Key events
Closing summary
Our live coverage is ending now. In the meantime, you can find all of our live US politics coverage here. Here is a summary of the key developments from today:
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Donald Trump signed an executive order meant to expand the power of Elon Musk’s governmental cost-cutting program, the so-called “department of government efficiency”, or Doge. The new order requires agencies to create a centralized system to record and justify payments, which may be made public for transparency – an initiative that would be monitored by Musk’s team.
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The Trump administration said it is eliminating more than 90% of the US Agency for International Development’s foreign aid contracts and $60bn in overall US assistance around the world.
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Fired USAid employees and advocates for people with HIV staged a protest in a Capitol office building, warning that Donald Trump’s drive to dismantle the agency tasked with implementing Washington’s foreign aid agenda imperils the fight against the virus.
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Trump announced that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy will visit Washington DC to sign the rare earth minerals agreement. He praised Doge, claiming, without evidence, that it has saved billions.
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Elon Musk also delivered remarks and warned that without cost-cutting, the country could go “bankrupt” describing himself as “tech support”. He acknowledged mistakes made by Doge, such as when they accidentally cancelled an Ebola prevention effort, but he said, they “restored it immediately and there was no interruption”.
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Trump also mentioned that the Environmental Protection Agency might cut up to 65% of its employees and declined to comment in response to a question about whether he would ever allow China to take control of Taiwan by force.
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Trump said that tariffs on Canada and Mexico will continue, and that a 25% tariff on the European Union was coming soon.
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Health Secretary Robert F Kennedy said that two people had died from a measles outbreak, but did not provide details about the deaths. Earlier on Wednesday, it was reported that one child had died of measles.
Lauren Gambino
The Guardian’s political correspondent, Lauren Gambino, writes about the latest executive order meant to expand the power of Elon Musk’s governmental cost-cutting program:
The order is part of a much broader effort by the White House to dramatically reduce the size of the federal workforce, which the Trump administration has cast as an impediment to realizing his sprawling agenda. On Wednesday, the Office of Management and Budget and the Office of Personnel Management sent a seven-page memo directing agency leaders to develop plans to implement “large-scale reductions” by 13 March, according to the Associated Press.
“We’re cutting down the size of government. We have to,” Trump said earlier on Wednesday during the first cabinet meeting of his second term. “We’re bloated. We’re sloppy. We have a lot of people that aren’t doing their job.”
The administration already moved to fire thousands of probationary employees who were not yet entitled to civil service protections. The president on Wednesday said that the Environmental Protection Agency plans to cut up to 65% of its employees. Employees at the labor department and the Social Security Administration are also reportedly bracing for dramatic downsizings.
Addressing the cabinet meeting on Wednesday, Musk conceded that Doge had made some mistakes in its rapid-fire approach to shrinking and in some cases attempting to entirely eliminate agencies. He conceded that Doge “won’t be perfect”, including when it “accidentally” cancelled an Ebola-prevention effort that the tech billionaire insisted had been restored “immediately” and with “no interruption”.
An official with the US Agency for International Development (USAid), one of Doge’s first targets, disputed Musk’s claim, telling the AP that agency funds for Ebola response had not been released since Trump froze foreign aid last month.
Under the new Doge-related executive order, the General Services Administration has 60 days to submit a plan for offloading any government real estate “deemed by the agency as no longer needed”.
The directive also places a 30-day freeze on all government-issued credit cards, effective immediately, unless they are used for disaster relief and other critical services, or an exception is made by a supervisor. Federally funded travel for conferences and other “non-essential purposes” will be subject to new reporting requirements.
Read more on the executive order:
Elon Musk’s “department of government efficiency” has gained access to a US Department of Housing and Urban Development system that contains confidential personal data on hundreds of thousands of alleged victims of housing discrimination, including survivors of domestic violence, ProPublica reports.
The system, known as the HUD enforcement management system, is typically highly restricted due to the sensitive nature of its records, which include medical and financial documents, social security numbers, and other private information.
Doge requested access, and HUD granted it last week, according to the news outlet.
Trump plans to cut more than 90% of USAid foreign assistance contracts
The Trump administration said it is eliminating more than 90% of the US Agency for International Development’s foreign aid contracts and $60bn in overall US assistance around the world, The Associated Press reports.
