Latest news with #DOGE-led
Yahoo
12-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Rubio Rejects Gates Plea To Reverse Musk's Foreign Aid Cuts
On June 6, 2025, billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates made a discreet stop at the White House to press Secretary of State Marco Rubio to roll back steep reductions to foreign aid instituted by Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). The cuts—totaling $8–9 billion—hit hard at USAID programs focused on HIV, AIDS, malaria, and other critical health initiatives in Africa. The visit, first reported by veteran political journalist Tara Palmeri in her Red Letter newsletter, came just hours after former President Trump departed for Bedminster. Palmeri noted that Gates was seen entering the Eisenhower Executive Office Building around 4 p.m., reportedly in a last-ditch effort to capitalize on the Trump–Musk political rift, which had spilled into public view days earlier. 'With Musk on the outs, Gates clearly saw an opportunity to argue for the reversal of the DOGE cuts,' Palmeri reported. What did Rubio say? Despite the high-level ask, Rubio held the line. According to Palmeri's sources, Rubio told Gates plainly: 'The country is insolvent. We can't pay back our debts.' A senior State Department official confirmed the meeting and emphasized that Rubio sees no justification for restoring the aid programs Musk dismantled. 'The Secretary's position on making important and necessary cuts to foreign aid has not changed,' the official told the New York Post. 'He does not believe U.S. taxpayers should be burdened with covering the costs for progressive projects abroad, including funding contraceptives, electric buses, and DEI.' Rubio's view reflects the broader Trump-era stance that foreign aid should only fund 'true lifesaving programs' that align with direct U.S. interests. Why it matters now USAID—which once managed over $40 billion and employed more than 10,000 people—has undergone dramatic restructuring. On March 28, the State Department officially shuttered the agency following a court ruling upholding the DOGE-led cuts. As of June 10, Rubio ordered the termination of all remaining overseas USAID staff, fully consolidating aid efforts under State Department control. Humanitarian fallout An analysis from The Times of London estimated that the DOGE cuts could contribute to as many as 300,000 global deaths, with over 200,000 children potentially affected by disruptions to malaria, HIV, and maternal health programs. The figure, based on modeling by Boston University's Brook Nichols, has been widely circulated by global health advocates and activists. But the number remains highly disputed. In testimony before the House Foreign Affairs Committee on May 21, Secretary of State Marco Rubio flatly rejected the claim: 'No one has died because of USAID [cuts],' he said, dismissing the figure as misleading and unsupported by evidence. Rubio and others in the administration argue that much of the spending eliminated had little to do with urgent, lifesaving care and was instead tied to ideological or bureaucratic programs that failed to serve core U.S. interests. Despite the warnings from aid groups, the administration contends that strategic reductions are both fiscally necessary and morally responsible in the context of record federal debt and public skepticism about global spending. What's next? Legal pushback: Multiple lawsuits are challenging the legality of DOGE's actions, including one from a coalition of NGOs and USAID staff arguing the agency's dismantling violates Congressional authority. Legislative efforts: Quiet efforts are underway in the Senate to reauthorize a scaled-down version of USAID's health division, possibly under new branding. Public pressure: Gates is expected to increase visibility around the issue, and has already hinted at launching a global campaign to restore bipartisan support for foreign aid. Bill Gates' private appeal to Secretary Rubio was a high-stakes intervention aimed at stopping what many global health leaders are calling a humanitarian disaster. But the Trump administration, bolstered by Musk's cost-cutting playbook and Rubio's ideological resolve, is signaling no intention to reverse course.
