directs

Donald Trump is directing US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth to pay military personnel despite the federal government shutdown.

The president said on Saturday that Hegseth must make sure troops do not miss out on their regular paycheque, scheduled for Wednesday. The directive comes as other government employees have already had some pay withheld and others are being laid off.

“I will not allow the Democrats to hold our Military, and the entire Security of our Nation, HOSTAGE, with their dangerous Government Shutdown,” Trump posted on his Truth Social platform.

The Republican and Democratic parties blame each other for failing to agree on a spending plan to reopen the government.

Trump’s message asks Hegseth to “use all available funds to get our Troops PAID” on 15 October, when military personnel would see their pay withheld for the first time since the shutdown began on 1 October.

Many US military employees are considered “essential”, meaning they must still show up for duty without pay. Some 750,000 other federal employees – about 40% – have been furloughed, or sent home, also without pay.

Furloughed employees are legally supposed to receive back-pay after a shutdown ends and they return to work, but the Trump administration has insinuated this might not happen.

“The Radical Left Democrats should OPEN THE GOVERNMENT, and then we can work together to address Healthcare, and many other things that they want to destroy,” Trump posted on Saturday.

Democrats have refused to vote for a Republican spending plan that would reopen the government after nearly 12 days shut down, saying any resolution must preserve expiring tax credits that reduce health insurance costs for millions of Americans and reverse Trump’s cuts to Medicaid, the healthcare program for elderly and low-income people.

Republicans accuse Democrats of unnecessarily bringing the government to a halt, and blame them for the knock-on effects caused by the federal work stoppage.

Finding a way to pay for military salaries could help reduce some of the political risk for congressional leaders if the shutdown drags on.

In an effort to pressure Democrats, the Trump administration has also begun laying off thousands of government workers, an unprecedented move during a shutdown.

“The RIFs have begun,” White House Office of Management Director Russell Vought announced in a post on X on Friday morning, referring to an acronym for “reductions in force”.

The administration disclosed later on Friday that seven agencies had started firing more than 4,000 people, making good on the president’s repeated threats to use the shutdown to further his long-held goal of reducing the federal workforce.

The reductions included dozens of employees at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), according to the BBC’s US partner CBS news, citing sources familiar with the situation.

The agency’s entire Washington DC office was laid off, the sources told CBS, adding that among the laid-off employees were those working on the CDC’s Mortality and Morbidity Weekly Report, the agency’s Ebola response and immunisations. There were also reductions in the human resources department, they said.

Andrew Nixon, a spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the CDC, told CBS that the let-go workers were not essential, and that “HHS continues to close wasteful and duplicative entities, including those that are at odds with the Trump administration’s Make America Healthy Again agenda”.

Employees at the Treasury Department and in the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency in the Department of Homeland Security were also among those laid off on Friday, those agencies confirmed.

The American Federation of Government Employees and AFL-CIO, two major unions representing federal workers, have filed a lawsuit in northern California, asking a judge to temporarily block the layoff orders.

“It is disgraceful that the Trump administration has used the government shutdown as an excuse to illegally fire thousands of workers who provide critical services to communities across the country,” AFGE president Everett Kelley said.

A spokesman from the White House budget office told the BBC on Saturday that the layoffs were just the beginning.

“These RIF numbers from the court filing are just a snapshot in time,” he said. “More RIFs are coming.”

In a court filing opposing the unions’ request for a temporary restraining order, the justice department revealed that agencies such as the Departments of Education, Housing and Urban Development, Commerce and Energy and the Environmental Protection Agency could also see staff cuts.

The government lawyers said the labour unions had failed to establish that their members would be irreparably harmed by the layoffs, which is needed for the judge to grant the restraining order. But they said a restraining order would “irreparably harm the government”.

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Reporting from Washington — President Trump stepped up his attack on federal environmental protections Tuesday, issuing an order directing his administration to begin the long process of rolling back sweeping clean water rules that were enacted by his predecessor.

The order directing the Environmental Protection Agency to set about dismantling the Waters of the United States rule takes aim at one of President Obama’s signature environmental legacies, a far-reaching anti-pollution effort that expanded the authority of regulators over the nation’s waterways and wetlands.