The cuts detailed by the administration would leave few surviving USAid projects for advocates to try to save in what are current court battles with the administration.
The Trump administration outlined its plans in an internal memo obtained by the Associated Press and in filings in one of those federal lawsuits.
The filing also maintained that the administration could not meet a court-ordered deadline to pay for past work. The administration requested the supreme court put a hold on a federal judge’s order requiring the government to pay foreign aid funds to contractors and grant recipients for past work. A Washington DC federal appeals court on Wednesday evening denied that request.
Read more:
The Mexican economy minister Marcelo Ebrard will meet US trade representative Jamieson Greer on Thursday and with commerce secretary Howard Lutnick on Friday to discuss trade negotiations between Mexico and the US.
The meetings follow remarks by Donald Trump that stiff new tariffs on imports from Mexico and Canada would take effect on 2 April.
These discussions come ahead of a planned 2026 review of the US-Mexico-Canada trade agreement, though Mexican president Claudia Sheinbaum suggested on Wednesday that renegotiations could happen sooner.
The Department of Veterans Affairs has temporarily halted plans to cut billions of dollars in contracts after lawmakers and veterans service organizations raised concerns that the reductions could harm essential health services for veterans.
The pause impacts hundreds of VA contracts that Secretary Doug Collins had described a day earlier as consulting agreements, whose cancellation would save $2 billion as part of the Trump administration’s broader effort to reduce federal spending.
“No benefits or services for Veterans or VA beneficiaries will be eliminated,” VA press secretary Pete Kasperowicz said in a statement.
US Forest Service chief Randy Moore announced that he will retire on 3 March, citing frustration over recent staff cuts after 45 years with the department.
The announcement follows the Trump administration’s dismissal of approximately 2,000 probationary employees at the Forest Service. This comes in addition to 1,000 layoffs at the National Park Service and 700 rangers who accepted the administration’s “fork in the road” buyout offer.
The wave of terminations has left employees and supervisors uncertain and concerned about the agencies’ future, especially as they head into the busy spring tourism season with reduced staff.
A Georgia Republican who previously ran a fringe gubernatorial campaign under the slogan “Jesus, guns, and babies” has announced her bid for Congress in 2026.
Kandiss Taylor of Baxley revealed her plans during an appearance on Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast on Tuesday.
She said that she will seek the Republican nomination for Georgia’s first congressional district in the south-east region of the state.
Senator calls Trump and Musk ‘out-of-touch billionaires’
Senator Patty Murray of Washington state called Donald Trump and Elon Musk “out-of-touch billionaires” during a news conference alongside three former federal employees.
Murray said Trump and Musk don’t care if they “burn down something really important”.
“The Trump/Musk firing spree continues to be as surgical as a wrecking ball,” Murray said.
“That is no way to treat people who have dedicated themselves to our country, often for years. And many of them, by the way, are veterans. Nearly a third of our federal workforce are veterans, people who are literally put their lives on the line for our country, and now we’re all seeing what Trump and Musk think about that.”
The Trump administration plans to close more than 110 IRS offices with taxpayer assistance centers as part of its broader push for government efficiency, the Washington Post reports.
The closures are scheduled during the peak federal tax filing season, which ends on 15 April.
The move comes about a week after the IRS began laying off about 7,000 probationary employees.
Chris Stein
Fired USAid workers and HIV activists hold ‘die-in’ to protest Trump and Musk
Fired USAid employees and advocates for people with HIV staged a protest in a Capitol office building on Wednesday, warning that Donald Trump’s drive to dismantle the agency tasked with implementing Washington’s foreign aid agenda imperils the fight against the virus.
Wearing white T-shirts that read “Aids funding cuts kill” and chanting “Congress has blood on its hands, unfreeze aid now”, around three dozen protesters lay down in the rotunda of the Cannon House office building, home to the offices of representatives from both parties. Capitol police said about 20 arrests were made of demonstrators who defied their orders to disperse.
“What we are demanding of Congress is that they stop behaving like doormats in the face of this attack on humanitarian assistance that truly is highly effective and life-saving,” Asia Russell, executive director of Health Gap, a global advocacy group fighting against HIV, said prior to the protest.
“It’s very hard to overstate what’s at stake regarding humanitarian assistance.”