Yahoo
10-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
NOAA firings, cuts will reduce services used to manage Alaska fisheries, officials say
Fishing boats are seen in Kodiak's St. Paul Harbor on Oct. 3, 2022. Deep job cuts at NOAA Fisheries will negatively affect the scientific work normally done to support fishery management, agency officials warned. (Photo by Yereth Rosen/Alaska Beacon) Trump administration job cuts in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration will result in less scientific information that is needed to set and oversee Alaska seafood harvests, agency officials have warned fishery managers. Since January, the Alaska regional office of NOAA Fisheries, also called the National Marine Fisheries Service, has lost 28 employees, about a quarter of its workforce, said Jon Kurland, the agency's Alaska director. 'This, of course, reduces our capacity in a pretty dramatic fashion, including core fishery management functions such as regulatory analysis and development, fishery permitting and quota management, information technology, and operations to support sustainable fisheries,' Kurland told the North Pacific Fishery Management Council on Thursday. NOAA's Alaska Fisheries Science Center, which has labs in Juneau's Auke Bay and Kodiak, among other sites, has lost 51 employees since January, affecting 6% to 30% of its operations, said director Robert Foy, the center's director. That was on top of some job losses and other 'resource limitations' prior to January, Foy said. 'It certainly puts us in a situation where it is clear that we must cancel some of our work,' he told the council. The North Pacific Fishery Management Council, meeting in Newport, Oregon, sets harvest levels and rules for commercial seafood harvests carried out in federal waters off Alaska. The council relies on scientific information from NOAA Fisheries and other government agencies. NOAA has been one of the targets of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, which has been led by billionaire Elon Musk. The DOGE program has summarily fired thousands of employees in various government agencies, in accordance with goals articulated in a preelection report from the conservative Heritage Foundation called Project 2025. NOAA's science-focused operations are criticized in Project 2025. NOAA Fisheries, the National Weather Service and other NOAA divisions 'form a colossal operation that has become one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry and, as such, is harmful to future U.S. prosperity,' the Project 2025 report said. The DOGE-led firings and cuts leave Alaska with notably reduced NOAA Fisheries services, Kurland and Foy told council members. Among the services now compromised is the information technology system that tracks catches during harvest seasons — information used to manage quotas and allocations. 'We really have less than a skeleton crew at this point in our IT shop, so it's a pretty severe constraint,' Kurland said. Also compromised is the Alaska Fisheries Science Center's ability to analyze ages of fish, which spend varying amounts of years growing in the ocean. The ability to gather such demographic information, an important factor used by managers to set harvest levels that are sustainable into the future, is down 40%, Foy said. A lot of the center's salmon research is now on hold as well. For example, work at the Little Port Walter Research Station, the oldest year-round research station in Alaska, is now canceled, Foy said. 'We're talking about the importance of understanding what's happening with salmon in the marine environment and its interaction with ground fish stocks,' he said. Much of the work at Little Port Walter, located about 85 miles south of Juneau, has focused on Chinook salmon and the reasons for run declines, as well as the knowledge needed to carry out U.S.-Canada Pacific Salmon Treaty obligations. As difficult as the losses have been, Kurland and Foy said they are bracing for even more cuts and trying to figure out how to narrow their focus on the top priorities. Despite the challenges, Foy said, the Alaska Fisheries Science Center has managed to cobble together scheduled 2025 fish surveys in the Bering Sea and Gulf of Alaska, which produce the stock information needed to set annual harvest limits. Some of the employees doing that work have been pulled out of other operations to fill in for experienced researchers who have been lost, and data analysis from the fish surveys will be slower, he warned. 'You can't lose 51 people and not have that impact,' he said. It was far from a given that the surveys would happen this year, Foy said. The science center team had to endure a lot of confusion leading up to now, he said. 