In his first full cabinet meeting of his second term, which was attended by Elon Musk, President Donald Trump praised dramatic planned cuts to the Environmental Protection Agency and his planned 25% tariffs on European Union imports.
Musk, who runs the so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) team, said at the meeting that their goal was to achieve “$1tn in deficit reduction by financial year 2026” – already halving the $2tn in cuts he had promised during the campaign. He claimed this would require “saving $4bn per day, every day” until the end of September.
Trump later signed an executive order designed to expand the Doge agency’s power.
Here are the biggest stories in US politics on Wednesday, 26 February.
Trump touts government-shrinking effort led by Musk – and signs executive order to increase its reach
Trump used the first full cabinet meeting of his second term to emphasize his administration’s focus on drastically reducing the size of the federal government, with tech billionaire Elon Musk warning without evidence that “America will go bankrupt” without significant spending cuts.
Later, Trump signed an executive order meant to expand Doge’s power. The new order calls for a “transformation” in federal spending on contracts, grants and loans by requiring agencies to create a centralized system to record and justify payments, which may be made public for transparency – an initiative that would be monitored by Musk’s team.
Donald Trump is facing a backlash on his Truth Social platform after sharing an AI-created video of him sipping cocktails with a topless Benjamin Netanyahu in Gaza, in a future imagining of the Palestinian territory devastated by Israel’s war.
The video presented a computer-generated vision of Trump’s property development plan for Gaza, under which he said he wants to “clean out” the population of about 2 million people. Named the “Riviera of the Middle East” plan, the proposal has been criticised as a blueprint for ethnic cleansing.
Trump plans to cut more than 90% of USAid foreign assistance contracts
The Trump administration said it was eliminating more than 90% of the US Agency for International Development’s foreign aid contracts and $60bn in overall US assistance around the world, the Associated Press reported.
Wednesday’s disclosures give an idea of the scale of the Trump administration’s retreat from US aid and development assistance overseas, and from decades of US policy that foreign aid helps US interests by stabilizing other countries and economies and building alliances.
White House gives deadline to plan mass layoffs
US government agency heads have been given a 13 March deadline to produce a plan for drastically slashing the federal workforce as Trump reinforced warnings that workers who failed to account for what they do could be fired.
