"Trump plans to sabotage the midterms, so we're going to need a plan to stop him"

As soon as he took office again, Trump started signaling that he intends to interfere with the midterms. There are too many examples to cover everything, so here are some of the lowlights from just the last year:             

March 2025: An executive order trying to unilaterally overhaul election administration.

July 2025: Ordered Texas to gerrymander five new Republican House seats.

August 2025: An executive order to "get rid of" mail-in ballots ahead of the midterms.

January 2026: Told the House GOP "they should cancel the election.” He regretted not seizing the voting machines after 2020, and then later that month he sent goons to raid Fulton County's election hub.

February 2026: Said Republicans should "nationalize" elections. The next day Steve Bannon said, "You're damn right we're gonna have ICE surround the polls come November," and urged Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act.

March 2026: Issues an executive order to create state-by-state citizen lists and orders USPS to deliver mail ballots only to federally approved names. Installed election denier Dan Bishop to run DOJ's "election-integrity" efforts.

April 2026: Supreme Court guts the Voting Rights Act, paving the way for racial gerrymanders in former Confederate states. Trump team threatens to force blue states to redraw their own maps.

June 2026: Raided the Cleveland offices of the Ohio Organizing Collaborative, a voter-registration nonprofit.

Even as he meets resistance from the courts and some blue states, he's clearly not backing down. So what's our plan?

We need to get into election protection formation -- let’s talk about how. For the last 75 weeks or so, Leah and I have hosted What's the Plan, our live Q&A with the Indivisible movement. It’s a unique space: thousands of people from across the country and the world, together every week, working through the strategy and tactics of organizing against fascism. When we’re at our best, we’re cutting through the noise, demystifying some process or institution, and focusing on what we all can actually do.

If Indivisibles are going to plan together for how we organize in defense of the midterms, the place to have that conversation is What’s the Plan. We don’t want to shortchange the big topic, so this week we’re trying something a bit different. This Thursday at 3pm ET, we'll be joined by Corey Dukes from Protect Democracy, an ally in this fight.

We're asking you to do a few minutes of pre-reading so the discussion is as fruitful as possible.

We're inviting you to submit a question ahead of time here. I’ll go through all these Wednesday night to help us steer the conversation before turning it over to live Q&A.

If we pull this off, you'll come away with a better understanding of how this sabotage threat actually works, and the steps you and your local group can take to blunt it. 

As a movement, we have to learn, grow, and act together, so I hope you can join us Thursday (or catch the podcast Friday!). But whatever your schedule, there are plenty of ways this week to organize your community in defense of democracy -- read on!

In solidarity,
Ezra Levin
Co-Executive Director, Indivisible

 

Birthright Citizenship

 

When the Supreme Court issues its decision in the birthright citizenship case, likely this week, the odds are that it will be a loss for the Trump administration. The Court heard argument in U.S. v. Barbara on April 1, 2026. The issue is whether Executive Order 14160, “Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship,” can end birthright citizenship.

Trump’s effort to rewrite the Constitution is blatantly illegal. Doing that takes a constitutional amendment, not a presidential whim. 

And while there may be a vote or two for the administration’s theory that the birthright citizenship provision and accompanying laws don’t mean what they plainly say, it seems more likely, following oral argument, that there are at least six votes for the noncontroversial legal view that the 14th Amendment means what it has been understood to say for over one hundred years—people born in the United States are entitled to U.S. citizenship, with rare exceptions for situations like the children of diplomats.

If you want a refresher on the issues in this case, find it here.

So don’t be surprised and pleased when the Court rules against Trump on this one. It won’t be remarkable. It won’t be a signal that the Court is finally getting tough with the executive branch. This is, put simply, a case that would not have happened in any other administration, because no other president would have attempted such a boldly illegal approach to changing the Constitution. Rejecting Trump’s effort to circumvent the law is a low bar for the Supreme Court to clear.

We saw a better example of this Court’s view of executive branch power last week when it agreed to let the administration end temporary protected status (TPS) for approximately 336,000 people who are legally present in this country because of natural disasters in their home countries—Haitians who came here following earthquakes and hurricanes, or Syrians who came due to armed conflict in their country. The Trump administration suddenly terminated their permission to remain in the country in mid-2025.

