Marco Rubio Issues New Foreign Aid Order—Causing Mass Confusion

After Donald Trump froze nearly all U.S. foreign aid last week, international projects on health, education, food, and all other humanitarian areas were placed in jeopardy. 

On Tuesday night, newly confirmed Secretary of State Marco Rubio tried to undo some of the confusion by issuing a memo waiving the aid freeze for “livesaving humanitarian assistance.” The memo defines this assistance as “core lifesaving medicine, medical services, food, shelter, and subsistence assistance, as well as supplies and reasonable administrative costs as necessary to deliver such assistance,” according to The Washington Post.

Programs still subject to the aid freeze include anything involving diversity programs, gender, abortion, family planning,  and “transgender surgeries, or other nonlife saving assistance,” the memo states. 

The memo says that “implementers of existing lifesaving humanitarian assistance programs should continue or resume work if they have stopped” but added that “this resumption is temporary in nature, and except by separate waiver or as required to carry out this waiver, no new contracts shall be entered into.”

But this language hasn’t cleared up any of the confusion, as organizations and agencies are now scrambling to figure out what exactly is considered “lifesaving” under the new memo. For example, one of the programs halted last week is the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, which funds clinics, hospitals, and other organizations around the world combating HIV and AIDS. It’s unclear if that work can now resume.

Plus, USAID, contractors, and nongovernmental aid organizations experiencing “stop-work” orders and a sudden halt in funds have already fired many employees. The memo also said that any assistance to migrants and refugees could only continue for livesaving activities “and for repatriation of third country nationals to their country of origin or safe-third-country.”

Neither Friday’s order nor Tuesday’s memo offered any way to request or seek a waiver from the aid freeze, except to contact the “Director of Foreign Assistance at the Department of State.” This position has yet to be filled by Rubio or the Trump administration. 

The decisions coming from the Trump administration since last week’s inauguration have resulted in chaos throughout the federal government and cruelty against the people who depend on it, whether they are federal workers, international aid recipients, or even struggling Americans on Medicaid. The administration is now facing a number of lawsuits and a public outcry. But will that change anything?

Robert F. Kennedy’s first confirmation hearing Wednesday to become secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services was quickly interrupted by protesters over the Trump nominee’s vaccine positions.

During his opening remarks, Kennedy said under oath that he is “not anti-vaccine”—but people standing in the back of the room weren’t convinced.

“News reports have claimed that I am anti-vaccine or anti-industry. I am neither,” Kennedy said.

“You are!” one person shouted out before she was dragged out by security. “Yes, you are!”

When the room returned to order, the 71-year-old continued that he considered himself “pro-safety” and mentioned that he had vaccinated all of his children and believed that “vaccines have a critical role in health care.”

As he continued speaking, another protester disrupted his speech for a second time and was removed.

Kennedy’s “pro-safety” claim, however, flies in the face of his outspoken stances on the jab. During the hearing, Senator Ron Wyden torched Kennedy for claiming in a 2020 podcast that he would “do anything, pay anything, to go back in time and not vaccinate” his children. And in a July 2023 interview with podcaster Lex Fridman, Kennedy baselessly connected essential vaccines—such as the polio jab, which has practically eradicated the paralyzing disease from the planet—to lethal diseases such as cancer.

“You’ve talked about that the media slanders you by calling you an anti-vaxxer, and you’ve said that you’re not anti-vaccine, you’re pro–safe vaccine,” Fridman prompted the former independent presidential candidate. “Difficult question: Can you name any vaccines that you think are good?”

“I think some of the live virus vaccines are probably averting more problems than they’re causing. There’s no vaccine that is, you know, safe and effective,” Kennedy said at the time. This is false.

Kennedy claimed during a heated back and forth with Wyden that quoting him was “dishonest” and that Fridman had, at the time, interrupted a response that was supposed to extend to a philosophy that every medicine—including vaccines—have individuals who are sensitive to them. Unfortunately, Kennedy didn’t find a way to squeeze that seemingly retroactive detail into his more than two-hour interview with the podcaster.

Political campaign donors are getting more brazen about what they expect to buy with their dollar.

Nicole Shanahan, a Silicon Valley lawyer and investor, impressed upon a handful of lawmakers late Tuesday the importance of confirming her former third-party running mate, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., as secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services. But within the folds of the message lay a dark and direct warning for two specific senators whose campaigns she backed five years ago.

“This hasn’t been widely reported, but in 2020 I cut large checks to Chuck Schumer to help Democrats flip two Senate seats from red to blue,” Shanahan said in a video posted to X. “The two candidates I helped select: Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff, please know I will be watching your votes very closely.

“I will make it my personal mission that you lose your seats in the Senate if you vote against the future health of America’s children,” she said.

