to programs that help the poor.

News Analysis

Who is helped and who is harmed by Republicans’ plans are shaping up to be central questions for the party’s lawmakers as they try to squeeze legislation through Congress.Eric Lee/The New York Times

The Republican Party won the last election in no small part because of its new appeal with working-class voters, a shift that left many in Washington wondering if a sustained political realignment was afoot.

But the economic agenda Republicans are now putting together on Capitol Hill would by and large help rich Americans, all while teeing up cuts to programs that provide health care and food to the poor.

The disconnect has left some Republicans nervous about whether they are abandoning their newfound base of support. Democrats, eyeing that vulnerability, are hammering Republicans for planning to take from the poor to give to the rich, a line of attack that they believe helped lift them back into power during President Trump’s first term.

Who is helped and who is harmed by Republicans’ plans are shaping up to be central questions for G.O.P. lawmakers as they try to squeeze legislation through their narrow majorities in Congress. The House on Tuesday adopted a budget blueprint that calls for $4.5 trillion in tax cuts and $2 trillion in spending reductions, alongside $300 billion in new funding for defense and border programs and an increase in the debt limit.

The House vote was just the first step in what could be a circuitous path to turning the plans into law. The Republican Senate has its own ideas for the party’s agenda, and the two chambers will have to agree on the broad strokes of the legislation before they can proceed to passing it along party lines.

Some House Republicans who supported the budget outline this week said they hoped that the Senate would ultimately tear up their plans. Making the math work in the House plan would almost certainly require cuts to programs for the poor like Medicaid, which provides health care to more than 70 million Americans. Representative Jeff Van Drew, a New Jersey Republican, said he had pitched Mr. Trump on avoiding deep cuts to Medicaid.

“He does not want Medicaid cuts on hard-working people. He knows this is the new majority. It is the new majority of the Republican Party, and it’s the right thing to do,” he said. “The Senate is going to straighten it out.”

The difficulty springs from Republicans’ expensive tax agenda. However their plans evolve, they will want to cut taxes, and fiscal hawks in the party are demanding that they also cut spending to help fill that fiscal hole. Because the federal government most heavily taxes the rich and focuses much of its spending on the poor, broad cuts to both taxes and spending would be regressive, or advantaging the rich over the poor, analysts say.

“They’re cutting taxes in a regressive manner and cutting spending, which is also regressive,” said Kyle Pomerleau, who studies tax policy at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank.

The American tax system is progressive, with the top 1 percent of Americans paying more than 30 percent of the taxes the federal government collects every year, according to Treasury Department data. So tax cuts like the ones Republicans hope to enact would provide their largest benefits to rich Americans who pay the most in tax, meaning the policy is regressive even if it still returns money to the working class.

Consider the top Republican tax priority this year: continuing the tax cuts the party passed into law in 2017. Among the measures that expire at the end of the year are lower marginal tax rates across income brackets, an expanded standard deduction and a more generous child tax credit, which is aimed at low- and middle-income Americans.

Most Americans saw lower taxes because of the bill, and Republicans see it as a political imperative to keep the existing cuts in place. Doing so would offer comparatively little to poor Americans who do not pay much tax. An analysis from the Tax Policy Center, a think tank, showed that Americans in the bottom 20 percent of earners, who make up to $33,900, would see on average a 0.6 percent — or $130 — increase in their after-tax income if the tax cuts were extended.

That’s smaller than the 1.8 percent boost the think tank expects for Americans on average. And it is far smaller than the 3.2 percent, or $70,350, increase in after-tax income that extending the tax cuts would provide to the top 1 percent, who make more than $1 million a year.

Republicans are considering additional tax cuts that could provide even more benefits to high-income Americans. Even corporate tax breaks that help grow the economy still flow mainly to the owners of businesses, who are typically wealthy.

Another idea under consideration would be to lift a $10,000 cap on state and local tax deductions that was put in place as part of the 2017 tax cuts. Any increase in the so-called SALT deduction would accrue to higher-income Americans who may owe a lot of property taxes on their valuable homes, for example.

Republicans defend their tax plans, which they argue can help grow the economy and in turn help lift wages for working-class Americans. Representative Jodey C. Arrington, Republican of Texas and the chairman of the House Budget Committee, believes that pairing spending cuts with tax cuts can juice the economy by reducing the amount the federal government has to borrow to pay for the tax cut.

“So if you are cutting taxes, they’ll say that the crowding out of private capital because you are borrowing more will kind of offset some of the positive economic growth potential that will come from lowering taxes,” he said this week. “But when you’re cutting spending, you’re reducing that crowding-out effect.”

