Donald Trump Just Cut All Foreign Aid to Ukraine and Most of the World

Donald Trump’s administration issued a 90-day pause on all foreign aid, with exceptions for Israel and Egypt, according to a new State Department memo Friday.

The memo signed by new Secretary of State Marco Rubio “shall ensure that, to the maximum extent permitted by law, no new obligations shall be made for foreign assistance” until Rubio carries out a review, which will take place over the next 85 days, at which time he will make his recommendation to Trump.

According to the memo, this will ensure that America’s foreign aid obligations “are not duplicated, are effective, and are consistent with President Trump’s foreign policy.”

The memo contains a special waiver for “foreign military financing” for Egypt and Israel, “including salaries, necessary to administer foreign military financing.” Those two countries happen to guard the exits to Gaza. While Gaza is currently experiencing a reprieve from the months of endless bombings, Trump recently admitted he is “not confident” that the ceasefire agreement he helped to negotiate will hold, leaving the door open for more brutality there.

Notably, Ukraine, which has received hundreds of billions in aid from the U.S., did not receive a waiver. Earlier this week, Trump said he was interested in discussing “denuclearization” between the U.S. and Russia. Russian President Vladimir Putin signaled this week that he was prepared to talk with Trump about ending the war in Ukraine. Trump has threatened sanctions if his efforts at diplomacy fail.

On Monday, Trump signed an executive order blocking all “new obligations and disbursements” of foreign aid to countries, nongovernmental organizations, international organizations, and contractors for 90 days, while the country’s commitments went under review for 90 days.

The anti-abortion movement is “entering a new era,” according to Republican leadership.

Speaking before a crowd at the March for Life in Washington, House Speaker Mike Johnson pointed to a flurry of actions by Donald Trump in the last week that have aided the right’s anti-abortion efforts. They included the pardoning of 23 anti-abortion activists who blockaded the entrance of a Washington clinic in October 2020.

And an executive order signed by Trump earlier this week also elevated fetal personhood to the national stage while simultaneously cementing language at the executive level to delegitimize transgender identities.

Meanwhile, progress against abortion rights also churned in Congress. On Thursday, House Republicans passed a “born alive” abortion bill, insisting that the effort was more akin to an anti-infanticide effort than another attempt to restrict abortions. The bill would require health care professionals to administer the “same degree of professional skill, care, and diligence” for a premature child that lives through an abortion as for a child that is carried to term. Democrats in the Senate blocked a twin bill from advancing in the upper chamber.

The effort was, of course, redundant due to a 2002 statute, the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act, which already prevents the “intentional killing of a child born alive”—otherwise known as murder.

Missouri Senator Josh Hawley also made a personal appeal to Trump on Thursday, asking the newly minted forty-seventh president to restore reproductive policies he had implemented during his first term. That would include requiring women to pick up their abortion medication in person, a move that could significantly impact people’s ability to acquire the abortion pill via mail in states where the procedure is currently banned.

Hawley also suggested to Trump that, with the overturning of Roe v. Wade in the rearview, states would prove to be “the most important theaters” for the fight to rid America of the procedure, according to The New York Times.

“House and Senate Republicans are committed to protecting innocent life,” Johnson told the crowd on Friday, championing his caucus’s efforts over the last five days.

Trump and JD Vance also gave remarks at the march. Speaking at the National Mall, Vance pledged to protect Christians and anti-abortion activists from federal prosecution.

“This administration stands by you, we stand with you, and most importantly we stand with the most vulnerable,” Vance said. “America is fundamentally a pro-baby, a pro-family and a pro-life country.”

Oklahoma’s state superintendent is inviting ICE to raid public schools. 

“In Oklahoma, we’re gonna work with law enforcement, we are gonna work with the Trump administration,” Ryan Walters told Oklahoma journalist Brenna Rose. “However President Trump decides to carry out the actions around his immigration policy, we’re gonna absolutely work with him on that. We’re gonna make sure that he has what he needs from us to carry those things out.”

“So you’re not completely ruling out a raid on an Oklahoma school?” Rose asked pointedly.