The ex-wife of Google co-founder Sergey Brin then went on to challenge the potential “no” votes from multiple other politicians, promising to find and back political challengers to their seats if they didn’t swing for Kennedy.

“And more than that, I also want to say to Senators Mitch McConnell, Lindsey Graham, Lisa Murkowski, Susan Collins, Bill Cassidy, Tom Tillis, James Lankford, Corey Booker, John Fetterman, Bernie Sanders, and Catherine Cortez Masto—this is a bipartisan message, and it comes directly from me, while Bobby may be willing to play nice, I won’t,” Shanahan warned.

“If you vote against him, I will personally fund challengers to primary you in your next election, and I will enlist hundreds of thousands to join me. You’re either on the side of transparency and accountability, or you’re standing in the way.”

Kennedy, a virulent vaccine conspiracy theorist, is slated for two confirmation hearings this week. He will appear before the Senate Finance Committee on Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. and will face further questioning from the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pension, or HELP, Committee on Thursday.

Kennedy’s history in public health is questionable at best. His stances, which include unscientific beliefs that AIDS is not caused by HIV and that a large number of vaccines should be stripped from the market, could have major impacts on the agency designed to protect America’s health, especially as bird flu outbreaks begin to dot the country.

In December, Donald Trump announced that Kennedy would spend his time at the top of HHS researching an already thoroughly debunked conspiracy that ties vaccine usage to autism rates.

And Kennedy’s vaccine conspiracies aren’t just easily refutable, anti-vax hogwash—they’ve caused legitimate, real-world harm. Preceding a deadly measles outbreak on the Pacific islands of Samoa in 2019, Kennedy’s anti-vax nonprofit Children’s Health Defense spread rampant misinformation about the efficacy of vaccines, sending the nation’s vaccination rate plummeting from the 60–70 percent range to just 31 percent, according to Mother Jones. That year, the country reported 5,707 cases of measles—an illness that was declared eliminated by the United States in 2000 thanks to advancements in modern medicine (read: vaccines)—as well as 83 measles-related deaths, the majority of which were children under the age of 5.

Further still, the 71-year-old’s private life has given pause to a number of lawmakers responsible for confirming him. Kennedy has publicly admitted to dumping a dead bear cub in Central Park, was accused of (and sort of apologized for) groping his children’s babysitter in the late 1990s, and last week was described by his cousin Caroline Kennedy as a “predator” who is “addicted to attention and power.”

“I have known Bobby my whole life; we grew up together,” the former ambassador to Australia and Japan wrote in a letter to lawmakers obtained by The Washington Post.

“His basement, his garage, his dorm room were the centers of the action where drugs were available, and he enjoyed showing off how he put baby chickens and mice in the blender to feed his hawks,” she continued. “It was often a perverse scene of despair and violence.”

Tim Kaine has a warning for any federal workers considering Trump’s buyout offer: It’s a scam.

The president announced on Tuesday that federal workers must return to the office full-time, or they can resign by next week with a buyout and severance pay through September 30. This is part of his effort to overhaul the federal bureaucracy in his own image, and with his own supporters.

“If you resign under this program, you will retain all pay and benefits regardless of your daily workload and will be exempted from all applicable in-person work requirements until September 30, 2025 (or earlier if you choose to accelerate your resignation for any reason),” the email read.

Aside from angering federal workers, the buyout raised immediate red flags for Democrats, and Senator Kaine particularly.

“The federal employees received an interesting email at the end of the day today,” Kaine said on Tuesday, referring to the buyout email. “So tender your resignation, and then boy it’s just gonna be a gravy train, you’re just gonna get paid for seven months without working. The president has no authority to make that offer!

“There’s no budget line item to pay people who are not showing up for work,” Kaine continued. “My message to federal employees who received this is: Yeah, the president has tried to terrorize you for about a week, and then gives you a little sweetheart offer if you resign in the next week.… Don’t be fooled! He’s tricked hundreds of people with that offer. If you accept that offer and resign, he’ll stiff you.… That promise is worth nothing.”

Some federal workers seem to be heeding Kaine’s warning.

“You can’t buy me off, scare me away, or intimidate me into resigning. I’m angry, spiteful, and resolute in holding the line and outlasting anyone trying to destroy the agency whose work I believe in and a mission I take to heart,” said one user in the popular r/fednews subreddit.

Donald Trump’s petty crusade for revenge continues: General Mark Milley will be the next of the president’s former advisers to lose his security detail.

Fox News reported Tuesday that according to multiple senior officials, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth will announce that he is “immediately pulling” Milley’s security clearance and personal security detail.

Hegseth will also direct the inspector general to determine whether Milley should be stripped of a star in retirement for undermining the chain of command.

Milley refused Trump’s orders in 2020 to send the military to crush protesters in Washington in the wake of George Floyd’s death. He has also described Trump as a “fascist” and a “wannabe dictator.”