Because their plans are still preliminary, Republicans have not yet detailed how they will achieve the spending cuts called for in the House budget blueprint. They have said they do not want to take away health care from children and other vulnerable Americans, though many of them appear open to rescinding enhanced federal aid for adults covered by the expansion of the program under the Affordable Care Act.

Under that law, the federal government pays for much of the cost of providing care to Americans who earn up to 138 percent of the federal poverty level, equivalent to $20,780 for an individual or $35,630 for a family of three, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal think tank.

Republicans are debating cutting the amount of money the federal government gives to states to provide health care to those people, a change that could endanger coverage for more millions of such Americans. For low-income Americans, the loss of Medicaid would likely be a greater loss in value than any gains provided by a cut in their income taxes.

“Cuts to Medicaid, for low-income and moderate-income families, are likely to overwhelm any tax cut that they get,” Brendan Duke, the senior director of federal fiscal policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, said.

During the campaign, Mr. Trump proposed a slew of novel tax policies that were targeted at working-class voters, including ending taxes on overtime, tips and Social Security. Republican lawmakers are not sure if they can find the money to afford several of those ideas, which in any case may not do much to help low-income Americans who don’t owe income taxes.

For some Republicans, pursuing an agenda that cuts taxes and spending is frustrating, given the way the party’s support has changed over time. Such an agenda may have made some political sense back when Republicans received more of their support from rich Americans. Not anymore, said Oren Cass, a founder of the think tank the American Compass and a leading voice in the so-called New Right.

“They have this old script they think they’re supposed to be reading off that says we’re going to cut taxes for high-income families and cut benefits for the poor,” he said. “That was always an incredibly dumb script, but it was one that the Republican Party thought it should be pursuing once upon a time. And now the Republican Party doesn’t think they should be pursuing it, but they’re still blindly wandering forward as if that’s what they’re supposed to do.”

GOP Gambles on Budget Plan That Helps the Rich and Cuts Aid to the Poor - The New York Times

Chief Justice Allows U.S. to Continue Freeze on Foreign Aid Payments

​

“The Supreme Court granted a temporary stay, allowing the Trump administration to continue withholding over $1.5 billion in foreign aid payments. The administration is terminating nearly 10,000 contracts and grants, including some for essential programs like PEPFAR, citing a need to review foreign aid spending. Aid groups argue that the administration’s actions jeopardize vital programs and the lives of millions, while the Trump administration maintains that foreign aid has become wasteful and detached from U.S. interests.

​

Lawyers for the government had said it would miss a deadline to release more than $1.5 billion in payments for past aid work and sought a late intervention from the Supreme Court.

Feb. 26, 2025

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. on Wednesday night handed the Trump administration a victory for now in saying that the U.S. Agency for International Development and the State Department did not need to immediately pay for more than $1.5 billion in already completed aid work.

A federal judge had set a midnight deadline for the agencies to release funds for the foreign aid work, which was withheld in the wake of the president’s Day 1 directive to gut U.S. spending overseas.

The Trump administration, in an emergency appeal to the Supreme Court just hours before the deadline, said the judge had overstepped his authority and interfered with the president’s obligations to “make appropriate judgments about foreign aid.”

Chief Justice Roberts issued an “administrative stay,” an interim measure meant to preserve the status quo while the justices consider the matter in a more deliberate fashion. The chief justice ordered the challengers to file a response to the application on Friday, and the court is likely to act not long after.

However tentative, the stay was nonetheless the first victory for the administration in a deluge of cases that the justices could hear over President Trump’s blitz of executive actions.

In another aggressive move on Wednesday to carry out the president’s directive, lawyers for the Trump administration said that it was ending nearly 10,000 U.S. Agency for International Development and State Department contracts and grants.

The pair of administration actions stunned diplomats and aid workers already reeling from mass firings at U.S.A.I.D., which funds food, health, development and democracy programs abroad, and which the Trump administration has systematically dismantled. A former senior U.S.A.I.D. official said the cuts account for about 90 percent of the agency’s work and tens of billions of dollars in spending.

The signage for U.S.A.I.D. in Washington, which has been covered up with tape, seen on Tuesday.Jason Andrew for The New York Times

The cuts deal “a catastrophic blow to USAID’s implementing partners and the populations they serve, likely bankrupting many, and shuttering lifesaving and important programs forever,” a group of agency workers and partners said in a fact sheet distributed Wednesday night.

Several aid workers and U.S.A.I.D. officials said that at least some money for the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR, had been eliminated, including for elements of the program that were previously deemed essential lifesaving work and exempted from the aid freeze.