'We've had staff sitting in airports on Saturdays, not knowing if the contract was done to start a survey on a Monday,' he said. At the same time the Trump administration is making deep cuts to science programs, it also is pushing fishery managers to increase total seafood harvests. President Donald Trump on April 17 issued an executive order called 'Restoring American Seafood Competitiveness' that seeks to overturn 'restrictive catch limits' and 'unburden our commercial fishermen from costly and inefficient regulation.' Federal fishing laws, including the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act, require careful management to keep fisheries sustainable into the future. Unregulated fisheries have collapsed in the past, leading to regional economic disasters. Part of the impetus for the executive order, a senior NOAA official told the council, is the long-term decrease in overall seafood landings. Prior to 2020, about 9.5 billion pounds of seafood was harvested commercially each year, said Sam Rauch, NOAA Fisheries' deputy assistant administrator for regulatory programs. Now that total is down to about 8.5 billion pounds, Rauch said. He acknowledged that the COVID-19 pandemic played a role in the reduction, as did economics. At their Newport meeting, council members raised concerns that the push for increased production might clash with the practices of responsible management, especially if there is less information to prevent overharvesting. Nicole Kimball, a council member and vice president of a trade organization representing seafood processors, cited a 'disconnect' between the goal of increased seafood harvests and the 'drastically lower resources' that managers normally rely upon to ensure harvest sustainability. The typical approach is to be cautious when information is scarce, she noted. 'if we have increased uncertainty — which we'll have with fewer surveys or fewer people on the water — then we usually have more risk, and we account for that by lowering catch,' she said at the meeting. In response, Rauch cited a need to cut government spending in general and NOAA spending in particular. That includes the agency's fishery science work, he said. SUBSCRIBE: GET THE MORNING HEADLINES DELIVERED TO YOUR INBOX 'We have to think about new and different ways to collect the data,' he said. 'The executive order puts a fine point on developing new and innovative but also less expensive ways to collect the science.' Even before this year, he said, NOAA was struggling with the increasing costs of its Alaska fish surveys and facing a need to economize. The agency had already been working on a survey modernization program prior to the second Trump administration. The Alaska portion of the program, announced last year, was intended to redesign fisheries surveys within five years to be more cost-effective and adaptive to changing environmental conditions. Foy, in his testimony to the council, said job and budget cuts will now delay that modernization work. 'I can almost assuredly say that this is no longer a 5-year project but probably moving out and into the 6- or 7-year' range, he told the council. Since Alaska accounts for about 60% of the volume of the nation's commercial seafood catch, it is likely to have a big role in accomplishing the administration's goals for increased production, council members noted. Alaska's total volume has been affected by a variety of forces in recent years. Those include two consecutive years of the Bering Sea snow crab fishery being canceled. That harvest had an allowable catch of 45 million pounds in the 2020-2021 season but wound up drastically reduced in the following year and shot down completely in the 2022-23 and 2023-2024 seasons because of a collapse in the stock. Another factor is the shrinking size of harvested salmon. Last year, Bristol Bay sockeye salmon were measured at the smallest size on record. The total 2024 Alaska salmon harvest of 101.2 million fish, one of the lowest totals in recent years, had a combined weight of about 450 million pounds. Past years with similar sizes harvests by fish numbers yielded higher total weights. The 1987 Alaska salmon harvest of 96.6 million fish weighed a total 508.6 million pounds, while the 1988 Alaska salmon harvest of 100.6 million fish weighed in at 534.5 million pounds, according to the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. SUPPORT: YOU MAKE OUR WORK POSSIBLE
Yahoo
03-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
'Now with reduced staff': Billboard calls out DOGE cuts to Cuyahoga Valley National Park
A national pro-labor organization has placed at least one billboard in the Columbus area targeting the Department of Government Efficiency. The satirical billboard advertising that Cuyahoga Valley National Park will now have fewer rangers because of DOGE-backed cuts to the federal workforce has been spotted near the Scioto Downs Resort and Casino off of Highway 23. More Perfect Union paid for hundreds of billboards in several states, including Ohio, Colorado and Pennsylvania. The executive director of the organization Faiz Shakir recently told GoErie, part of the USA TODAY Network, that staffing cuts to national parks could mean visitors have a less than ideal experience that can include longer wait times. 