Ever since entering the White House, it seems Trump just can’t stop thinking about the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Within minutes of being sworn in, Milley’s portrait was stripped from the wall of the Pentagon. Last week, Trump posted that his presidential personnel office was “actively in the process of identifying and removing over a thousand Presidential Appointees from the previous Administration,” including Milley, whom he listed by name.

Trump has already pulled the security details for some of his other former colleagues turned political adversaries, including Dr. Anthony Fauci, John Bolton, and Mike Pompeo. Each one has publicly criticized Trump, and the latter two had their security details removed despite warnings from the Biden administration that they were still receiving threats from foreign adversaries.

Tulsi Gabbard is facing more scrutiny over her foreign travels, specifically a trip she made to the Middle East while a member of Congress.

In 2017, as a member of Congress representing Hawaii, Gabbard made a trip to Syria and Lebanon to meet with Syrian leader Bashar Al Assad. But shortly after her visit, The New York Times reported, U.S. intelligence agencies intercepted a call between two Hezbollah officials in which they said that she met with “the boss” or “the big guy.”

Intelligence officials assume that the person in question was a senior Hezbollah official, or a high-ranking Lebanese government official with strong ties to Hezbollah. Gabbard denied meeting anyone from the militant organization and political party but acknowledged that she met with different Lebanese officials on her trip, including some close to Hezbollah, such as the head of Lebanese intelligence at the time. 

The Times spoke with unnamed people close to Gabbard who said that she disclosed all of her meetings from the trip and that the reports were misinterpreted. But this latest revelation is sure to introduce another snag into Gabbard’s confirmation process to serve as director of national intelligence. Gabbard hasn’t yet won over the Republicans on the Senate Intelligence Committee, nor influential Senator Mitch McConnell. 

The report also notes that Gabbard found herself under additional scrutiny from a federal agency that protects flights, thanks to a trip she made to the Vatican for an event organized by a European businessman on the FBI watchlist.

Trump’s allies are trying to force the normally secret committee vote to be made public in the hopes of forcing skeptical Republicans, like Senators Susan Collins and Todd Young, to back her. Gabbard can’t afford to lose a single committee vote, stacking the odds against this particularly quixotic Cabinet choice. 

Trump’s ultimatum to federal workers is backfiring—making them vow to stay in their positions out of sheer spite. 

On Tuesday, the president announced that he’d be giving federal workers a choice: return to the office full-time or quit with a buyout and severance pay through September 30. This is part of his effort to revamp the federal bureaucracy in his own image, and with his own supporters.

“The President required that employees return to in-person work, restored accountability for employees who have policy-making authority, restored accountability for senior career executives, and reformed the federal hiring process to focus on merit,” a mass email said. “As a result of the above orders, the reform of the federal workforce will be significant.

“If you resign under this program, you will retain all pay and benefits regardless of your daily workload and will be exempted from all applicable in-person work requirements until September 30, 2025 (or earlier if you choose to accelerate your resignation for any reason),” the email continues.

Federal workers aren’t taking this lying down.

“I’ll be honest, before that email went out, I was looking for any way to get out of this fresh hell,” said one user in the popular r/fednews subreddit. “But now I am fired up to make these goons as frustrated as possible, RTO be damned.”

These sentiments were echoed throughout the thread.

“I’ll continue to do my job and fight for the position I’ve earned,” another said. “It took me 10 years of applying and 20 years experience in my field to get here. I will not be pushed out by two billionaire trust funds babies. I’M NOT LEAVING!”

“I’ve never been more motivated to stay. Before the ‘buyout’ memo, I was ready to go job hunting, but then a revelation hit. I took an oath under this position to the American people and leaving my job under the current state would be failing to maintain my oath as civil servant,” another worker wrote. 

“You can’t buy me off, scare me away, or intimidate me into resigning. I’m angry, spiteful, and resolute in holding the line and outlasting anyone trying to destroy the agency whose work I believe in and a mission I take to heart,” one comment stated. “My colleagues feel the same way and we’re not leaving, you’ll have to drag us out. We’ll continue to follow mission we’re charged with executing and serving the individuals we’re charged with serving.… We will be here and continue to be here.” The user also noted that he and 12 other co-workers would be wearing “Rebel Alliance” T-shirts under their work clothes every Friday in the office.

“They just created the imaginary deep state they convinced everyone they were fighting against, oh the irony,” another user noted.

Federal employees also noticed that the memo announcing the buyouts was eerily similar to the one Elon Musk sent Twitter employees in 2022.

A judge on Tuesday temporarily blocked Donald Trump’s move to freeze funding for all federal grants and loans. 

U.S. District Judge Loren AliKhan ordered a brief administrative stay on the Office of Management and Budget’s effort to stop funding to federal grant contracts.