Other terminated contracts included ones with urban search and rescue teamsin Virginia and California that deploy to afflicted areas in the wake of natural disasters such as the devastating earthquake that struck Turkey and Syria two years ago, according to the former U.S.A.I.D. official. That program had also previously been granted a humanitarian exception from the foreign aid freeze by Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

Trump administration lawyers outlined the steep foreign aid cuts in a status report on the administration’s progress in complying with a Feb. 13 order by Judge Amir H. Ali of the Federal District Court for the District of Columbia. In the order, he said the government must disburse funding already promised to foreign aid contractors and grant recipients who work around the world and who say the U.S.-backed programs save countless lives and enhance America’s influence abroad.

Mr. Trump and other top U.S. officials insist that foreign aid, which makes up roughly 1 percent of the federal budget, has grown wasteful and detached from America’s vital interests.

But critics warn that Mr. Trump is making a calamitous mistake, saying his assault on foreign aid “dangerously undermines America’s ability to win,” as Liz Schrayer, president of the U.S. Global Leadership Coalition, said in a statement. 

The moves on Wednesday were the latest twists in the tug of war between the Trump administration and the legal system, in which administration officials have stated that they are working to comply with directives while simultaneously looking for ways around them.

After Mr. Trump in January ordered agencies to pause nearly all foreign aid spending for 90 days while officials reviewed individual projects, aid groups sued. They argued that the pause jeopardized their missions and the lives of millions of people who depend on the programs the U.S. government has funded for decades.

On Feb. 13, Judge Ali issued an order requiring agencies to release funds for any “contracts, grants, cooperative agreements, loans or other federal foreign assistance award that was in existence as of Jan. 19,” the day before Mr. Trump took office.

But group after group, including the ones that brought the lawsuit, has reported that funding was never restored. At the hearing on Tuesday, lawyers told Judge Ali that the only reasonable explanation was that the government had never taken steps to lift the blanket pause on foreign aid.

The administration argued in the filing that because the agencies had raced ahead to review the grants and contracts and determined that all but a fraction of them would be canceled, it had met the court’s demands by finishing “a good-faith, individualized assessment” of its programs.

“U.S.A.I.D. is in the process of processing termination letters with the goal to reach substantial completion within the next 24 to 48 hours,” it said. “As a result, no U.S.A.I.D. or State obligations remain in a suspended or paused state.”

According to the filing, the government identified around 3,200 contracts and grants that it decided to retain and was “committed to fully moving forward with the remaining awards.”

Judge Ali repeatedly pressed a lawyer representing the government to clarify whether any funds had been released since his directive earlier this month. The lawyer was unable to point to any sign that the aid money was flowing, and Judge Ali issued a new midnight deadline for the government to pay any outstanding invoices or drawdown requests that had come due before his Feb. 13 order.

According to Pete Marocco, the top Trump appointee in charge of foreign aid, the continued holdup was at least in part because of logistical issues. U.S.A.I.D. is facing roughly $1.5 billion in payment requests and the State Department has around $400 million more outstanding, Mr. Marocco said, which could not be handled immediately.

“These payments cannot be accomplished in the time allotted by the court and would instead take multiple weeks,” he wrote in a document supporting the government’s argument for more time filed on Wednesday.

In their own submissions on Wednesday, groups that had brought the legal challenge against the Trump administration listed a ream of complaints about how the Trump administration has proceeded.

Among them, lawyers argued that Trump officials “have added new layers of review to all disbursements of foreign assistance funds, including requiring line-by-line policy justifications for payments for past work that has already been approved through normal approval processes.”

Lawyers pointed to sworn statements by aid workers who said that because they had been unable to access funds as recently as Tuesday, they had been unable to go about their work overseas, including disbursing H.I.V. medications purchased with U.S. aid.

The State Department issued a waiver for PEPFAR weeks ago, allowing funding to flow to those programs. But several statements filed on Wednesday said that invoices related to PEPFAR still had not been paid.

Statements filed in support of the groups suing on Wednesday detailed other harms.

“Within my portfolio this means that starving children will not receive ready-to-use therapeutic foods, pregnant and breastfeeding women will not be screened for malnutrition, and refugee households will not be provided vouchers to purchase food for their families,” one worker wrote in a declaration.

Lawyers for the government said Judge Ali’s deadline to keep aid flowing was unrealistic.

“Additional time is required because restarting funding related to terminated or suspended agreements is not as simple as turning on a switch or faucet,” they wrote.

Lawyers for the aid groups also asked the court on Wednesday to allow them to call Mr. Marocco and Mr. Rubio to testify. In the filing they said that administration lawyers had “indicated that they would resist” Mr. Rubio being deposed under the apex doctrine, a legal theory that protects high-level executive branch officials from burdensome demands and potential harassment.

But the plaintiff’s lawyers noted that administration lawyers have said that Mr. Rubio had “personal involvement” in decisions about the foreign aid funding, making his testimony essential.“