Watch: Elon Musk says he is “disappointed” with Trump’s “big, beautiful bill”, in interview with CBS Sunday Morning
Elon Musk has criticised one of the signature policies of Donald Trump, marking a break from the US president who he helped to win re-election in 2024.
Last week, the US House of Representatives narrowly passed what Trump calls his “big, beautiful” bill, which includes multi-trillion dollar tax breaks and a pledge to increase defence spending. It will now head to the Senate.
Tech titan Musk told the BBC’s US partner CBS News he was “disappointed” by the plan, which he felt “undermines” the work he did for the president on reducing spending.
Musk was enlisted as Trump’s cost-cutting tsar – ending funds for US foreign aid among other projects – before announcing he would step back.
“I was disappointed to see the massive spending bill, frankly,” Musk said in the interview with CBS Sunday Morning, a clip of which was released by the broadcaster before transmission.
He went on to argue that Trump’s plan “increases the budget deficit, not just decreases it”.
It is thought that the legislation could increase the deficit – or the difference between what the US government spends and the revenue that it receives – by about $600bn (£444bn) in the next fiscal year.
Furthermore, the bill “undermines the work that the Doge team is doing”, Musk said, using the acronym of the cost-cutting advisory body the Department of Government Efficiency.
Referring to Trump’s moniker for the legislation, Musk told CBS: “I think a bill can be big or beautiful. I don’t know if it can be both.”
Musk’s intervention highlights the ongoing tension within Trump’s Republican Party over the tax and spend plans, which faced an uneasy passage through the House due to opposition from different wings of the party.
Long a policy priority of Trump’s, the legislation pledges to extend soon-to-expire tax cuts passed during his first administration in 2017, as well as provide an influx of money for defence spending and to fund the president’s mass deportations.
The bill also proposes increasing to $4tn the debt ceiling – meaning the limit on the amount of money the government can borrow to pay its bills.
Musk’s comments on the issue imply a growing distance from Trump, who he helped to propel back to the White House last year with donations of more than $250m.
They come after the billionaire recently pledged to step back from Doge. Musk had stated that he wanted to help the government cut $1tn in spending by cancelling contracts and reducing the government workforce.
Musk also said last week that he planned to do “a lot less” political spending in the future, and that he was committed to leading electric car company Tesla for another five years.
Tesla faced protests, boycotts and a drop in sales over Musk’s work as the Doge chief, including his controversial efforts to lay off thousands of federal workers and curb foreign aid.
Musk defended his actions in his comments last week, saying: “I did what needed to be done.” He and Trump previously justified the cuts as a matter of weeding out what they saw as fraud and abuse within federal spending.
Thomas J. Barrack Jr. drew worldwide attention for bailing out Michael Jackson when the singer’s Neverland Ranch was on the brink of foreclosure.
A couple years later, Barrack’s purchase of Miramax studios with actor Rob Lowe and other partners vaulted him into the Hollywood elite. Barrack was chairman of Miramax for six years.
Now, Barrack’s close friendship with Donald Trump has made him one of the most influential Californians in the inner circle of the president-elect. Trump put Barrack in charge of planning his Jan. 20 inauguration.
Barrack is the founder and executive chairman of Colony Capital Inc., a Los Angeles investment giant that manages more than $60 billion in assets, much of it for Arab clients.
As Trump prepares to take power, Barrack’s long business history in the Mideast — and his deep knowledge of its politics and its cultures — makes him a significant player in shaping Trump’s thinking on the region.
“That he’s sitting at the table with Trump should make everybody very happy,” said Lowe, one of Barrack’s best friends. “I know it does me.”
Over coffee at his Santa Monica mansion, Barrack said he declined a top role in Trump’s administration, telling the president-elect he could serve him better as a friend with “no skin in the game.”
For now, that means overseeing preparations for next week’s inaugural celebrations, a task Barrack described as “drinking out of 10 fire hoses.”
“It’s like putting on the Olympics in 60 days,” he said.
Barrack (pronounced BEAR-ick) leads a group of wealthy Trump supporters who have raised more than $90 million, he said, for the galas and ceremonies in Washington. Among them are casino tycoons Sheldon Adelson and Steve Wynn.
Mark Burnett, producer of “The Apprentice,” is working for Barrack on the inauguration night festivities. Trump’s toxic image in liberal Hollywood has kept big stars off the program.
Barrack befriended Trump in the 1980s. They were haggling over the Plaza Hotel, a Manhattan trophy that Trump was buying from oil tycoon Robert Bass, then Barrack’s boss. Trump was already a famous developer, so Barrack felt obliged to treat him with deference.
“We didn’t have that intersection that two big dogs have when they get to a fire hydrant; I wasn’t equal,” Barrack recalled.
Barrack and Trump developed a close friendship through three decades of raising children, weathering divorces and maneuvering among the top echelons of global finance and real estate.
Barbara A. Res, who was Trump’s chief of construction in the 1980s, recalled that Barrack was one of Trump’s few genuine friends.
“I always felt sympathy for Donald, because it’s very hard for him to have a friend,” she said. “Everyone who surrounds him wants to have a piece of him.”
The friendship gave Barrack a prominent role at the Republican National Convention in July. On the night Trump accepted the presidential nomination, Barrack was the last speaker before the candidate’s daughter, Ivanka, took the stage.
He told the audience that Trump “played me like a Steinway piano” in the Plaza Hotel deal. Left unmentioned was that Barrack’s boss got a good price, nearly $410 million, while Trump went so deep into debt — on that deal and others — that he soon lost the hotel in a bankruptcy settlement.
Barrack, a grandson of Lebanese Christian immigrants, grew up in Culver City. His father ran a grocery store; his mother was a secretary. In the family’s small stucco house, his parents spoke English with Barrack and his sister, Arabic and French with the grandparents.
Barrack, impeccably fit at 69, has six children, ages 2 to 39. He works out daily and often surfs and plays polo around the world. He spends about a week a month at his neoclassical colonial home overlooking Santa Monica Canyon’s Riviera Country Club.
“When I get him on the phone, he’s as likely to be in Riyadh or Paris as he is to be in L.A.,” said Lowe, who joked that Barrack lives on his private jet. “He uses that plane the way my kids use an Uber.”
Barrack sees the jet as an essential tool for work.
“If somebody calls me on Sunday night and says I want to have breakfast with you in London at 8 o’clock in the morning, most of my competitors are too spoiled to do it — they’ll send somebody,” he said. “If I go, that’s my competitive advantage. And I don’t get jet lag.”
Last year, Barrack took Lowe to the Mideast. In Lebanon, they visited three Syrian refugee camps. One of them was in Zahle, Barrack’s ancestral village on his father’s side. It was heartbreaking, Barrack said, to see thousands of children left homeless by the wreckage of war.
Trump has vowed to block Syrian refugees from entering the United States, saying countries in the Mideast must set up “safe zones” where they can live peacefully in the region. Barrack recalled telling Trump how challenging that would be.
“The president-elect has a very good vision of what needs to be done, but it’s not that simple,” he said.
Trump’s critics, Barrack said, don’t realize how “tender and inclusive” he will be. “I go to my friends and say, ‘Get over it. He’s going to be so much better than you think.’”
Barrack served on Trump’s economic advisory council during the campaign. He also urged Trump to dial down the bombast, saying the volleys between him and Hillary Clinton were “disheartening.”
At the same time, Barrack started a super PAC, Rebuilding America Now, which spent more than $17 million slamming Clinton over donations that her family foundation got from what the ads called “Wall Street insiders” and “misogynistic regimes.” One of the spots accused her of looking the other way “on Saudi funding of terrorism.”
Some of Barrack’s friends and partners are dismayed by his embrace of Trump.
“I have absolutely no use for the president-elect, but that doesn’t mean I can’t like Tom,” said Richard Blum, a Barrack investment partner who is married to Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California. “He’s a very smart guy, and I hope Trump listens to him.”
Barrack’s big break came in the early 1970s, when he was an attorney at the firm of Herbert W. Kalmbach, President Nixon’s personal lawyer. The firm dispatched Barrack to work on a project in Saudi Arabia, where he played squash with a man who turned out to be a prince.
Barrack left the practice and spent the next four years in Saudi Arabia as an advisor to the royal family. At the time, Saudi rulers were using oil riches to transform the primitive Bedouin nation into a modern society with a mammoth construction program.
With few options for entertainment, Barrack spent nearly every night conversing in Arabic with men in their majlis, salons where he recalls learning patience and cultural adaptability.
“You’d sit sharia style and talk for six or seven hours,” he said.
Barrack’s time in the Mideast led to top executive jobs in real estate and finance, with a brief stint as deputy undersecretary at the Interior Department under President Reagan.
In 1991, Barrack opened Colony Capital. It specialized in bets on distressed assets, starting with bundles of bad loans that it picked up at low cost from federal regulators in the aftermath of the savings and loan crisis.