AliKhan’s order, which landed just as the freeze was to begin at 5:00 p.m. on Tuesday, will go into effect immediately and last until 5:00 p.m. on February 3—little less than a week. 

A hearing for further arguments has been scheduled for Monday morning. 

“I think there is the specter of irreparable harm,” said AliKhan, according to Politico. 

The Trump administration’s decision to pause all funding caused widespread chaos and confusion Tuesday as officials across the country reported that they’d been locked out of  essential government services, such as Medicaid and Head Start. 

The sweeping memo from OMB will affect 2,600 accounts across government, holding hostage the funding for essential government agencies, programs, and nonprofits until they’re willing to answer questions about their commitments to environmental justice, “gender ideology,” and diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Lawmakers from across the country warned Tuesday that the systems for crucial programs such as Head Start were shut down as a direct result of the funding freeze, forcing the organizations to grind to a halt. Medicaid portals were down in every single state.

But OMB insisted that certain programs  would not be affected by the order. The White House claimed that the Medicaid portal had experienced an “outage” and that they expected it to be up and running “soon.”

Attorneys general from at least 23 states joined a federal lawsuit Tuesday against Trump to oppose his freeze on vital health services. 

This story has been updated.

Speaking before a crowd at the March for Life in Washington last week, House Speaker Mike Johnson promised that the anti-abortion movement would be “entering a new era” under Donald Trump’s leadership. The newest benchmark for the conservative party under that banner is, apparently, allowing people to attack and shutter health care clinics providing abortion services.

Republican lawmakers held a private meeting with anti-abortion activists, pledging to repeal the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances, or FACE, Act, reproductive rights columnist Jessica Valenti reported Tuesday. The FACE Act prohibits the use of physical force, threat, or intimidation to prevent people from obtaining an abortion, and prohibits damaging or destroying the clinics that provide them.

“God demands justice,” said Representative Andy Biggs, according to Valenti.

The meeting followed an effort by Representative Chip Roy last week, in which the Texas Republican introduced a bill in the House to formally repeal the act.

“Americans just spent the last four years being targeted by a weaponized justice system,” Roy said in a statement at the time. “The FACE Act was one of the primary weapons of abuse—being used to politically target, arrest, and jail pro-life Americans for speaking out and standing up for life.”

Regardless of the FACE Act’s future, the Department of Justice announced it won’t enforce the protective statute, anyway. In a memo issued Friday, the acting attorney general’s chief of staff directed the agency’s Civil Rights Division to dismiss several FACE Act cases against anti-abortion protesters, claiming that the act embodied the “weaponization of the federal government.” The department also ceased future prosecutions under the statute, except under “extraordinary circumstances,” such as death, “serious bodily harm, or serious property damage.”

In the same week, Trump pardoned 23 anti-abortion activists who blockaded the entrance of a Washington clinic in October 2020. They included Lauren Handy, who was arrested in 2022 for retaining five fetuses at her house.

Meanwhile, conservatives are also attacking abortion access through the judicial system: Anti-abortion activists have asked the Supreme Court to overrule Hill v. Colorado, which established a buffer zone around abortion clinics that prevents activists from speaking to patients or distributing anti-abortion materials to them within 100 feet of a facility.

The intention, for Republicans, is clear.

Speaking at the National Mall last week, Vice President JD 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.”

The first foreign leader to visit President Donald Trump at the White House in his second term will be wanted for war crimes.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced Tuesday that Trump will host him at the White House on February 4. Trump had earlier hinted at the announcement on Monday by saying he’ll be “speaking with Bibi Netanyahu in the not too distant future.”

Less than two weeks ago, a ceasefire in Israel’s war in Gaza went into effect. Netanyahu deliberately delayed the ceasefire to be implemented the day before Trump’s inauguration, agreeing to terms with Hamas that were nearly identical to previous ceasefire proposals months before.

Now Trump and Netanyahu will gloat before media cameras and will probably discuss how Trump plans to thank the Israeli leader—perhaps more military aid, a green light for annexing the occupied West Bank, or a revival of the idea to ethnically cleanse Gaza. Trump already lifted the Biden administration’s superficial ban on exporting 2,000-pound bombs to the country last week.

Netanyahu is facing allegations of bribery, fraud, and breach of trust back in Israel, along with an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity. The U.S. under the Biden administration rejected the warrants against Netanyahu and his former defense minister Yoav Gallant, and Trump’s Secretary of State Marco Rubio has similarly defended Israel’s actions during its brutal war against Gaza and condemned the ICC.

Senate Republicans attempted to give Netanyahu a gift on Tuesday by trying to advance a bill sanctioning the ICC, but Senate Democrats (minus John Fetterman) blocked the bill. Regardless, Netanyahu will be able to travel to the White House next week and meet with his corrupt American counterpart worry-free.