“No, if that’s what President Trump sees fit, as there’s [an] illegal immigrant population there that needs to have enforcement to remove them from the schools, absolutely. We will work with him to make sure that he’s able to carry that out.”  

Walters has served as Oklahoma public schools superintendent since 2020, and has been a staunch MAGA advocate in that tenure. Last year, he made the Bible required reading in public schools, saying that “without basic knowledge of it, Oklahoma students are unable to properly contextualize the foundation of our nation.” When the state opened bids for companies seeking to supply the Bible, the requirements were so narrow the Trump Bible was one of the only ones to fit the bill. (Walters is currently being sued over the entire mandate.) He has also referred to teachers as “radical leftists” who are “turning our schools into Epstein Island.” And just last month, he proposed a rule that would let the Oklahoma State Department of Education gather data on undocumented children in public schools. 

Ushering ICE agents into public schools is yet another mask-off moment for the Trump administration and all its allies.

The Trump administration this week began a plan to send email alerts to every single federal government employee from a single email address, confusing and worrying many workers about what’s coming next.

CBS News reports that the Office of Personnel Management, which manages the federal workforce, is testing a new capability that would allow the alerts to be sent to every single employee, about roughly 2.3 million people. Workers at multiple federal agencies initially didn’t recognize the sender, an hr-at-opm-.gov email address, and reported the email as spam.

OPM sent the messages overnight between Thursday and Friday, two officials told CBS.

“This is a new effort under this administration,” one official told CBS.

The effort is so new that even some I.T. offices in federal agencies flagged the email as spam. One anonymous federal employee sent a screenshot to CBS and said their co-workers weren’t sure if the email was legitimate.

“Everyone thought it was spam,” said the employee. “There was a flurry of messages, ‘Is this spam?’”

At a time when the new administration is closing various federal offices and proposing massive cuts to the government under Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” initiative, the new system’s potential worries federal employees.

“They had to send this this week, of all weeks? Really?” said CBS’s source. Only agency and department heads had advance notice of the email plan on Thursday, according to OPM officials. Some rank-and-file employees didn’t hear about the new plan until they received the first email, leading to Friday’s confusion.

White House officials didn’t respond to CBS’s questions about what the system will be used for. But looking at past comments from Trump and others close to his administration, the potential is vast and disturbing, with the possibility of upending some of our most critical federal agencies.

While it seems likely that the lion’s share of President Donald Trump’s Cabinet nominees are going to sail through their confirmation hearings, the fortunes of three of his picks—Secretary of Defense nominee Pete Hegseth, Director of National Intelligence prospect Tulsi Gabbard, and would-be Department of Health and Human Services head Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—remain somewhat cloudy. Hegseth, of late, has emerged as the likeliest of the three to get over the line.

But according to a fresh report from Talking Points Memo’s Josh Marshall, another may be edging closer: Kennedy Jr. And the reason RFK’s chances have slightly improved have nothing to do with the nominee sanding down his fringe ideas about vaccines and modern medicine, and everything to do with the fact that Rhode Island Democrat Sheldon Whitehouse, while not “confirmed as voting for Kennedy” nevertheless “appears to be actively considering it.”

Naturally, the reasons why, given the high stakes, are both indescribably stupid and yet very typical of the way Washington works. As Marshall reports:

I’m told that there appear to be two reasons: One is that Whitehouse and Kennedy are personal friends. They were law school roommates at UVA and that seems to have been the beginning of a lifelong friendship. There are also specific issues with Rhode Island’s health care system that apparently need regulatory flexibility from HHS. That seems to be a real issue. But it hasn’t been enough of an issue to shift the state’s senior senator, Sen. Jack Reed (D-RI), who remains firmly opposed to Kennedy’s nomination.

Why would it matter if Whitehouse bucks common sense and votes to install RFK in Trump’s Cabinet? As Marshall points out, support for Kennedy among Republican senators is fluid for all the reasons you might expect (not everyone wants to see long-conquered childhood diseases make a comeback in this, the twenty-first century). But Whitehouse’s support may go a long way toward providing some of the fence-sitters some political cover to back Trump’s man.