The protest came as USAid remained frozen by the Trump administration’s rapid moves to close the agency. Over the weekend, the agency announced that it was placing all but a small number of its employees worldwide, as well as nearly 2,000 staffers based in the United States, on paid leave. Those working in Washington DC have been invited to retrieve their belongings from its headquarters, which is set to be turned into office space for US Customs and Border Protection, one of the agencies implementing Trump’s hardline immigration policies.
Read the full story by Chris Stein here:
David Smith
The Guardian’s Washington DC bureau chief, David Smith, offers an analysis of the president’s first full cabinet meeting:
Trump cabinet flunkies hail wannabe Caesar and Elon, his oligarch pal
On Tuesday, just over a mile from the White House, the classicist Mary Beard spoke to an audience about Roman emperors. “An autocrat is somebody who kills you when he’s being his most generous,” she remarked. “You go to dinner, you think, wow, this is wonderful! But the generosity of the autocrat is always potentially lethal.”
On Wednesday, Donald Trump held his first full cabinet meeting. The mood was warm and convivial and, some might say, generous. Housing secretary Scott Turner offered a prayer that included: “Thank you, God, for President Trump.”
Was it just an accident that the TV camera framed the scene as the antithesis of DEI? Viewers could see seven men in suits with Trump in the middle, then another row of seven men in suits sitting behind. Nearly all of them were white. (Yes, there were women and people of colour at the meeting – but not many.)
The Vice-president, JD Vance, was in attendance but there was no doubt whom this emperor had appointed as consul. Trump invited Elon Musk, the tech billionaire running the so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge), to speak before any of his cabinet secretaries after claiming that everyone present was supportive.
Wearing a black “Make America great again” cap, Musk jokingly referred to himself as “humble tech support” – people laughed dutifully – and claimed that his haphazard efforts to take a chainsaw to the federal government can save a trillion dollars and dig the country out of debt. “It’s not an optional thing, it’s an essential thing,” he said. “If we don’t do this, America will go bankrupt.”
It sounds fine in theory. But Doge, mostly consisting of young male software engineers fuelled by pizza and Red Bull, has been a disaster. It fired the people who oversee the nuclear weapons stockpile then hastily tried to rehire them, only to find they were hard to contact because they could not access their work email accounts. It claimed to have saved $8bn on a terminated contract that was actually worth only $8m. Musk falsely stated that the US spent $50m on condoms for Gazans. And it emerged this week Doge quietly deleted the top five items from its public ledger of alleged savings after they turned out to be nothing of the sort.
You can read the full analysis here:
US health officials are reevaluating a $590m contract for bird flu shots that was awarded to Moderna, Bloomberg News reports.
The US government had awarded Moderna the money in January to advance the development of its bird flu vaccine.
The review is part of a government push to examine spending on messenger RNA-based vaccines, the technology that powered Moderna’s Covid vaccine, according to Bloomberg.
In a letter to the Federal Aviation Administration, senator Edward Markey of Massachusetts asked the agency whether a deal to install equipment from SpaceX unit Starlink at several air traffic control facilities was part of a competitive bidding process.
“I urge the FAA to be transparent about this agreement and ensure that Musk does not wrongfully steer federal funds to his companies,” Markey wrote to Chris Rocheleau, acting administrator of the FAA.
Markey asked whether there is a final contract award between the FAA, which oversees airplane safety, and SpaceX for the deployment of three SpaceX Starlink terminals, and whether reports are accurate that SpaceX engineers are serving as senior advisers to the FAA.
Markey also asked in the letter whether Elon Musk has had access to FAA offices or employees.
Under the new cost-cutting executive order, each agency’s “Doge” team lead must provide monthly reports on contracting activities, including payment and travel justifications.
Law enforcement, the military, immigration agencies, and national security-related activities are excluded from these requirements.
Also, all government-issued credit cards will be frozen for 30 days starting on Wednesday, except for use in disaster relief or critical services.
New executive order requires government payments, travel to be justified and made public
A new executive order under the Trump administration is making every agency create a centralized system to record all payments made under federal contracts and grants.
“This order commences a transformation in Federal spending on contracts, grants, and loans to ensure Government spending is transparent and Government employees are accountable to the American public,” reads the order.
According to the executive order, employees approving payments must provide a written justification, which may be made public for transparency.
Agencies must also record all federally funded travel for non-essential purposes, which will require written justifications before approval.
