Trump executive order targets payments and travel after reporters barred from cabinet meeting – live

Senator Patty Murray of Washington state called Donald Trump and Elon Musk “out-of-touch billionaires” during a news conference alongside three former federal employees.

Murray said Trump and Musk don’t care if they “burn down something really important”.

“The Trump/Musk firing spree continues to be as surgical as a wrecking ball,” Murray said.

“That is no way to treat people who have dedicated themselves to our country, often for years. And many of them, by the way, are veterans. Nearly a third of our federal workforce are veterans, people who are literally put their lives on the line for our country, and now we’re all seeing what Trump and Musk think about that.”

Fired USAid workers and HIV activists hold ‘die-in’ to protest Trump and Musk

Fired USAid employees and advocates for people with HIV staged a protest in a Capitol office building on Wednesday, warning that Donald Trump’s drive to dismantle the agency tasked with implementing Washington’s foreign aid agenda imperils the fight against the virus.

Wearing white T-shirts that read “Aids funding cuts kill” and chanting “Congress has blood on its hands, unfreeze aid now”, around three dozen protesters lay down in the rotunda of the Cannon House office building, home to the offices of representatives from both parties. Capitol police said about 20 arrests were made of demonstrators who defied their orders to disperse.

“What we are demanding of Congress is that they stop behaving like doormats in the face of this attack on humanitarian assistance that truly is highly effective and life-saving,” Asia Russell, executive director of Health Gap, a global advocacy group fighting against HIV, said prior to the protest.

“It’s very hard to overstate what’s at stake regarding humanitarian assistance.”

The protest came as USAid remained frozen by the Trump administration’s rapid moves to close the agency. Over the weekend, the agency announced that it was placing all but a small number of its employees worldwide, as well as nearly 2,000 staffers based in the United States, on paid leave. Those working in Washington DC have been invited to retrieve their belongings from its headquarters, which is set to be turned into office space for US Customs and Border Protection, one of the agencies implementing Trump’s hardline immigration policies.

Read the full story by Chris Stein here:

David Smith

The Guardian’s Washington DC bureau chief, David Smith, offers an analysis of the president’s first full cabinet meeting:

Trump cabinet flunkies hail wannabe Caesar and Elon, his oligarch pal

On Tuesday, just over a mile from the White House, the classicist Mary Beard spoke to an audience about Roman emperors. “An autocrat is somebody who kills you when he’s being his most generous,” she remarked. “You go to dinner, you think, wow, this is wonderful! But the generosity of the autocrat is always potentially lethal.”

On Wednesday, Donald Trump held his first full cabinet meeting. The mood was warm and convivial and, some might say, generous. Housing secretary Scott Turner offered a prayer that included: “Thank you, God, for President Trump.”

Was it just an accident that the TV camera framed the scene as the antithesis of DEI? Viewers could see seven men in suits with Trump in the middle, then another row of seven men in suits sitting behind. Nearly all of them were white. (Yes, there were women and people of colour at the meeting – but not many.)

The Vice-president, JD Vance, was in attendance but there was no doubt whom this emperor had appointed as consul. Trump invited Elon Musk, the tech billionaire running the so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge), to speak before any of his cabinet secretaries after claiming that everyone present was supportive.

Wearing a black “Make America great again” cap, Musk jokingly referred to himself as “humble tech support” – people laughed dutifully – and claimed that his haphazard efforts to take a chainsaw to the federal government can save a trillion dollars and dig the country out of debt. “It’s not an optional thing, it’s an essential thing,” he said. “If we don’t do this, America will go bankrupt.”

It sounds fine in theory. But Doge, mostly consisting of young male software engineers fuelled by pizza and Red Bull, has been a disaster. It fired the people who oversee the nuclear weapons stockpile then hastily tried to rehire them, only to find they were hard to contact because they could not access their work email accounts. It claimed to have saved $8bn on a terminated contract that was actually worth only $8m. Musk falsely stated that the US spent $50m on condoms for Gazans. And it emerged this week Doge quietly deleted the top five items from its public ledger of alleged savings after they turned out to be nothing of the sort.

You can read the full analysis here:

A new executive order under the Trump administration is making every agency create a centralized system to record all payments made under federal contracts and grants.

“This order commences a transformation in Federal spending on contracts, grants, and loans to ensure Government spending is transparent and Government employees are accountable to the American public,” reads the order.

According to the executive order, employees approving payments must provide a written justification, which may be made public for transparency.

Agencies must also record all federally funded travel for non-essential purposes, which will require written justifications before approval.

Lauren Gambino

Several Democratic senators made dramatic returns to Washington to vote against Republicans’ budget blueprint on Tuesday night.

California Congressman Kevin Mullin, who had been absent while recovering from a blood clot and infection following knee surgery, went straight to the airport after being discharged from the hospital, while Colorado Congresswoman Brittany Pettersen returned to teh House floor with her newborn son, Sam, nestled in her arms.

