The State Department plans to reconstitute U.S.A.I.D. as the U.S. Agency for International Humanitarian Assistance and abolish its status as an independent agency, according to an internal planning memo reviewed by The Times. Because of the way U.S.A.I.D. was established, Congress would have approve changes the Trump administration makes to the agency. If the planned … Read more
The State Department has ended funding for the tracking of thousands of Ukrainian children abducted by Russia, and American officials or contractors might have deleted a database with information on them, according to a letter that U.S. lawmakers plan to send to Secretary of State Rubio on Wednesday. The work on the abducted children by … Read more
Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency on Tuesday reversed a change that had made some of its claims far more difficult to fact-check. In early March, the group — which had been caught in a series of high-profile errors — began posting itemized claims about the savings it had achieved from canceling federal grants. Its … Read more
When President Trump talks about the “hundreds of billions of dollars of fraud” that Elon Musk’s cost-cutting team has uncovered in the federal government, he sometimes singles out one program with particular scorn. “Twenty million dollars for the Arab ‘Sesame Street’ in the Middle East,” the president told a joint session of Congress this month, … Read more