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Nearly 40% of contracts canceled by Doge are expected to produce no savings

This report is from the Associated Press.

Some 40% of the federal contracts that the Trump administration claims to have canceled as part of its signature cost-cutting program aren’t expected to save the government any money, the administration’s own data shows.

Elon Musk’s so-called “department of government efficiency” last week published an initial list of 1,125 contracts that it terminated in recent weeks across the federal government. Data published on Doge’s “wall of receipts” shows that more than one-third of the contract cancellations, 417 in all, are expected to yield no savings.

That’s usually because the total value of the contracts has already been fully obligated, which means the government has a legal requirement to spend the funds for the goods or services it purchased and in many cases has already done so.

Dozens of them were for already-paid subscriptions to the AP, Politico and other media services that the administration said it would discontinue. Others were for research studies that have been awarded, training that has taken place, software that has been purchased and interns that have come and gone.

An administration official said it made sense to cancel contracts that are seen as potential dead weight, even if the moves do not yield any savings. The official was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.

You can read the full story here.

Donald Trump is scheduled to sign yet more executive orders in the Oval Office at 3pm ET today, according to the White House.

It did not specify how many orders would be signed or what topics they would address.

Since taking office last month Trump has signed 73 executive orders, according to the Office of the Federal Register – that’s more than any president since FDR in 1937.

‘He believes he is the law’: anti-Maga conservatives view Trump as threat to constitution

Michael Fanone attends a House hearing in Washington DC on 13 October 2022. He spoke at this year’s Principles First summit. Photograph: Will Oliver/EPA

Michael Fanone, the former police officer who defended the US Capitol on 6 January 2021, looked out at the attendees of the Principles First summit and denounced Donald Trump in the strongest possible terms for pardoning roughly 1,500 people who participated in the insurrection.

“He pardoned them because he wants people to know that if you commit crimes on his behalf, he’s got your back,” Fanone said on Saturday. “They are operating under the assumption that, if they commit violent criminal acts on Donald Trump’s behalf, that he will pardon them for future violence.”

Fanone’s words appeared prescient later that afternoon, when he and three other officers were confronted by Enrique Tarrio, the former leader of the far-right Proud Boys group. Tarrio received a prison sentence of 22 years for seditious conspiracy and other charges related to his role in the insurrection, but Trump pardoned him last month. In a video that Tarrio shared on social media, he taunted Fanone and the other officers – Daniel Hodges of the Metropolitan police department and former Capitol police officers Aquilino Gonell and Harry Dunn – as “fucking cowards”.

You can read the full report here:

Norwegian Refugee Council to suspend ’lifesaving’ aid after US funding freeze

One of Europe’s largest humanitarian organisations announced on Tuesday that it would have to suspend “lifesaving” US-funded aid in 21 countries this week.

The Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC), said in a statement that the crisis was triggered by the US government’s “continued failure to issue outstanding payments for completed and ongoing authorised work”,

Donald Trump has ordered the suspension of foreign assistance and called for the closure of the United States Agency for International Development (USAid), which distributes US humanitarian aid globally, Agence France-Presse reports.

The organisation said it had $20 million in outstanding requests to the United States, which had already been spent on “21 countries affected by wars, disasters, and displacement”.

The NRC said the funding situation had “created a liquidity crisis” that the organisation “can no longer absorb”, and that it would have to lay off aid workers.

Suspended projects include bakeries providing daily bread to people in Sudan, water and sanitation support in Sudan and the DRC, and emergency shelter and support for cyclone-affected families in Mozambique.

The NRC said it would suspend these programmes on 28 February, and called on the US government to release outstanding payments and “lift all stop work orders to best ensure lifesaving assistance is able to continue”.

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio previously announced waivers for lifesaving humanitarian programmes, but NRC said “neither funding nor communication on when money will be transferred has since been received”.

A Trump administration move to suspend funding to the World Health Organization has frozen $46 million for its operations in Gaza, a top WHO official said on Tuesday.

Dr Rik Peeperkorn, the WHO representative for Occupied Palestinian Territories, said the freezing would leave six areas underfunded, including Emergency Medical Teams (EMT) operations, rehabilitation of health facilities, coordination with partner organisations and medical evacuations.

Kremlin says Russia has rare earth metals the US needs and is open to cooperation

The Kremlin said on Tuesday that Russia had lots of rare earth metal deposits and that it was open to doing deals to develop them after President Vladimir Putin held out the possibility of such collaboration with the United States.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said:

The Americans need rare earth metals. We have a lot of them.
We have our own plans to develop strategic resources, but there are quite broad prospects for cooperation here.