Their dramatic – and surprise – appearances were part of an effort by Democrats to block Republicans’ plan to advance major pieces of Donald Trump’s tax cut and immigration agenda.

“I have a message for Donald Trump: nobody fights harder than a mom,” Petterson wrote on X. “Republican leadership may have denied my ability to vote by proxy but that didn’t stop us from voting against this disastrous budget that strips away health care and food for seniors, veterans, kids and families across Colorado — all to give tax breaks to billionaires like Elon Musk.”

The bill ultimately passed in a 217-215 vote. Only one Democrat, Arizona congressman Raúl Grijalva, who has cancer, returned for the vote. But up until the moment the vote ended, Republicans were working to overcome unified Democratic opposition to the plan, which would likely result in steep cuts to social safety net programs, including Medicaid.

“After three surgeries, a blood clot, an infection and being hospitalized for over a week, the moment I was discharged I immediately rushed to the airport so I could get on a plane to D.C. and vote NO on Republicans’ disastrous budget plan,” Mullin said in a statement after the vote. “They are trying to make the most devastating cuts to Medicaid the nation has ever seen – $880 billion – all so they can give more tax cuts to billionaires and corporations.”

On board the flight, Mullin’s wife, Jessica Stanfill-Mullin, helped administer IV antibiotics to him.

Here are some photos coming in from the wires showing demonstrators gathered on the floor of the Capitol Rotunda on Wednesday, protesting against cuts to USAid funding.

Organized by ActUp’s Health Global Access Project, the protesters temporarily occupied the rotunda before Capitol Police arrested 21 of them.

One of the big moments of today came from Donald Trump’s first officials cabinet meeting. Here were some of the key moments during the public portion of Trump’s first official cabinet meeting of his second term:

• Trump announced that Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy will visit Washington DC to sign the rare earth minerals agreement. He praised Doge, claiming, without evidence, that it has saved billions.

• Elon Musk also delivered remarks and warned that without cost-cutting, the country could go “bankrupt” describing himself as “tech support”. He acknowledged mistakes made by Doge, such as when they accidentally cancelled an Ebola prevention effort, but he said, they “restored it immediately and there was no interruption”.

• Trump also mentioned that the Environmental Protection Agency might cut up to 65% of its employees and declined to comment in response to a question about whether he would ever allow China to take control of Taiwan by force.

• Trump said that tariffs on Canada and Mexico will continue, and that a 25% tariff on the European Union was coming soon.

• Health secretary Robert F Kennedy said that two people had died from a measles outbreak, but did not provide details about the deaths. Earlier on Wednesday, it was reported that one child had died of measles.

Other news that happened today:

• UK prime minister Keir Starmer left for Washington today prior to his meeting with Donald Trump set for Thursday in what will be his biggest diplomatic test to date.

• US agriculture secretary Brooke Rollins said that the US will invest up to $1bn to combat the spread of bird flu, including increasing imports of eggs.

• Donald Trump threatened to sue journalists and authors who use “anonymous” sources in their reporting.

• Minnesota governor Tim Walz will not run for Minnesota’s newly open US Senate seat, according to his spokesperson.

• The US abstained from World Trade Organization condemnation of Russia’s aggression in Ukraine.

• California governor Gavin Newsom announced that he is launching his own podcast.

• The US supreme court heard oral arguments in a case that could radically transform workplace discrimination claims.

• New York City mayor Eric Adams asked a federal judge to toss out the corruption case against him.

• A meeting between EU foreign policy chief and US secretary of state Marco Rubio was cancelled, with both sides citing scheduling conflicts.

• Trump urged Apple to end its diversity, equity and inclusion policies.

• The Trump administration issued a memo directing federal agencies to plan for sweeping layoffs of government employees, according to the Associated Press and other news agencies.

• A US judge has briefly extended an order reinstating the head of a federal watchdog agency responsible for protecting whistleblowers who had challenged his firing by Trump.

• The Trump administration said that New York City must end its congestion pricing program by 21 March, according to Reuters.

• Trump announced that his administration is reversing concessions given to Venezuela on an oil transaction agreement by former president Joe Biden.

• The Trump administration will require undocumented immigrants aged 14 and older to register with the federal government or face possible fines or prosecution.

• The Senate confirmed Trump’s pick for US trade representative, Jamieson Greer.

A US judge has briefly extended an order reinstating the head of a federal watchdog agency responsible for protecting whistleblowers who had challenged his firing by Donald Trump.

According to Reuters, US district judge Amy Berman Jackson in Washington said Hampton Dellinger, the head of the office of special counsel, could remain in his post through at least Saturday.

Jackson said the extension would give her time to draft a permanent ruling in the case.

Last week, the US supreme court temporarily kept Dellinger on the job as the head of the federal agency that protects government whistleblowers, in its first word on the many legal fights over the agenda of Trump’s second presidency.

The justices said in an unsigned order that Dellinger could remain in his job at least until Wednesday. And now, that has been extended to at least Saturday, per Reuters.