Colony later capitalized on another U.S. lending debacle, the 2008 economic crash. Colony bought tens of thousands of single-family homes at foreclosure auctions in California, Nevada and other states, then made money by renting them out as housing markets recovered.
Barrack said Colony was careful to avoid tossing families from their homes, but critics fault the nature of the business, with tenants replacing homeowners.
“The only reason they’re able to acquire those properties is because of the misfortunes of homeowners that went into foreclosure,” said Charles Evans, a senior lawyer at Public Counsel, a Los Angeles nonprofit that provides free legal services to the poor.
Barrack, whose family spends summers at his medieval chateau on the French Riviera, has become a top corporate player in France, where Colony for a time owned the Paris-St. Germain soccer team. Colony has been a major investor in French hotel and retail chains.
In 2008, when Jackson was on the verge of losing his Neverland Ranch in Santa Ynez, near Barrack’s Happy Canyon winery and polo fields, a mutual friend asked him to meet with the singer and review his finances.
Barrack said he told Jackson he could no longer spend $35 million a year when his income was $12 million.
“You either go back to work, and you make enough money to support your lifestyle, or you wind your lifestyle down to a level that you can live on four or five million dollars a year,” he recalled saying to Jackson.
Colony restructured Jackson’s debt, keeping Neverland out of foreclosure as Jackson went back to work. Jackson started rehearsing for a comeback tour that would never occur; he died in 2009. Barrack also rescued other celebrities from financial ruin, but declined to name any, apart from the photographer Annie Leibovitz, whose lifeline from Barrack was widely known.
Barrack’s biggest Hollywood play was Miramax. He and Lowe were on holiday on a boat in Sardinia when Barrack called Ron Tutor, the construction magnate, and asked about joining forces to buy the studio from Disney.
They believed that they could make money by minimizing future filmmaking and maximizing sales from the studio’s film library to Netflix and other outlets. With partners from Qatar, the trio formed an investment group that bought Miramax for $610 million.
Barrack largely avoided the trappings of Hollywood. Others in his position, Lowe said, would have rushed to “make Leonardo DiCaprio’s passion project about sub-Saharan Africa.”
“Tom kept his eye on the ball,” Lowe said.
Barrack said the group made a solid return last year when it sold the studio for an undisclosed amount to investors in Qatar.
Now, as Trump’s administration takes shape, Barrack is content to watch from afar. He wants to stay near his youngest children in California and to see through Colony’s merger with two real estate companies.
If Trump needs him on the inside, Barrack said, the timing might be better once his advisors settle into their new roles and “everybody learns to play more nicely in the sandbox.”
California Rep. Nanette Diaz Barragán urged the Federal Communications Commission on Monday to follow through on plans to modernize the federal emergency alert system and provide multilingual alerts in natural disasters for residents who speak a language other than English at home.
The call comes nearly five months after deadly fires in Los Angeles threatened communities with a high proportion of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders — some with limited English proficiency — highlighting the need for multilingual alerts.
In a letter sent to Brendan Carr, the Republican chair of the FCC, Barragán (D-San Pedro) expressed “deep concern” that the FCC under the Trump administration has delayed enabling multilingual Wireless Emergency Alerts for severe natural disasters such as wildfires, hurricanes, earthquakes and tsunamis.
“This is about saving lives,” Barragán said in an interview with The Times. “You’ve got about 68 million Americans that use a language other than English and everybody should have the ability to to understand these emergency alerts. We shouldn’t be looking at any politicization of alerts — certainly not because someone’s an immigrant or they don’t know English.”
Multilingual emergency alerts should be in place across the nation, Barragán said. But the January Pacific Palisades and Eaton fires served as a reminder that the need is particularly acute in Los Angeles.
Not only does L.A. have a significant risk of wildfires, flooding, mudslides, and earthquakes, but the sprawling region is home to a diverse immigrant population, some of whom have limited English proficiency.
“When you think about it, in California we have wildfires, we’re always on earthquake alert,” Barragán said. “In other parts of the country, it could be hurricanes or tornadoes — we just want people to have the information on what to do.”
Four months ago, the FCC was supposed to publish an order that would allow Americans to get multilingual alerts
In October 2023, the FCC approved rules to update the federal emergency alert system by enabling Wireless Emergency Alerts to be delivered in more than a dozen languages — not just English, Spanish and sign language — without the need of a translator.
Then, the Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau developed templates for critical disaster alerts in the 13 most commonly spoken languages in the US. In January, the commission declared a “major step forward” in expanding alert languages when it issued a report and order that would require commercial mobile service providers to install templates on cellphones within 30 months of publication of the federal register.
“The language you speak shouldn’t keep you from receiving the information you or your family need to stay safe,” then-FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel said in a January statement.
But shortly after, Trump took control of the White House. Under the chairmanship of Brendan Carr, the commission has yet to publish the January 8 Report and Order in the Federal Register — a critical step that triggers the 30-month compliance clock.
“This delay is not only indefensible but dangerous,” Barragán wrote in a letter to Carr that was signed by nearly two dozen members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus and the Congressional Black Caucus. “It directly jeopardizes the ability of our communities to receive life-saving emergency information in the language they understand best.”
Barragán noted that Carr previously supported the push for multilingual alerts when he was a member of the commission, before taking over leadership.
“Your failure to complete this ministerial step — despite having supported the rule itself — has left this life-saving policy in limbo and significantly delayed access to multilingual alerts for millions of Americans,” she wrote.
Asked by The Times what explained the delay, Barragán said her office had been told that Trump’s regulatory freeze prohibited all federal agencies, including the FCC, from publishing any rule in the Federal Register until a designated Trump official is able to review and approve it.
“It’s all politics,” she said. “We don’t know why it’s stuck there and why the administration hasn’t moved forward, but it seems, like, with everything these days, they’re waiting on the president’s green light.”
Barragán also noted that multilingual alerts helped first responders.
“If you have a community that’s supposed to be evacuated, and they’re not evacuating because they don’t know they’re supposed to evacuate, that’s only going to hurt first responders and emergency crews,” she said. “So I think this is a safety issue all around, not just for the people receiving it.”
Manjusha Kulkarni, executive director of AAPI Equity Alliance, a coalition of 50 community-based groups that serves the 1.6 million Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders who live in Los Angeles, told The Times the FCC’s failure to push alerts in more languages represented a “real dereliction of duty.”
Over half a million Asian Americans across L.A. County are classified as Limited English Proficiency, with many speaking primarily in Chinese, Korean, Tagalog and Vietnamese, she noted.
“President Trump and many members of his administration have made clear they plan to go on the attack against immigrants,” Kulkarni said. “If this makes the lives of immigrants easier, then they will stand in its way.”
During the January L.A. fires, Kulkarni said, residents complained that fire alerts were sent only in English and Spanish. More than 12,000 of the 50,000 Asian immigrants and their descendants who lived within four evacuation zones — Palisades, Eaton, Hurst and Hughes — need language assistance.
“There were community members who didn’t realize until they were evacuated that the fire was so close to them, so they had little to no notice of it,” Kulkarni said. “Really, it can mean life or death in a lot of cases where you don’t get the information, where it’s not translated in a city and county like Los Angeles.”
Community members ended up suffering not just because of the fires themselves, Kulkarni said, but because of federal and local officials’ failure to provide alerts in languages every resident can understand.
“It is incumbent that the alerts be made available,” she said. “We need those at local, state and federal levels to do their part so that individuals can survive catastrophic incidents.”
A Medicaid bill pushed by Republicans proposes significant cuts to the health insurance programme for lower-income Americans. But United States President Donald Trump has claimed the legislation would change Medicaid in ways that only combat “waste, fraud and abuse”, a phrase he repeated seven times over a couple of minutes.
“We’re not doing any cutting of anything meaningful,” the Republican president said. “The only thing we’re cutting is waste, fraud and abuse. … We’re not changing Medicaid, and we’re not changing Medicare, and we’re not changing Social Security.”
The House of Representatives passed the bill on Thursday, and it now moves to the Senate, where it could be changed. The House version doesn’t directly target Social Security or Medicare. But it changes Medicaid, including in ways that align with Republican priorities.
Congress’s nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office has projected that at least 8.6 million people will lose coverage because of the changes.
“Relatively little of the bill is clearly related to trying to reduce fraud or error,” said Leighton Ku, director of George Washington University’s Center for Health Policy Research. “There are some minor provisions about things like looking for dead people who are enrolled or checking addresses. But the major provisions are not fraud, waste or error by any means. They’re things that reflect policy preferences of the Republican architects.”
Robin Rudowitz, vice president and director of the Program on Medicaid and the Uninsured at the health policy research group KFF, agreed that the scope of the bill’s changes go further than Trump said. “The magnitude of the federal spending reductions and resulting coverage loss go well beyond rooting out fraud and abuse,” she said.
The bill’s key provisions could be removed before the final votes and enactment while others may be added.