Putin told state TV on Monday that Russia was open to joint projects with American partners - including government and the private sector - under a future Russia-US economic deal, Reuters reports.

Russian president Vladimir Putin said Russia was open to projects with US partners. Photograph: Mikhail Metzel/AP

US president Donald Trump has pledged that “major economic development transactions with Russia” would take place.

Peskov said there was still a lot of work to be done to normalise relations between Moscow and Washington before any economic deals could be struck.

“Next on the agenda is the issue of resolving the Ukrainian crisis”, he said. “And then, especially since the Americans themselves have also spoken about it, it will be time to consider possible projects related to trade, economic and investment cooperation.”

Peskov added: “When there comes, let’s say, a moment of political will, we will be open to this (cooperation on rare earth metals),”

Former defense secretary Chuck Hagel and other former US national security officials on Tuesday warned that China was outpacing the US in critical technology fields and urged Congress to increase funding for federal scientific research.

The appeal comes a week after the National Science Foundation (NSF), which funds science research, fired 170 people in response to President Donald Trump’s order to reduce the federal workforce.

An NSF spokesman declined to comment on reports that hundreds more layoffs were possible and that the agency’s budget could be slashed by billions.

The ex-officials want Congress to provide at least $16 billion authorised for the NSF in the fiscal year 2025, according to a letter seen by Reuters which was addressed to Trump, Senate Majority Leader John Thune, and Mike Johnson, speaker of the US House of Representatives.

“China is making significant strategic investments in basic and applied research and positioning the country to outpace us in critical areas that could determine the outcome of future conflicts,” the letter said. “This is a race that we cannot afford to lose.”

Amid pushback, Musk threatens federal workers with sacking if they fail to reply to email

Hello and welcome to our rolling US politics coverage:

The fallout from Musk’s demand for government workers to justify their work in a bullet-point list continues.

The US Office of Personnel Management (OPM), which manages the federal workforce, walked back on an ultimatum issued by Elon Musk at the weekend that would have forced its workers to resign if they did not submit the requested list of their recent accomplishments.

It marks one of the first signs of internal pushback to the Tesla billionaire’s campaign to downsize the federal workforce.

The OPM announced that responding to Musk’s email was not mandatory and that failing to respond by midnight on Monday would not be considered a resignation, as Musk had warned.

Musk, however, continued to insist that workers will be expected to respond or they would lose their jobs.

“Subject to the discretion of the president, they will be given another chance. Failure to respond a second time will result in termination,” Musk said on Monday afternoon.

Earlier in the day Donald Trump had spoken in support of the demand

“By asking the question, tell us what you did this week, what he’s doing is saying, are you actually working?” the president said.

But the ultimatum had already run into resistance with the FBI, the state department and the Pentagon among the agencies instructing employees not to answer the message. Other department heads advised staff to comply, while some told workers to wait for further guidance before responding.

Attorneys for federal workers said in a lawsuit Musk had violated the law with his weekend demand. An updated lawsuit, which was filed in federal court in California and was provided to the Associated Press, is trying to block mass layoffs.

In other developments:

• Donald Trump said Vladimir Putin would accept European peacekeepers in Ukraine as part of a potential deal to end the three-year war. Trump was speaking alongside French president Emmanuel Macron at the White House as the leaders sought to smooth over a transatlantic rift to achieve peace.

• The Trump-Macron meeting came as the US voted against a United Nations resolution condemning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, siding with countries such as North Korea, Belarus and Sudan over European allies.

• Trump said the US and Ukraine are “very close” to coming to terms on a rare earth minerals agreement, in comments made during a visit from French president Emmanuel Macron amid European concerns over the US position on Ukraine.

• A federal judge on Monday denied a request by the Associated Press to immediately restore full access to presidential events for the news agency’s journalists, but said the issue required more exploration before ruling. The Trump administration barred the outlet earlier this month for continuing to refer to the Gulf of Mexico in its coverage after the president renamed it the “Gulf of America”.

• A federal judge has blocked the government downsizing team Doge from accessing sensitive data maintained by the US education department and the US office of personnel management. US district judge Deborah Boardman in Greenbelt, Maryland issued the temporary restraining order at the behest of a coalition of labour unions.

• A federal judge has extended protections for trans women in prison. The judge, who blocked the Federal Bureau of Prisons from carrying out Donald Trump’s executive order that would have transferred three incarcerated trans women into men’s facilities earlier this month, has extended protections for nine additional women.

• A federal judge blocked immigration agents from conducting enforcement operations in houses of worship for some religious groups, the Associated Press reported. US district judge Theodore Chang found that the Trump administration policy could violate their religious freedom and should be blocked while a lawsuit challenging it plays out.

• Former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy has launched his campaign for Ohio governor.