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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Trump: no significant guarantees in Ukraine deal Trump announced that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy will visit the White House on Friday to sign a rare earth minerals deal, but also said the US would not provide significant security guarantees to Ukraine as part of the agreement.
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Trump vows to slap 25% tariffs on EU Trump threatened to slap 25% tariffs on the European Union claiming the 27-country bloc was “formed to screw the United States”. He said he would soon release details of the latest tariff threat.
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Bezos narrows focus of Washington Post opinion pages Jeff Bezos, the self-proclaimed “hands-off” owner of the Washington Post, emailed staffers on Wednesday about a change he is applying to the paper’s opinion section, which he said would now “be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets.” Bezos’s decision to inject more regular and weighty conservative theming will also see the departure of opinions editor David Shipley, although it was not immediately clear if he was fired for resisting Bezos’s direction, or chose to resign.
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A Wall Street Journal editorial slamming Trump’s tariff plans as terrible for the US economy and auto industry prompted a broadside from the president followed by threats to sue the media. Trump wrote on Truth Social the Journal is “soooo wrong” and threatened those publishing “Fake books and stories with the so-called ‘anonymous’, or ‘off the record’, quotes”.
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US supreme court likely to back straight woman in ‘reverse discrimination’ case The US supreme court justices appeared to lean on Wednesday toward making it easier for people from “majority backgrounds”, such as white or heterosexual people, to pursue workplace discrimination claims, as they heard an appeal by an Ohio woman who claims she was denied a promotion and demoted because she is heterosexual.
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Doge quietly deletes billions in claimed savings from website When Elon Musk’s Doge posted its “wall of receipts” boasting of major savings to the federal budget, the list was billed as the proud public interface of a radical shake-up of the US government. But in the latest embarrassment to befall the site, Doge has stealthily expunged all of the five largest items on the “wall of receipts” after the much-vaunted “savings” were revealed to be so much hot air.
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What else happened today:
New York City mayor Eric Adams asked a federal judge to toss out the corruption case against him, alleging prosecutorial misconduct.
Apple has promised to fix a bug in its iPhone automatic dictation tool after some users reported it had suggested to them “Trump” when they said the word “racist”.
A new book was announced on Joe Biden’s bid for a second term, promising to reveal a top-level cover-up about his health decline.
Trump said 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.