The White House did not respond to an inquiry for this fact check.
How the federal government defines waste, fraud and abuse
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the federal agency that runs Medicaid, offers official definitions for these three terms:
Fraud: “When someone knowingly deceives, conceals, or misrepresents to obtain money or property from any health care benefit program. Medicare or Medicaid fraud is considered a criminal act.”
Waste: “Overusing services or other practices that directly or indirectly result in unnecessary costs to any health care benefit program. Examples of waste are conducting excessive office visits, prescribing more medications than necessary, and ordering excessive laboratory tests.”
Abuse: “When health care providers or suppliers perform actions that directly or indirectly result in unnecessary costs to any health care benefit program. Abuse includes any practice that doesn’t provide patients with medically necessary services or meet professionally recognised standards,” such as overbilling or misusing billing codes.
Some bill provisions can be described as targeting waste, fraud and abuse
One provision in the bill requires states to confirm recipients’ Medicaid eligibility at least every six months rather than every year under current law. Another would set stricter requirements for verifying enrollees’ addresses and other information.
Such efforts could save expenditures on ineligible people and could be classified as a waste-prevention measure.
Other provisions are more ideological than focused on waste, fraud and abuse
Several of the bill’s highest-profile provisions are driven more by ideology – differences in how expansive the programme should be and what types of people should benefit.
One of these provisions involves people in the US without documentation.
Because it’s already against the law to spend federal Medicaid funds on undocumented people, the bill takes a different approach: It seeks to make it harder for states to exclusively rely on state funds to cover immigrants in the US. Currently, 14 states and the District of Columbia cover children regardless of their immigration status, and seven states plus Washington, DC, cover at least some adults living in the US without documents too.
For these states, the bill reduces the federal government’s share of Medicaid payments from 90 percent to 80 percent.
In other words, if a state wants to keep covering undocumented people, it will face a cut in the federal reimbursement rate for the coverage of US citizens, not just immigrants in the country without documents. Budgetary pressures in these states could mean that some citizens also lose some of their benefits or all of their Medicaid coverage.
Another provision involves work requirements. The bill would require individuals aged 19 to 64 receiving Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act expansion, which was passed during former President Barack Obama’s Democratic administration, to be working or participating in qualifying activities (such as having a disability, being a caretaker for family members or attending school) for at least 80 hours per month.
Research has found that the vast majority of people who would be required to work under similar requirements are already employed or have a qualifying exemption — yet many get thrown off Medicaid because they fail to keep up with the mandatory paperwork.
“Work requirements are not about waste, fraud, and abuse. They are fundamentally changing the rules of who is eligible for the programme, and they are adding an immense set of bureaucratic obstacles and red tape for eligible people to keep coverage,” said Benjamin D Sommers, a professor of healthcare economics and medicine at Harvard University’s TH Chan School of Public Health and Harvard Medical School.
A KFF analysis in March found that fraud occurs in Medicare and Medicaid mostly by providers. “There are checks on fraud, waste, and abuse at both the federal and the state levels,” KFF wrote.
Another bill provision bans Medicaid funds spent on nonprofit organisations primarily engaged in family planning or reproductive services, which would affect Planned Parenthood and other organisations that provide abortions.
Finally, at least two provisions focus on saving money. One would require, for the first time, that states impose $35 copays for many types of care. The other would limit retroactive coverage after applying for Medicaid to one month before application, down from 90 days. These provisions don’t specify how they’d root out waste, fraud and abuse.
“The ‘Medicaid savings’ in this bill are primarily from reducing programme enrolment,” Sommers said.
Our ruling
Trump said the House bill is “not changing Medicaid,” only cutting “waste, fraud and abuse”.
The legislation includes provisions that could improve the detection of beneficiaries who aren’t eligible for coverage.
But other provisions would change Medicaid to align with Trump’s ideology and Republican priorities. The bill would incentivise states to stop using their own funds to cover undocumented people in the US; it requires people to work or do other approved activities to secure benefits; and it bans Medicaid payments to nonprofits such as Planned Parenthood, which provide abortions among other services.
Other changes aim to cut expenses, including the imposition of copays and a shorter window for retroactive coverage. Those provisions don’t specify how they’d cut waste, fraud or abuse.
The administration of United States President Donald Trump has taken its first concrete action to deliver sanctions relief for Syria, following a surprise policy pivot earlier this month.
On Friday, the US Department of the Treasury announced sweeping relief to an array of individuals and entities, which it said will “enable new investment and private sector activity consistent with [Trump’s] America First strategy”.
The US State Department, meanwhile, concurrently issued a waiver to a 2019 law, the Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act, that would “enable our foreign partners, allies, and the region to further unlock Syria’s potential”.
Trump surprised the international community when, on May 13, he pledged to remove sanctions placed on Syria during the leadership of its now-ousted leader, President Bashar al-Assad.
Friday’s announcements mark an initial step towards that goal, as Syria recovers from abuses under al-Assad’s government and 13 years of civil war.
“As President Trump promised, the Treasury Department and the State Department are implementing authorizations to encourage new investment into Syria,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said in a statement.
“Syria must also continue to work towards becoming a stable country that is at peace, and today’s actions will hopefully put the country on a path to a bright, prosperous, and stable future”.
Sanctions relief is critical for Syria to move forward. The United States is issuing a Caesar Act sanctions waiver to increase investments and cash flows that will facilitate basic services and reconstruction in Syria. We support the Syrian people’s efforts to build a more…
Trump first unveiled his plans for sanctions relief during a tour of the Middle East in mid-May. He said lifting US sanctions would give Syria “a chance at greatness”, since the restrictions left the war-torn country economically isolated.
“It’s their time to shine. We’re taking them all off,” he said from Riyadh.
Shortly after, Trump met and shook hands with Syrian leader Ahmed al-Sharaa, who had only recently been removed from the US’s “Specially Designated Global Terrorist” list.
Appeal for relief
Calls for sanctions relief had grown following the fall of al-Assad’s government last December. As head of the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) group, al-Sharaa spearheaded the offensive that led to al-Assad fleeing the country, bringing the civil war to an end.
The war, which first broke out in 2011, had left Syria’s economy in tatters.
As many as 656,493 people were killed during the conflict, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, and a 2020 report from the United Nations estimated that the country suffered total economic losses of about $442.2bn in the first eight years of the war alone.
Sanctions have further dampened Syria’s economic outlook, making it difficult for countries with ties to the US to conduct business there.
Since taking power in December, Syria’s interim government has argued the ongoing sanctions, largely imposed during al-Assad’s rule, would slow development and cause further instability.
Trump’s announcement earlier this month buoyed hope for many Syrians of a new path forward, although the extent of the relief had remained unclear.
Earlier this week, the European Union also announced it had lifted sanctions against Syria.
Friday’s sanctions relief in the US applies to the “the Government of Syria … as in existence on or after May 13, 2025”, according to the Treasury Department.
The reprieve also applies to several previously sanctioned transportation, banking, tourism and fossil fuel entities.
Transactions related to Russia, Iran and North Korea remain under US sanctions.
One of the biggest hurdles, however, is the Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act, a law that was passed in 2019, during Trump’s first term.
It included broad sanctions that targeted al-Assad’s government and its allies and supporters for atrocities committed against civilians.
The act was named after a former Syrian military photographer and whistleblower who smuggled out of the country a cache of images showing torture and mass killing at detention centres run by al-Assad’s security forces.
But since the law was passed by Congress, it will likely take an act of Congress to completely lift its restrictions.
The president, however, can issue temporary waivers to the law, which is what the Trump administration did on Friday.
In a statement, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the waiver will last for 180 days, in order to “increase investments and cash flows that will facilitate basic services and reconstruction in Syria”.
“We support the Syrian people’s efforts to build a more hopeful future,” Rubio said.
Investors interpreted Trump’s comments to mean Nippon Steel had received his approval for its takeover of US Steel.
United States President Donald Trump has expressed support for Nippon Steel’s $14.9bn bid for US Steel, saying their “planned partnership” would create jobs and help the US economy.
Shares of US Steel soared 21 percent on Friday after Trump’s comments as investors interpreted the president’s post on Truth Social to mean Nippon Steel had received his approval for its long-planned takeover, the last major hurdle for the deal.
“This will be a planned partnership between United States Steel and Nippon Steel, which will create at least 70,000 jobs, and add $14 Billion Dollars to the US Economy,” Trump said in a post on Truth Social on Friday.
This week, the Reuters news agency reported that Nippon Steel has said if the merger is approved, it would invest $14bn into US Steel’s operations, including up to $4bn in a new steel mill.
Trump added that the bulk of that investment would occur in the next 14 months and said he would hold a rally at US Steel in Pittsburgh next Friday.
Nippon Steel said it applauded Trump’s decision to approve the “partnership”. The White House did not immediately reply to questions about the announcement.