The contentious rule had been fought for years by farmers, ranchers, real estate developers and others, who complained it invited heavy-handed bureaucrats to burden their businesses with onerous restrictions and fines for minor violations.

Obama’s EPA argued that such claims were exaggerated and misrepresented the realities of the enforcement process of a rule that promised to create substantially cleaner waterways, and with them healthier habitats for threatened species of wildlife.

The directive to undo the clean water initiative is expected to be closely followed by another aimed at unraveling the Obama administration’s ambitious plan to fight climate change by curbing power plant emissions.

“It is such a horrible, horrible rule,” Trump said as he signed the directive Tuesday aimed at the water rules. “It has such a nice name, but everything about it is bad.” He declared the rule, championed by environmental groups to give the EPA broad authority over nearly two-thirds of the waterways in the nation, “one of the worst examples of federal regulation” and “a massive power grab.”

While the executive orders are a clear sign of the new administration’s distaste for some of the highest profile federal environmental rules, they also reflect the challenge it faces in erasing them. Both the climate and the clean water rules were enacted only after a long and tedious process of public hearings, scientific analysis and bureaucratic review. That entire process must be revisited before they can be weakened. It could take years.

And environmental groups will be mobilized to fight every step of the way. “These wetland protections help ensure that over 100 million Americans have access to clean and safe drinking water,” California billionaire climate activist Tom Steyer said in a statement. “Access to safe drinking water is a human right, and Trump’s order is a direct violation of this right.”

The executive orders are compounded by the administration’s release of a budget blueprint that includes deep cuts at the EPA. Even if the process of changing the environmental rules is slow, the Trump administration will aim to hasten their demise by hollowing out the agencies charged with enforcing them.

At the same time, it is working with Congress to immediately kill some environmental protections under an obscure authority that applies to regulations enacted within the final months of the previous administration. A rule intended to limit water pollution from coal mining has already been killed by Congress, which is now weighing whether to jettison rules that force gas drilling operations on federal land to capture more of the toxic methane they emit.

Trump vowed Tuesday that he would continue to undermine the Obama-era environmental protections wherever he sees the opportunity, arguing they have cost jobs. “So many jobs we have delayed for so many years,” Trump said. “It is unfair to everybody.”

Many industries take issue with that interpretation. Tuesday’s order, for example, was met with a swift rebuke from sport fishing and hunting groups. They said the clean water rule has been a boon to the economy, sustaining hundreds of thousands of jobs in their industry.

“Sports men and women will do everything within their power to compel the administration to change course and to use the Clean Water Act to improve, not worsen, the nation’s waterways,” a statement from a half-dozen of the organizations said.

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June 16 (UPI) — President Donald Trump announced that the nation’s large Democratic-run cities are to be the new focus for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations.

“ICE Officers are herewith ordered, by notice of this Truth, to do all in their power to achieve the very important goal of delivering the single largest mass deportation program in history,” Trump posted to his Truth Social account Sunday night.

The post goes on to order the expansion of the efforts of ICE within cities Chicago, Los Angeles and New York, where he also alleged “millions upon millions of illegal aliens reside.”

Trump went on to call the cities the “core of the Democrat Power Center,” each of which he purports uses migrants to control elections and expand the use of welfare in actions that he alleges simultaneously take jobs and benefits from citizens.

“These radical left Democrats are sick of mind, hate our country, and actually want to destroy our inner cities,” Trump further wrote, and went on to declare the same cities believe in “transgender for everybody, and men playing in women’s sports.”

He went on to say he has directed his entire administration “to put every resource possible” behind the efforts of ICE, and that the federal government is focused on the “remigration of aliens to the places from where they came, and preventing the admission of anyone who undermines the domestic tranquility of the United States.”

Trump said Thursday there will be policy changes that promised migrant farmers and those employed across the hospitality industry would be protected from deportation after he heard complaints from others in those fields.

“Our great farmers and people in the hotel and leisure business have been stating that our very aggressive policy on immigration is taking very good, long time workers away from them, with those jobs being almost impossible to replace,” Trump posted to Truth Social Thursday, “This is not good. We must protect our farmers but get the criminals out of the USA.”