In a 6-3 decision authored by Justice Alito, with a majority that included Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who has two adopted children from Haiti, the Court held that the courts can’t review a president’s decisions about TPS. In other words, Trump can do whatever he wants to these people, and the courts can’t stay his hand.

Creator: Lynne Sladky | Credit: AP

The only exception, according to the Court, is for constitutional claims. There was a claim here that the decisions were impermissibly race-based: TPS was terminated for Haitians, Syrians, Venezuelans, Hondurans, and Nicaraguans. The majority’s willingness to ignore evidence that the administration’s decision was based on race was so transparently in contravention of the facts that it suggests the exception for constitutional claims exists on paper, but this Supreme Court will never give it any weight. Justice Alito held that so long as a race-neutral explanation for the government’s action exists, no matter how much evidence of racial animus is otherwise involved, a plaintiff is unlikely to succeed on constitutional claims.

The part of the TPS case that’s most worth reading is Justice Kagan’s dissent. She started out by noting that the countries the administration says it’s safe for people to be forced to return to “continue to be unsafe.” Justice Kagan wrote, “Secretaries [of State] have repeatedly examined the conditions in the two countries and have repeatedly determined that they remain too dangerous to permit safe return.” 

But Kristi Noem suddenly decided they were safe. When the case was brought, lower courts ruled in favor of the TPS holders, finding that Noem likely violated the law when she made her decision “without first consulting with other agencies about current country conditions.” Kagan writes, later in her dissent, that “Haiti and Syria are countries that the State Department continues to list as too dangerous for travel; they may be yet more perilous for a former inhabitant.”

But it was the argument about race and the Haitian plaintiffs that revealed the conservative majority’s willingness to tolerate the unacceptable. Justice Kagan was joined by Justices Sotomayor and Jackson in calling it “plain to see” that race was involved in the decision to terminate the TPS designation for Haiti. Kagan wrote that “the evidence is there, plain to see, in the President’s statements, which the majority (and for that matter, his own lawyers) cannot even bear to repeat.” Ouch.

The legal standard for what the plaintiffs have to prove is taken from a 1977 case, Arlington Heights v. Metropolitan Housing Development Corp. They must show that “a racially ‘discriminatory purpose’ was ‘a motivating factor’ in the termination of Haiti’s TPS designation.” That means “One factor among many is enough when the factor is racial to presumptively establish an equal protection violation.” That means the administration’s decision to terminate TPS should be evaluated in light of “‘circumstantial and direct evidence of intent’ that is available,” as well as “‘[t]he historical background of the decision’; the ‘sequence of events leading up’ to it; and, most relevant here, ‘contemporary statements’ by decisionmakers.” That is the well-established legal standard that the majority purported to apply.

Justice Kagan takes the majority to task, writing that: “The evidence they [the Haitian TPS holders] have offered includes statements by the President so repellent and racially inflected that the majority declines to put them in print. (Indeed, one measure of the President’s way of speaking about Haitians is to compare it with the majority’s, which is unfailingly respectful.)” She then recites the comments the majority declined to include:

“Haitians are ‘eating the dogs . . . . They’re eating the cats. They’re eating—they’re eating the pets of the people that live [in Springfield, Ohio].’”

“Haitians in the United States ‘probably have AIDS.’”

“Haiti is a ‘shithole country,’ which is ‘filthy, dirty, [and] disgusting.’”

“Haitian immigration is ‘like a death wish for our country.’”

“Haitians, along with some others, are ‘poisoning the blood’ of our country.”

She concludes with an example of Trump saying, “Why is it we only take people from shithole countries” like “Haiti [and] Somalia”? “Why cannot we have some people from Norway [and] Sweden?”