US Steel share price kept rising after hours and reached $54, just shy of Nippon Steel’s $55-per-share offer price made in late 2023. While no details were released, investors expressed confidence that terms will be similar to those agreed in 2023. Investors said that eventually US Steel will no longer be publicly traded and they will receive a cash payout for their shares.
Politically controversial
The deal has been one of the most highly anticipated on Wall Street after it morphed into the political arena with fears that foreign ownership would mean job losses in Pennsylvania, where US Steel is based. It factored into last year’s election that saw Trump return to the White House.
Pennsylvania Senator Dave McCormick, who also called the deal a “partnership”, on Friday said it was a “huge victory for America and the US Steel Corporation”, that will protect more than 11,000 Pennsylvania jobs and support the creation of at least 14,000 more.
The last pieces of the deal came together surprisingly fast. The Committee on Foreign Investment in the US (CFIUS), which reviews deals for national security risks, told the White House this week that the security risks can be addressed, Reuters reported, moving the final decision to Trump’s desk.
Following an earlier CFIUS-led review, former President Joe Biden blocked the deal in January on national security grounds.
The companies sued, arguing they did not receive a fair review process. The Biden White House rejected that view.
The companies argued Biden opposed the deal when he was running for re-election to win support from the United Steelworkers union in the battleground state of Pennsylvania. The Biden administration had defended the review as essential to protecting security, infrastructure and supply chains.
Trump also initially opposed the deal, arguing the company must be owned and operated in the US.
The United Steelworkers were against the deal as recently as Thursday when they urged Trump to block the deal despite the $14bn investment pledge from Trump.
For investors, including prominent hedge funds, the news spells relief after more than a year of waiting for a resolution. “There were huge high-fives all around today,” one recent investor said, adding, “We understood Donald Trump’s psyche and we played it to our advantage here.”
Investors said Trump appears to have won ground after the pledge for new investments was increased.
“This deal ensures that steelmaking will live on in Pittsburgh for generations,” another investor said.
Donald Trump’s decision to ban Harvard from enrolling foreign students has caused irreparable damage, says one student leader. The order was the latest move in the administration’s escalating battle with the Ivy League school. A federal judge has now temporarily blocked it.
Throughout his 2024 campaign for president, Donald Trump strongly and repeatedly denied any connection to Project 2025, the political platform document authored by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank based in Washington, D.C.
“I have nothing to do with Project 2025,” Trump said during a debate with former Vice President Kamala Harris last September. He said he had not read the document, nor did he intend to.
Yet less than six months into his second stay in the White House, the president and his administration have initiated or completed 42% of Project 2025’s agenda, according to a tracking project that identified more than 300 specific action items in the 922-page document. The Project 2025 Tracker is run by two volunteers who “believe in the importance of transparent, detailed analysis,” according to its website.
Of all the action items, nearly a quarter are related to the environment through agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Forest Service, and the departments of the Interior, Commerce, and Energy. Further, it seems the environment is a high priority for the Trump administration, which has initiated or completed about 70% of Project 2025’s environmental agenda — or roughly two-thirds — according to a Times analysis of the tracked items.
That includes Project 2025 action items like rolling back air and water quality regulations; canceling funds for clean energy projects and environmental justice grants; laying off scientists and researchers in related fields; and withdrawing from the Paris Climate Accord, an agreement among nearly 200 countries to reduce greenhouse gas emissions driving global warming.
When asked about this overlap, the administration continued to downplay any connection between the president and Project 2025.
“No one cared about Project 2025 when they elected President Trump in November 2024, and they don’t care now,” White House spokesman Taylor Rogers said in an email. “President Trump is implementing the America First agenda he campaigned on to free up wasteful DEI spending for cutting-edge scientific research, roll back radical climate regulations, and restore America’s energy dominance while ensuring Americans have clean air and clean water.”
Project 2025 refers to climate change as an “alarm industry” used to support a radical left ideology and agenda.
“Mischaracterizing the state of our environment generally and the actual harms reasonably attributable to climate change specifically is a favored tool that the Left uses to scare the American public into accepting their ineffective, liberty-crushing regulations, diminished private property rights, and exorbitant costs,” it says in a chapter about the EPA.
That same chapter also recommends that the president undermine California’s ability to set strict vehicle emission standards, which Trump vowed to do shortly after taking office; the Senate this week voted to revoke California’s rights to enact policy on the issue.
Gunasekara did not respond to a request for comment.
Matthew Sanders, acting deputy director of the Environmental Law Clinic at Stanford, said these and other Project 2025-mandated moves could have far-reaching ramifications. He noted that 11 other states had chosen to follow California’s emission rules.
“What California does impacts what the rest of the nation does,” Sanders said. “In that sense … decisions about how to effectuate the Clean Air Act mandates are technology-forcing for much of the nation, and isolating California and eliminating its ability to do that will have profound consequences.”
The EPA isn’t the only agency affected by environmental policy changes mirrored in Project 2025.
Sanders said actions on public lands are particularly consequential, not only for the extraction of resources but also for protected species and their habitats. The president has already taken Project 2025-mandated steps to lessen protections for marine life and birds, and has called for narrowing protections afforded by the Endangered Species Act.
He also expressed concern about Trump’s Jan. 20 proposal to revise or rescind National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) regulations that require federal agencies to consider the environmental impacts of their actions — a step recommended on page 60 of Project 2025.
While the president described NEPA and other rules as “burdensome and ideologically motivated regulations” that limit American jobs and stymie economic growth, Sanders said such framing is an oversimplification that can make the environment a scapegoat for other administrative goals.
“When we make these decisions in a thoughtful, careful, deliberate way, we actually can have jobs and economic development and environmental protection,” he said. “ I don’t think that those things are inherently opposed, but the administration, I think, gets some mileage out of suggesting that they are.”
Indeed, the Commerce Department, which houses the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, National Weather Service and other climate-related entities, has also seen changes that follow Project 2025’s playbook. The document describes the agency as “one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry and, as such, is harmful to future U.S. prosperity.”
These are some of nearly 70 environmental action items identified in the Project 2025 Tracker, of which 47 are already completed or in progress less than 150 days into President Trump’s second term.
Tracking the administration’s progress is a somewhat subjective process, in part because many of the directives have come through executive orders or require multiple steps to complete. Additionally, many goals outlined in Project 2025 are indirect or implied and therefore not included in the tracker, according to Adrienne Cobb, one of its creators.
Cobb told The Times she read through the entire document and extracted only “explicit calls to action, or recommendations where the authors clearly state that something should be done.”
“My goal was for the tracker to reflect the authors’ intentions using their own words wherever possible,” she said. “By focusing on direct language and actionable items, I tried to create a list that’s accurate and accountable to the source material.”
Though the Trump administration continues to deny any connection to Project 2025, the creators of the massive tome were always clear about their presidential intentions.
“This volume — the Conservative Promise — is the opening salvo of the 2025 Presidential Transition Project,” Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts wrote in its forward. “Its 30 chapters lay out hundreds of clear and concrete policy recommendations for White House offices, Cabinet departments, Congress, and agencies, commissions, and boards.”
South African President Cyril Ramaphosa met Donald Trump in a bid to reset US ties. But critics say he missed a key chance to counter Trump’s false ‘white genocide’ claims. Al Jazeera’s @FahmidaMiller reports on the mixed reaction from Johannesburg.
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Thursday upheld, for now, President Trump’s decision to fire two agency officials who had fixed terms that were set by Congress.
By a 6-3 vote, the justices set aside rulings that would have reinstated Gwynne Wilcox to the National Labor Relations Board and Cathy Harris to the Merit Systems Protection Board. Both were appointees of President Biden.
The decision is the latest in which the court’s conservative majority sided with the president’s power to fire agency officials in violation of long-standing laws.
“Because the Constitution vests the executive power in the President, he may remove without cause executive officers who exercise that power on his behalf,” the court said in an unsigned order.
But the justices were quick to add the Federal Reserve Board is not affected by this decision.
“The Federal Reserve is a uniquely structured, quasi-private entity that follows in the distinct historical tradition of the First and Second Banks of the United States,” the court said.
At issue is a fundamental dispute over whether the Constitution gave the president or Congress the power to set the structure of the federal government.
In 1935, the court ruled unanimously that Congress can create independent and “nonpartisan” boards and commissions whose members are appointed by the president for a fixed term. The court then drew a distinction between “purely executive officers” who were under the president’s control and members of boards whose duties were more judicial or legislative.
But in recent years, conservatives have questioned that precedent and argued that the president has the executive power to hire and fire all officials of the government.
Shortly after taking office, Trump fired Wilcox and Harris even though their terms had not expired. They sued contending the firings were illegal and violated the law.
They won before a federal judge and the U.S. court of appeals.
Those judges cited the Supreme Court’s 1935 decision that upheld Congress’ authority to create independent boards whose members are appointed by the president to serve a fixed-term.