'My understanding is that some national parks are going to have some reduced staffing. Some people are looking forward to going there with their families and my impression is that this year, sadly, you will have a worse experience because of what Trump and Musk are doing with unnecessary cuts,' Shakir said. Thousands of federal workers have lost their jobs after DOGE-led cuts. The recently formed department was until very recently led by the richest man in the world, Elon Musk. In Cuyahoga Valley National Park, three probationary employees lost their jobs, in addition to a freeze on seasonal hires, according to previous Akron Beacon Journal reporting. The park in northeastern Ohio is the only national park in the Buckeye State. Anna Lynn Winfrey covers the western suburbs for the Columbus Dispatch. She can be reached at awinfrey@ This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: Ohio billboard calls out DOGE cuts to Cuyahoga Valley National Park
Yahoo
02-06-2025
- Automotive
- Yahoo
Tesla Slides After Q1 Miss as Musk Vows to Cut DOGE Time
Tesla (TSLA, Financials) reported weak Q1 results Tuesday, with auto sales down 20% year over year and net income dropping 71%, as CEO Elon Musk said he plans to scale back his role in the Trump administration's government reform program, DOGE, starting in May. Warning! GuruFocus has detected 4 Warning Sign with MS. Revenue fell short of Wall Street expectations, and Tesla shares have now plunged over 40% year to date, according to CNBC. Musk, who created DOGE after backing Donald Trump's 2024 re-election bid with nearly $300 million, said during the earnings call he would reduce his time on federal restructuring from full-time to just a couple of days a week, though he plans to remain involved as long as needed. The company cited external challenges including heightened competition from Chinese EV makers, protests in the U.S. and Europe, and brand headwinds tied to Musk's political affiliations. Protestors have targeted Tesla for its perceived alignment with far-right politics, including Musk's support of Germany's AfD party. Musk claimed without evidence that many protesters were recipients of wasteful largesse. Tesla's auto division generated less revenue than the same quarter last year, while the company's overall market cap has shrunk by around $600 billion since DOGE's inception. Meanwhile, DOGE claims to have cut $160 billion in federal spendingfigures that have been disputed and partially retracted. The administration confirmed that Musk holds a special government employee designation, allowing reduced disclosure obligations. DOGE-led cuts have reportedly affected agencies that regulate Musk's companies, including the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Aviation Administration. Investors will be watching for Tesla's next earnings and further clarification on Musk's future time allocation as he navigates federal duties and a shrinking EV market share. See Tesla's insider trades: This article first appeared on GuruFocus.
Yahoo
02-06-2025
- Automotive
- Yahoo
Tesla Slides After Q1 Miss as Musk Vows to Cut DOGE Time
Tesla (TSLA, Financials) reported weak Q1 results Tuesday, with auto sales down 20% year over year and net income dropping 71%, as CEO Elon Musk said he plans to scale back his role in the Trump administration's government reform program, DOGE, starting in May. Warning! GuruFocus has detected 4 Warning Sign with MS. Revenue fell short of Wall Street expectations, and Tesla shares have now plunged over 40% year to date, according to CNBC. Musk, who created DOGE after backing Donald Trump's 2024 re-election bid with nearly $300 million, said during the earnings call he would reduce his time on federal restructuring from full-time to just a couple of days a week, though he plans to remain involved as long as needed. The company cited external challenges including heightened competition from Chinese EV makers, protests in the U.S. and Europe, and brand headwinds tied to Musk's political affiliations. Protestors have targeted Tesla for its perceived alignment with far-right politics, including Musk's support of Germany's AfD party. Musk claimed without evidence that many protesters were recipients of wasteful largesse. Tesla's auto division generated less revenue than the same quarter last year, while the company's overall market cap has shrunk by around $600 billion since DOGE's inception. Meanwhile, DOGE claims to have cut $160 billion in federal spendingfigures that have been disputed and partially retracted. The administration confirmed that Musk holds a special government employee designation, allowing reduced disclosure obligations. DOGE-led cuts have reportedly affected agencies that regulate Musk's companies, including the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Aviation Administration. Investors will be watching for Tesla's next earnings and further clarification on Musk's future time allocation as he navigates federal duties and a shrinking EV market share. See Tesla's insider trades: This article first appeared on GuruFocus. Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