Kagan assesses the majority’s view of Trump’s comments like this: “The majority briefly replies that those remarks are not ‘overtly racial,’ … but it is hard to know what that means.” Then, she reaches the only conclusion possible on these facts: “Haitians are Black. (Norwegians and Swedes not so much.) The references—of filth, disease, and primitiveness—are shot through with racial stereotypes and tropes. It is hard to imagine the statements being made today of any White community.” It’s not a pretty bottom line, but it’s honest.

It’s hard to refute Kagan’s challenge to the majority: “The statements fairly shout, in their racial undertones and overtones alike, that race entered into the President’s resolve to remove Haitians from this country.” But six conservative Justices chose to ignore them in order to give still more power to a president who has shown a willingness to abuse it and a carelessness about how his decisions affect not only immigrants, but American citizens.

This isn’t just a case about laws and legal standards. It’s a case about people, about individuals and their futures. Kagan makes this clear as well, writing about one of the plaintiffs that “Fritz Emmanuel Lesly Miot is a Haitian national who has held TPS for fifteen years. He lives in California where he works in a laboratory researching Alzheimer’s, a job he can hold only because of his TPS work authorization. Miot suffers from Type 1 diabetes, which is easily treated in the United States. But in Haiti, the same disease can be a death sentence, given that country’s collapsed health-care infrastructure.”

Kagan concludes that the plaintiffs “deserve better than today’s decision.” When the Court rules that Trump can’t rewrite the rules for birthright citizenship, do not clap. Remember Mr. Miot, and what he will face. Remember others with TPS, who are all here legally, with permission, performing important work in our economy. 

Shortly after the administration ended TPS, Senator Elizabeth Warren wrote that “This mass de-legalization has left various segments of the American workforce, from health care to construction to hospitality, without the workers they depend on. Notably, the termination of TPS for Haiti — scheduled for February 3, 2026 — threatens to seriously disrupt the health care, senior care, and disability care workforce.”

Who wins here? Perhaps it’s Stephen Miller, who will gain an estimated 1.3 million people he can tack on as statistics to support the success of his mass deportation master plan. It’s hard to see who else these benefits. These people are not violent criminals, who the administration promised us it would deport. These are hardworking people who are making important contributions that benefit Americans, people who have broken no laws, who only ask to be permitted to remain in this country so they can raise their claims in court and have them heard.

Some decisions are wrong from the start. Like Dred Scott, which denied former slaves' citizenship, or Korematsu, which allowed the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. This case will join them in a Supreme Court walk of shame.

Thanks for being here with me at Civil Discourse. Your support makes it possible for me to do deep dives into cases like this, so we understand what’s really happening at the Supreme Court, not just how the headlines read. If you’re not already a paid subscriber, click on the subscribe button below and join our community.

We’re in this together,

Joyce Vance

 

Healthcare Fraud

 

Federal prosecutors charged 455 people, including 90 doctors and other licensed medical professionals, in a nationwide crackdown on schemes that allegedly billed Medicare, Medicaid, and other health programs for more than $6.5 billion in false claims. 

The 2026 National Health Care Fraud Takedown stretched across dozens of federal districts and targeted a range of fraud types, from amniotic wound allograft billing to pill-mill operations and sham mental-health services. The sheer scale of the alleged losses, and the direct involvement of credentialed providers, raises hard questions about how deeply fraud networks have penetrated the health care system.

Why $6.5 billion in alleged fraud demands attention right now: The dollar figures in this takedown are not spread thin across hundreds of small cases. They are concentrated in a handful of districts where prosecutors allege that specific procedure types, particularly amniotic wound allografts, drove enormous billing volumes. 

In Arizona alone, charges involved over $1.2 billion in false or fraudulent claims, with allegations of kickbacks, bribes, and sham invoicing designed to inflate reimbursements for products applied to elderly and hospice patients. In the Southern District of Texas, nine defendants faced charges tied to an alleged $906 million allograft scheme in which a nurse practitioner and clinic managers allegedly created fake patient records to justify billing.

That pattern suggests a clear enforcement signal. The districts that filed the largest individual loss amounts also show the highest concentration of allograft-related charges. Arizona and Southern Texas together account for more than $2 billion of the $6.5 billion total, and both center on allograft fraud. If procedure type is functioning as a leading indicator for enforcement targeting, providers billing heavily for wound allografts in other states should expect increased scrutiny from federal investigators and CMS program-integrity teams in the months ahead.