Trump’s lawyers say the Constitution gives the president full executive power, including control of agencies. And that in turns gives him the authority to fire officials who were appointed to a fixed term by another president, they said in Trump vs. Wilcox.
Justice Elena Kagan filed an eight-page dissent joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson.
“Today’s order favors the President over our precedent; and it does so unrestrained by the rules of briefing and argument—and the passage of time— needed to discipline our decision-making,” Kagan wrote. “I would deny the President’s application. I would do so based on the will of Congress, this Court’s seminal decision approving independent agencies’ for-cause protections, and the ensuing 90 years of this Nation’s history.”
The court said its decision was not final.
The NLRB was created by Congress in 1935 as a semi-independent agency tasked with enforcing the labor laws. Its general counsel serves as a prosecutor while the board‘s five members act as judges who review administrative decisions arising from unfair-labor claims brought by unions.
Under the law, the president appoints the general counsel who can be fired but board members have five-year terms. They may be fired for “neglect of duty or malfeasance in office,” but not simply because of political disagreements.
Trump could have controlled the board by appointing members to fill two vacancies. He chose instead to fire Wilcox, leaving the board without a quorum of three members.
Wilcox argued there was no reason to rush to change the law.
“Over the past two centuries, Congress has embedded modest for-cause removal restrictions in the structure of numerous multi-member agencies,” she said in response to the administration’s appeal. She noted that all past presidents — Republicans and Democrats — did not challenge those limits.
The Merit System Protections Board was created by Congress in 1978 as a part of a civil service reform law. Its three board members have seven-year terms, and they review complaints from federal civil servants who allege they were fired for partisan or other inappropriate reasons.
Trump’s decision to fire Harris also left the board without a quorum.
The administration of President Donald Trump has taken a hard line against top US universities over their responses to pro-Palestine protests, as well as their diversity initiatives and curricula.
In a statement, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said the administration was “holding Harvard accountable for fostering violence, antisemitism, and coordinating with the Chinese Communist Party on its campus”.
Harvard has called the latest move “unlawful” and a “retaliatory action”.
Here’s how we got here:
December 2023: The standoff stretches back to the months following the October 7, 2023 attack on southern Israel, and the resulting Israeli offensive on Gaza, in which at least 53,655 Palestinians have since been killed.
Then-Harvard President Claudine Gay’s testimony before Congress on the administration’s response to pro-Palestine protests sparks outrage, as elected officials, particularly Republicans, call for greater crackdowns.
January 2025: Trump takes office in January 2025, following a campaign where he vowed to crack down on pro-Palestine protests, diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programmes, and “woke ideology” on college campuses.
Trump also signs a series of executive orders calling for government agencies to take actions against DEI programmes at private institutions, including universities, and to increase government actions to combat anti-Semitism, particularly on campuses.
February 2025: The US Department of Justice (DOJ) launches a task force to “root out anti-Semitic harassment in schools and on college campuses”.
The task force later announces it will visit 10 schools, saying it was “aware of allegations that the schools may have failed to protect Jewish students and faculty members from unlawful discrimination, in potential violation of federal law”.
The schools include Harvard, as well as Columbia University, George Washington University, Johns Hopkins University, New York University, Northwestern University, the University of California, Los Angeles, the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Minnesota, and the University of Southern California.
March 7, 2025: The Trump administration takes its first action against a US university, slashing $400m in federal funding to Columbia University and accusing the school of “continued inaction in the face of persistent harassment of Jewish students”.
A subsequent letter from the Department of Education warns Harvard and dozens of other universities of “potential enforcement actions”.
March 21, 2025: Columbia yields to Trump’s demands, which include banning face masks, empowering campus police with arresting authority, and installing a new administrator to oversee the department of Middle East, South Asian and African Studies and the Center for Palestine Studies.
March 31, 2025: The US Departments of Education (ED), Health and Human Services (HHS), and the US General Services Administration (GSA) announce an official review of $255.6m in Harvard contracts and $8.7bn in multi-year grants.
The review is part of the “ongoing efforts of the Joint Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism”, the statement said.
April 11, 2025: Harvard is sent a letter saying the university has “failed to live up to both the intellectual and civil rights conditions that justify federal investment” and listing several Trump administration demands.
The demands include a governance overhaul that lessens the power of students and some staff, reforming hiring and admissions practices, refusing to admit students deemed “hostile to the American values and institutions”, doing away with diversity programmes, and auditing several academic programmes and centres, including several related to the Middle East.
April 14, 2025: Harvard President Garber issues a forceful rejection of the demands, writing: “The University will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights”.
The US administration announces an immediate freeze on funding, including $2.2bn in multi-year grants and $60m in multi-year contracts.
April 15, 2025: In a Truth Social post, Trump floats that Harvard could lose “Tax Exempt Status and be Taxed as a Political Entity”. He accuses Harvard of “pushing political, ideological, and terrorist inspired/supporting ‘Sickness’”.
April 16, 2025: The Department of Homeland Security calls on Harvard to turn over records on any foreign students’ “illegal and violent activities”, while threatening to revoke the university’s Student and Exchange Visitor Program approval. The certification is required for it to enrol foreign students. Noem gives an April 30 deadline for this.
April 21, 2025: Harvard files a lawsuit against the Trump administration, accusing it of violating the First Amendment of the US Constitution with “arbitrary and capricious” funding cuts.
April 30, 2025: Harvard says it shared information requested by Noem regarding foreign students, but does not release the nature of the information provided.
May 2, 2025: Trump again says the administration will take away Harvard’s tax-exempt status. No action is immediately taken.
May 5, 2025: The Trump administration says it is cutting all new federal grants to Harvard.
May 13, 2025: The US Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism announces another $450m in federal funding from eight federal agencies.
May 19, 2025: The DOJ announces it will use the False Claims Act, typically used to punish federal funding recipients accused of corruption, to crack down on universities like Harvard over DEI policies. The Department of Health and Human Services also says it is terminating $60m in federal grants to Harvard.
May 22, 2025: Noem announces revocation of Harvard’s Student and Exchange Visitor Program, blocking it from enrolling new foreign students and saying current students will need to transfer to continue their studies.
Harvard responds: “We are fully committed to maintaining Harvard’s ability to host our international students and scholars, who hail from more than 140 countries and enrich the university – and this nation – immeasurably.”
Johannesburg, South Africa – When the millionaire mining magnate-turned-president of South Africa landed in Washington to meet the billionaire real estate tycoon-turned-president of the United States, it was with a deal in mind.
Tensions have been escalating between the US and its African trade ally since Donald Trump took office this year, cut off aid to South Africa, repeated false accusations that a “white genocide” is taking place there and began welcoming Afrikaners as refugees.
At the meeting between Trump and Cyril Ramaphosa in the White House on Wednesday, the South African president began by focusing heavily on trade and investments, highlighting the two countries’ years of cooperation, in keeping with statements made by South Africa’s presidency that Ramaphosa would present a trade deal to the US.
But Trump responded with a well-prepared redirect that South African media and analysts described as an “ambush” and a move that “blindsided” Ramaphosa.
Ready with printouts of news articles about alleged white victims of killings in South Africa and a video of firebrand opposition politician Julius Malema singing Kill the Boer, Trump insisted that white farmers were being targeted and murdered – an assertion Ramaphosa politely yet firmly denied, saying criminality was a problem for all South Africans regardless of race.
The team Ramaphosa assembled to join him on his working visit – which included four white South Africans: two golf legends, the wealthiest man in the country and the agriculture minister – all reaffirmed Ramaphosa’s facts that while violence was widespread, white people were not specifically being targeted.
“We have a real safety problem in South Africa, and I don’t think anyone wants to candy-coat that,” said John Steenhuisen, the agriculture minister and a member of the Democratic Alliance party, which is part of South Africa’s governing coalition.
“Certainly, the majority of South Africa’s commercial and smallholder farmers really do want to stay in South Africa and make it work,” the minister, who is himself an Afrikaner, said. Trump claimed that “thousands” of white farmers were fleeing South Africa.
Steenhuisen added that the people in the video Trump showed were leaders of opposition minority parties and his party had joined forces with Ramaphosa “precisely to keep those people out of power”.
From second left, businessman Johann Rupert speaks next to golfers Retief Goosen and Ernie Els in the Oval Office during a meeting between US President Donald Trump and South African President Cyril Ramaphosa on May 21, 2025. [Kevin Lamarque/Reuters]
‘The lion’s den’
The meeting began cordially where Trump complimented South African golfers, including well-known Ernie Els and Retief Goosen, who were part of the delegation. They both implored Trump for enhanced trade to uplift South Africa’s economy.
Also in the delegation was South Africa’s richest man, Johann Rupert, a luxury-goods mogul and an Afrikaner. He countered claims of racial persecution against the white minority, saying that while criminality was rife, Black people were more often the victims.
“We have too many deaths, but it’s across the board. It is not only white farmers,” Rupert said to Trump.
Ramaphosa kept his cool, local media and observers said, noting that the South African president chose to remain calm, patient and light-hearted even in light of Trump’s attack.
He steered talks back to trade, saying South Africa needed economic investment from its allies, and mostly sat expressionless while the video was played, occasionally stretching his neck to look at it.
Ramaphosa went into “the lion’s den” and was met with an ambush but he remained calm, South African political analyst Sanusha Naidu said.
“Ramaphosa and the delegation did not allow themselves to be baited into an emotional response. That’s critical. They made Trump feel like he had the upper hand in the meeting,” she told Al Jazeera, adding that given the narrative from Trump before Ramaphosa’s arrival, it “could have gone worse”.
When asked by a reporter whether he wanted the impasse between the US and South Africa resolved, Trump said he was open to it.
“I hope it has to be resolved. It should be resolved,” he said, adding that if it were not resolved, it would be “the end of the country”.
‘Reset’ relations
Before the two leaders met on Wednesday, Ramaphosa’s office said the aim was to “reset” relations, especially as the US is South Africa’s second largest trading partner after China.
“Whether we like it or not, we are joined at the hip, and we need to be talking to them,” the South African president said before his trip.
Christopher Isike, a political scientist at the University of Pretoria, told Al Jazeera that direct engagement between the leaders was important, given the tense relations between their countries.
“This is an opportunity for South Africa to correct misinformation peddled by President Trump and try to reset trade relations between the two countries,” he said.
Isike noted that both presidents’ backgrounds as businesspeople could provide common ground for discussing mutually advantageous deals.
“Rich friends of Ramaphosa are also rich friends of Trump, and that may have helped facilitate the meeting,” Isike added.
Common ground and level heads would be useful as the leaders continued private talks away from the media on Wednesday, observers said.
Before the visit, Ramaphosa maintained that while Trump was a dealmaker, he too was adept at making deals and even joked about the possibility of playing a round of golf with his US counterpart.
Washington, however, has criticised Pretoria for a host of matters since Trump took office. This continued in the meeting on Wednesday.
Trump focused on the white farmers, particularly Afrikaners – the descendants of mainly Dutch settlers who instituted apartheid. He alleged they are being killed because of their race despite evidence showing that attacks and killings are common across all groups in the country.
Trump also mentioned South Africa’s land reform law that allows land in the public interest to be taken without compensation in exceptional circumstances in an effort to redress apartheid injustices. Pretoria said no white land has been taken, but the US said the law unfairly targets minority white South Africans who are the majority landholders.
Despite Pretoria consistently seeking to rectify false assertions, the Trump administration has pushed ahead with a plan to take in Afrikaners as refugees. The first group arrived last week. He has also cut aid, including vital support for life-saving HIV programmes, to South Africa.
Additionally, there are worries that Trump may not attend the Group of 20 summit being held in South Africa in November and his government may not renew the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), key US trade legislation that assists economies in sub-Saharan Africa. It expires in September.
South Africa native Elon Musk attends the meeting between US President Donald Trump and South African President Cyril Ramaphosa in the Oval Office [Kevin Lamarque/Reuters]
Trade and investments
Before Wednesday’s meetings, Ramaphosa said strengthening trade relations between the two countries was his primary motivation for travelling to Washington, DC.
“We want to come out of the United States with a really good trade deal, investment promotion. We invest in the United States, and they invest in us. We want to strengthen those relations. We want to consolidate relations between the two countries,” he said.
This week, South Africa’s ministers of trade and agriculture, Parks Tau and Steenhuisen, met with US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer to present the first draft of a trade deal.
In 2024, total goods trade between the US and South Africa amounted to $20.5bn. This included $5.8bn in US exports to South Africa and $14.7bn in South African exports to the US.
However, some observers said that at the heart of the potential trade deal is what South Africa could offer billionaire and close Trump ally, Elon Musk, given his ongoing claims about obstacles he allegedly faces in operating Starlink, his satellite internet company, in the country where he was born due to its transformation laws.
These laws seek to redress past injustices that kept Black people destitute and require businesses over a certain size to have a 30 percent equity stake held by members of previously disadvantaged groups.
Speaking at the Doha Economic Forum on Tuesday, Musk reiterated his assertions about laws he claimed were biased against white people despite experts explaining that most of those only seek to promote racial justice.
“All races must be on equal footing in South Africa. That is the right thing to do. Do not replace one set of racist laws with another set of racist laws, which is utterly wrong and improper,” Musk said.
“I am in an absurd situation where I was born in South Africa but cannot get a licence to operate Starlink because I am not Black,” he claimed.
Before Wednesday’s meeting, a White House official told the Reuters news agency Trump is likely to tell Ramaphosa that all US companies in South Africa should be exempt from “racial requirements”.
Opposition figure Malema’s party, the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), threatened legal action after news that the government was considering offering regulatory assurances to Musk’s Starlink. The EFF said the move would be unconstitutional and shows Ramaphosa is willing to compromise the country’s sovereignty to “massage the inflated ego of Musk and Trump”.
Isike said that while trade concessions would be discussed, he doubted the South African government would give up its laws to appease Musk.
“I will be surprised if Starlink gets its way by refusing to follow South African transformation laws, which require 30 percent Black ownership of a foreign company,” he said.
During his meeting with Ramaphosa, US President Donald Trump shows a copy of an article that he said is about white South Africans who had been killed [Kevin Lamarque/Reuters]
‘Genocide’ claims
Meanwhile, in private talks, Ramaphosa and Trump were also expected to discuss foreign policy issues, including peace prospects between Russia and Ukraine and South Africa’s support for Palestine and its genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ).
Some political observers said Pretoria is in the US crosshairs partly because of its actions against the key Washington ally.
Patrick Bond, a sociology professor at the University of Johannesburg, predicted before the talks that the US might offer to retract claims of “white genocide” in exchange for South Africa dropping its case at the ICJ.
South Africa is seeking to hold Israel accountable for its assault on Gaza, which has killed more than 53,000 Palestinians since October 2023. The US is Israel’s strongest ally and arms supplier.
“We are very rational when it comes to discussing global and geopolitical matters. We will put South African positions first, and our foreign policy positions will be clarified,” Ramaphosa said before the meeting.
As the Gaza genocide case against Israel continues in The Hague, US allegations of a widely discredited “white genocide” in South Africa continue to follow the country’s leadership.
Before Trump and Ramaphosa retreated to private meetings on Wednesday, a reporter asked the US president if he had decided whether genocide was being committed in South Africa. “I haven’t made up my mind,” he replied.
The unfounded claim of white genocide has “taken on a life of its own”, analyst Paolo von Schirach, president of the Global Policy Institute in Washington, DC, told Al Jazeera.
It will be difficult for Ramaphosa and Trump to rebound after the Oval Office “ambush”, he said.
“We know that Elon Musk certainly fanned this story [about a white genocide], and he’s probably not the only one,” von Schirach said. “It’s going to be hard for Trump to say, ‘Oh, so sorry. I was misinformed.’”
WASHINGTON — House Republicans are getting closer to passing President Trump’s tax breaks, spending cuts and beefed-up border security as Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) attempts to pass the package over unified Democratic opposition by Memorial Day.
House committees have labored for months on the legislation, which exceeds 1,000 pages and is titled the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” a nod to Trump himself.
GOP divisions have narrowed but continue as fiscal conservatives worry the bill doesn’t do enough to curb Medicaid spending, while Republicans from competitive swing districts have expressed concerns about the prospect of their constituents losing access to health coverage and food assistance.
Democrats say they will fight what House party leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) calls “this extreme and toxic bill.”
Here’s a look at what’s in and out of the legislative package so far.
Tax cuts for individuals and businesses
Republicans are looking to make permanent the individual income and estate tax cuts passed in Trump’s first term, in 2017, plus enact promises he made on the 2024 campaign trail to not tax tips, overtime and interest on some auto loans.
To partially offset the lost revenue, Republicans propose repealing or phasing out more quickly the clean energy tax credits passed during Joe Biden’s presidency, helping to bring down the overall cost of the tax portion to about $3.8 trillion.
The bill includes a temporary boost in the standard deduction — a $1,000 increase for individuals, bringing it to $16,000 for individual filers, and a $2,000 boost for joint filers, bringing it to $32,000. The deduction reduces the amount of income that is actually subject to income tax.
There is also a temporary $500 increase in the child tax credit, bringing it to $2,500 for 2025 through 2028. It then returns to $2,000 and will increase to account for inflation.
The estate tax exemption rises to $15 million and is adjusted for inflation going forward.
Several of the provisions Trump promised in the campaign would be temporary, lasting roughly through his term in office. The tax breaks for tips, overtime and car loan interest expire at the end of 2028. That’s also the case for a $4,000 increase in the standard deduction for seniors.
Among the various business tax provisions, small businesses, including partnerships and S corporations, will be able to subtract 23% of their qualified business income from their taxes. The deduction has been 20%.
Businesses will temporarily be allowed to fully expense domestic research and development costs in the year they occur and the cost of machinery, equipment and other qualifying assets. This encourages businesses to invest in ways that enhances their productivity.
Parents and older Americans face work requirements for food assistance
House Republicans would reduce spending on food aid, what is known as the Supplemental Nutrition and Assistance Program, by about $267 billion over 10 years.
States would shoulder 5% of benefit costs, beginning in fiscal 2028, and 75% of the administrative costs. Currently, states pay none of the benefit and half of the administration costs.
Republicans also are expanding the work requirements to receive food aid. Under current law, able-bodied adults without dependents must fulfill work requirements until they are 54, and that would change under the bill to age 64.
Also, some parents are currently exempt from work requirements until their children are 18; that would change so only those caring for a dependent child under the age of 7 are exempt.
At the same time, the legislation would invest $60 billion in new money for agriculture programs, sending aid to farmers.
New work requirements for Medicaid
A focal point of the package is nearly $700 billion in reduced spending in the Medicaid program, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.
To be eligible for Medicaid, there would be new “community engagement requirements” of at least 80 hours per month of work, education or service for able-bodied adults without dependents. The new requirement would not kick in until Jan. 1, 2029, after Trump leaves office. People would also have to verify their eligibility for the program twice a year, rather than just once.
Republicans are looking to generate savings with new work requirements. But Democrats warn that millions of Americans will lose coverage.
An estimate from the Congressional Budget Office said the proposals would reduce the number of people with healthcare by at least 7.6 million from the Medicaid changes, and possibly more with other changes to the Affordable Care Act.
Applicants could not qualify for Medicaid if they have a home that is valued at more than $1 million.
No taxes on gun silencers, no money for Planned Parenthood and more
Republicans are also using the package to reward allies and disadvantage political foes.
The package would eliminate a $200 tax on gun silencers that has existed since Congress passed the National Firearms Act in 1934. The elimination of the tax is supported by theNational Rifle Assn.
The group Giffords, which works to reduce gun violence, said silencers make it more difficult to recognize the sound of gunfire and locate the source of gunshots, impairing the ability of law enforcement to respond to active shooters.
Republicans are also looking to prohibit Medicaid funds from going to Planned Parenthood, which provides abortion care and other services. Democrats say defunding the organization would make it harder for millions of patients to get cancer screenings, pap tests and birth control.
‘MAGA’ kids $1,000 savings accounts
“MAGA” is shorthand for Trump’s signature line, “Make America Great Again.” But in this case, it means “Money Accounts for Growth and Advancement.”
For parents or guardians who open new “MAGA” accounts for their children, the federal government will contribute $1,000 for babies born between Jan. 1, 2024 and Dec. 31, 2028.
Families could add $5,000 a year, with the account holders unable to take distributions before age 18. Then, they could access up to 50% of the money to pay for higher education, training and first-time home purchases. At age 30, account holders have access to the full balance of the account for any purpose.
Funding for Trump’s mass deportation operation
The legislation would provide $46.5 billion to revive construction of Trump’s wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, and more money for the deportation agenda.
There’s $4 billion to hire an additional 3,000 new Border Patrol agents as well as 5,000 new customs officers, and $2.1 billion for signing and retention bonuses. There’s also funds for 10,000 more Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers and investigators.
It includes major changes to immigration policy, imposing a $1,000 fee on migrants seeking asylum — something the nation has never done, putting it on par with a few others, including Australia and Iran.
Overall, the plan is to remove 1 million immigrants annually and house 100,000 people in detention centers.
More money for the Pentagon and Trump’s ‘Golden Dome’
There’s also nearly $150 billion in new money for the Defense Department and national security.
It would provide $25 billion for Trump’s “Golden Dome for America,” a long-envisioned missile defense shield, $21 billion to restock the nation’s ammunition arsenal, $34 billion to expand the naval fleet with more shipbuilding and some $5 billion for border security.
It also includes $9 billion for servicemember quality-of-life-related issues, including housing, healthcare and special pay.
Tax on university endowments and overhaul of student loans
The proposal would replace all existing student loan repayment plans with just two: a standard option with monthly payments spread out over 10 to 25 years and a “repayment assistance” plan that is generally less generous than those it would replace.
Among other changes, the bill would repeal Biden-era regulations that made it easier for borrowers to get loans canceled if their colleges defrauded them or closed suddenly.
There would be a tax increase, up to 21%, on some university endowments.
More drilling, mining on public lands
To generate revenue, one section would allow increased leasing of public lands for drilling, mining and logging while clearing the path for more development by speeding up government approvals.
Royalty rates paid by companies to extract oil, gas and coal would be cut, reversing Biden’s attempts to curb fossil fuels to help address climate change.
In a last-minute add, Republicans also included a provision authorizing sales of hundreds of thousands of acres of public lands in Nevada and Utah, prompting outrage from Democrats and environmentalists.
Freking and Mascaro write for the Associated Press. AP writers Collin Binkley and Mary Clare Jalonick in Washington and Matthew Brown in Billings, Mont., contributed to this report.
WASHINGTON — Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has accepted a gifted Boeing 747 aircraft from Qatar for President Trump to use as Air Force One, the Pentagon said Wednesday.
The Defense Department will “work to ensure proper security measures” on the aircraft to make it safe for use by the president, Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said. He added that the plane was accepted “in accordance with all federal rules and regulations.”
Trump has defended the gift, which came up during his recent Middle East trip, as a way to save tax dollars.
“Why should our military, and therefore our taxpayers, be forced to pay hundreds of millions of Dollars when they can get it for FREE,” Trump posted on his social media site during the trip.
Others, however, have raised concerns about the aircraft being a violation of the Constitution’s prohibition on foreign gifts. They also have noted the need to retrofit the plane to meet security requirements, which would be costly and take time.
Trump was asked about the move Wednesday while he was meeting in the Oval Office with South Africa’s president, Cyril Ramaphosa. “They are giving the United States Air Force a jet,” Trump said.
The Republican president has presented no national security imperative for a swift upgrade rather than waiting for Boeing to finish new Air Force One jets that have been in the works for years.
WASHINGTON — House Republicans are pushing to vote on their multitrillion-dollar tax breaks package as soon as Wednesday, grinding out last-minute deal-making to shore up wavering GOP support and deliver on President Trump’s top legislative priority.
Trump himself had instructed the Republican majority to quit arguing and get it done, his own political influence on the line. But GOP leaders worked late into the night to convince skeptical Republicans who have problems on several fronts, including worries that it will pile onto the nation’s $36-trillion debt.
A fresh analysis from the Congressional Budget Office said the tax provisions would increase the federal deficit by $3.8 trillion over the decade, while the changes to Medicaid, food stamps and other services would tally $1 trillion in reduced spending. The lowest-income households in the U.S. would see their resources drop, while the highest ones would see a boost, the CBO said.
Republicans hunkered down at the Capitol through the night for one last committee hearing processing changes to the package. Democrats immediately motioned to adjourn, but the vote failed on party lines.
“President Trump’s ‘one, big, beautiful bill’ is going to require one, big, beautiful vote,” said Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.). “We are going to get this done.”
It’s a make-or-break moment for the president and his party in Congress, who have invested much of their political capital during the crucial first few months of Trump’s return to the White House on this package. If the House Republicans fall in line with the president, overcoming unified Democratic objections, the package would next go to the Senate.
The package comes at a daunting time as the U.S. economy faces uncertainty. Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries said Republicans are trying to “quickly jam this unpopular legislation through the House because they know that the longer they wait, the more will come to light about this cruel and unconscionable bill.”
At its core, the sprawling 1,000-plus-page bill is centered on extending the tax breaks approved during Trump’s first term in 2017, while adding new ones he campaigned on during the 2024 presidential campaign.
To make up for some of the lost revenue, the Republicans are focused on spending cuts to federal safety net programs and a massive rollback of green energy tax breaks from the Biden-era Inflation Reduction Act.
Additionally, the package tacks on $350 billion in new spending — with about $150 billion going to the Pentagon, including for the president’s new “ Golden Dome” defense shield, and the rest for Trump’s mass deportation and border security agenda.
The package title carries Trump’s own words, the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act.”
As Trump promised voters on the tax front, the package proposes there would be no taxes on tips for certain workers, including those in some service industries; automobile loan interest; or some overtime pay.
There would also be an increase to the standard income tax deduction, to $32,000 for joint filers, and a boost to the child tax credit to $2,500. There would be an enhanced deduction, of $4,000, for seniors of certain income levels, to help defray taxes on Social Security income.
To cut spending, the package would impose new work requirements for many people who receive health care through Medicaid, with able-bodied adults without dependents needing to fulfill 80 hours a month on a job or in other community activities.
Similarly, those who receive food stamps through the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program, known as SNAP, would also face new work requirements.
Older Americans up to age 64, rather than 54, who are able-bodied and without dependents would need to work or engage in the community programs for 80 hours a month. Additionally, some parents of children older than 7 years old would need to fulfill the work requirements; under current law, the requirement comes after children are 18.
Republicans said they want to root out waste, fraud and abuse in the federal programs.
The Congressional Budget Office has estimated 8.6 million fewer people would have health insurance with the various changes to Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act. It also said 3 million fewer people each month would have SNAP benefits.
Republicans have been racing to finish up the package by Memorial Day, a deadline imposed by Johnson as he tries to overcome objections within his own ranks.
Conservatives are insisting on quicker, steeper cuts to federal programs to offset the costs of the trillions of dollars in lost tax revenue. GOP leaders have sped up the start date of the Medicaid work requirements from 2029 to 2027.
At the same time, more moderate and centrist lawmakers are wary of the changes to Medicaid that could result in lost health care for their constituents. Others are worried the phaseout of the renewable energy tax breaks will impede businesses using them to invest in green energy projects in many states.
Plus, a core group of lawmakers from New York, California and other high-tax states want a bigger state and local tax deduction, called SALT, for their voters back home.
As it stands, the bill would triple what’s currently a $10,000 cap on the state and local tax deduction, increasing it to $30,000 for joint filers with incomes up to $400,000 a year. They have proposed a deduction of $62,000 for single filers and $124,000 for joint filers.
Trump has been pushing hard for Republicans to unite behind the bill, which has been uniquely shaped in his image, and he said after meeting with House lawmakers privately Tuesday at the Capitol that anyone who doesn’t support the bill would be a “fool.”
But it’s not at all clear that Trump, who was brought in to seal the deal, changed minds.
One of the conservative Republicans, Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky, said afterward he’s still a no vote.
“We’re still a long ways away,” said Rep. Andy Harris (R-Md.), chair of the House Freedom Caucus.
The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a nonpartisan fiscal watchdog group, estimates that the House bill is shaping up to add roughly $3.3 trillion to the debt over the next decade.
Mascaro, Freking, Askarinam and Cappelletti write for the Associated Press.
Libraries across the United States are cutting back on ebooks, audiobooks and loan programs after the Trump administration suspended millions of dollars in federal grants as it tries to dissolve the Institute of Museum and Library Services.
Federal judges have issued temporary orders to block the Trump administration from taking any further steps toward gutting the agency. But the unexpected slashing of grants has delivered a significant blow to many libraries, which are reshuffling budgets and looking at different ways to raise money.
Maine has laid off a fifth of its staff and temporarily closed its state library after not receiving the remainder of its annual funding. Libraries in Mississippi have indefinitely stopped offering a popular ebook service, and the South Dakota state library has suspended its interlibrary loan program.
Ebook and audiobook programs are especially vulnerable to budget cuts, even though those offerings have exploded in popularity since the COVID-19 pandemic.
“I think everyone should know the cost of providing digital sources is too expensive for most libraries,” said Cindy Hohl, president of the American Library Assn. “It’s a continuous and growing need.”
Library officials caught off guard by Trump’s cuts
President Trump issued an executive order March 14 to dismantle the IMLS before firing nearly all of its employees.
One month later, the Maine State Library announced it was issuing layoff notices for workers funded through an IMLS grant program.
“It came as quite a surprise to all of us,” said Spencer Davis, a library generalist at the Maine State Library who is one of eight employees who were laid off May 8 because of the suspended funding.
In April, California, Washington and Connecticut were the only three states to receive letters stating the remainder of their funding for the year was canceled, Hohl said. For others, the money hasn’t been distributed yet. The three states all filed formal objections with the IMLS.
Rebecca Wendt, California state library director, said she was never told why California’s funding was terminated while the other remaining states did not receive the same notice.
“We are mystified,” Wendt said.
The agency did not respond to an email seeking comment.
Popular digital offerings on the chopping block
Most libraries are funded by city and county governments, but receive a smaller portion of their budget from their state libraries, which receive federal dollars every year to help pay for summer reading programs, interlibrary loan services and digital books. Libraries in rural areas rely on federal grants more than those in cities.
Many states use the funding to pay for ebooks and audiobooks, which are increasingly popular, and costly, offerings. In 2023, more than 660 million people globally borrowed ebooks, audiobooks and digital magazines, up from 19% in 2022, according to OverDrive, the main distributor of digital content for libraries and schools.
In Mississippi, the state library helped fund its statewide ebook program.
For a few days, Erin Busbea was the bearer of bad news for readers at her Mississippi library: Hoopla, a popular app to check out ebooks and audiobooks, had been suspended indefinitely in Lowndes and DeSoto counties due to the funding freeze.
“People have been calling and asking, ‘Why can’t I access my books on Hoopla?’” said Busbea, library director of the Columbus-Lowndes Public Library System in Columbus, a majority-Black city northeast of Jackson.
The library system also had to pause parts of its interlibrary loan system allowing readers to borrow books from other states when they aren’t available locally.
“For most libraries that were using federal dollars, they had to curtail those activities,” said Hulen Bivins, the Mississippi Library Commission executive director.
States are fighting the funding freeze
The funding freeze came after the agency’s roughly 70 staff members were placed on administrative leave in March.
Attorneys general in 21 states and the American Library Assn. have filed lawsuits against the Trump administration for seeking to dismantle the agency.
The institute’s annual budget is below $300 million and distributes less than half of that to state libraries across the country. In California, the state library was notified that about 20%, or $3 million, of its $15-million grant had been terminated.
“The small library systems are not able to pay for the ebooks themselves,” said Wendt, the California state librarian.
In South Dakota, the state’s interlibrary loan program is on hold, according to Nancy Van Der Weide, a spokesperson for the South Dakota Department of Education.
The institute, founded in 1996 by a Republican-controlled Congress, also supports a national library training program named after former first lady Laura Bush that seeks to recruit and train librarians from diverse or underrepresented backgrounds. A spokesperson for Bush did not return a request seeking comment.
“Library funding is never robust. It’s always a point of discussion. It’s always something you need to advocate for,” said Liz Doucett, library director at Curtis Memorial Library in Brunswick, Maine. “It’s adding to just general anxiety.”
WASHINGTON — House Republican leadership is pressing ahead toward a vote on landmark legislation that would codify President Trump’s agenda this week, the first major push to pass Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” since he resumed office.
The bill would overhaul the tax code and extend many of the tax cuts passed during Trump’s first term, while increasing spending on defense and border security — costly policies that would be offset by new work requirements and conditions on Medicaid, cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, and the phasing out of green energy tax credits.
Success is far from guaranteed for House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), who is navigating negotiations with fiscal conservatives and coastal moderates within his caucus to secure enough votes within his razor-thin majority. But the bill did take one procedural step forward Sunday night, clearing the bill through the House Budget Committee in a rare weekend vote.
Four members of that committee voted “present,” and have not committed to ultimately vote in favor of the bill. Those four alone — Freedom Caucus members Rep. Chip Roy of Texas, Andrew Clyde of Georgia, Josh Brecheen of Oklahoma and Ralph Norman of South Carolina — are enough to sink the bill in a final floor vote.
More moderate Republican lawmakers from states like California, New York and New Jersey, where residents face higher state and local taxes than in much of the rest of the country, are pushing for an increase in the state and local tax deduction cap, known as SALT, to be included in the bill — a provision that is opposed by the Freedom Caucus. They also are pushing back against efforts to wind down green energy tax credits that are popular with their constituents.
The Congressional Budget Office issued a preliminary estimate that new conditions to Medicaid coverage built into the bill would result in at least 7.6 million people losing health insurance by 2034. The CBO has yet to release a full assessment of the bill’s effect on the debt and deficit.
Johnson has said that the bill will go to the House Rules Committee on Tuesday or Wednesday. He then aims to put the bill to a vote on the House floor on Thursday.
The White House has been involved in the negotiations in recent days.
“Passing this bill is what voters sent Republicans to Washington to accomplish,” Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said Monday. “That’s why it’s essential that every Republican in the House and Senate unites behind President Trump to pass this popular and transformative legislative package.”
Even if Johnson succeeds in passing the legislation, the bill will then move to a Senate filled with Republicans who have expressed skepticism of the House legislation.
“Not only myself, but a number of us in the Senate have been very clear: We have to reduce the deficit,” Republican Sen. John Curtis of Utah said in an interview with CNN. Asked if he wants serious changes to the House bill, Curtis said, “Yes.”
Earlier in the week, Republican Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri said the House bill represented “real Medicaid benefit cuts” that he would not vote for.
“I can’t support that,” Hawley said. “No Republican should support that. We’re the party of the working class. We need to act like it.”
In a statement on social media Monday, Johnson called the bill a “once in a generation opportunity to help restore our economy to greatness.”
“The One Big Beautiful Bill Act will bring the historic relief and prosperity President Trump and Congressional Republicans promised the American people,” he said.