Licensed professionals at the center of the alleged schemes: The Justice Department announced that 90 of the 455 defendants held medical licenses, a figure that includes doctors, nurse practitioners, and other credentialed professionals. 

Their alleged roles went beyond passive participation. In Texas, prosecutors described clinic managers and a nurse practitioner who allegedly generated fabricated records to support Medicaid mental-health billing and pill-mill prescriptions alongside the allograft scheme. Separate charging documents in the Southern District of Texas outlined how defendants allegedly used shell entities and falsified documentation to conceal the scope of their billing activity.

The single largest case by alleged loss amount landed in the Eastern District of New York. Dubbed “Operation Gold Rush,” the indictment charged 11 defendants in a multi-billion-dollar fraud and money laundering scheme affecting Medicare, Medicaid, and private insurers. Prosecutors called it the largest case by loss amount ever charged by the Department of Justice. The case included an international dimension, with apprehensions reported in Estonia, illustrating how fraud networks can operate across borders while exploiting American health programs.

The fraud was not limited to massive schemes. In Minnesota, 15 defendants faced charges for over $90 million in alleged Medicaid provider fraud. Across the Southern District of Florida, prosecutors highlighted transnational activity and laundering tied to durable medical equipment, home health services, and telemedicine orders. Smaller districts reported cases involving allegedly unnecessary genetic tests, forged prior authorizations, and billing for counseling sessions that never occurred. Taken together, the filings show how both large and mid-sized operations can drain public health programs when internal controls and external oversight fail.

What the takedown reveals about enforcement priorities: The 2026 operation underscores several enforcement priorities that health care organizations should not ignore. 

First, investigators are clearly focused on high-reimbursement niche products such as amniotic wound allografts, where complex coding rules and limited clinical familiarity can mask abusive billing. 

Second, prosecutors are increasingly framing cases around alleged kickback and referral arrangements, not just false claims, signaling a broader view of corrupt financial relationships as a gateway to fraud.

Third, the prominence of licensed professionals in the charging documents shows that credentials are no shield. When physicians or nurse practitioners allegedly lend their names to sham clinics, sign off on medically unnecessary procedures, or delegate prescribing authority to non-qualified staff, they become central to the government’s narrative of intentional fraud. That emphasis is likely to reverberate through state licensing boards, malpractice insurers, and hospital credentialing committees, which may respond with tighter oversight of practice patterns and ownership interests.

Implications for health systems and policymakers

For hospitals, group practices, and ancillary providers, the takedown is a warning to reassess internal compliance programs. High-volume billing in specialized product lines, especially where third-party marketing companies or distributors are involved, will attract attention. Robust pre-billing review, independent medical-necessity audits, and clear documentation standards are now essential risk controls rather than optional best practices.

For policymakers, the cases highlight structural vulnerabilities in federal and state health programs. Complex reimbursement formulas, fragmented data systems, and uneven state-level enforcement create openings that sophisticated actors can exploit. Strengthening real-time claims analytics, harmonizing state and federal data sharing, and investing in specialized fraud units focused on emerging therapies and devices may be necessary to keep pace with evolving schemes.

The 2026 National Health Care Fraud Takedown is not just a snapshot of alleged wrongdoing; it is a roadmap of where enforcement is headed. Providers whose business models rely on aggressive use of high-margin products, loosely supervised telehealth arrangements, or volume-based mental-health billing should assume their claims data will be scrutinized. As these cases move through the courts, they are likely to shape future regulations, compliance expectations, and, ultimately, how trust is rebuilt between health care professionals, patients, and the public programs that fund so much of American care.

The post How did 455 people allegedly drain $6.5 billion from Medicare and Medicaid? Federal prosecutors say doctors and nurses were in on the schemes appeared first on The Financial Wire.

 

Trump Quips He’s ‘Very Disappointed’ He Wasn’t Mentioned in Declaration of Independence Alongside God!

 

“The very first settlers who set foot upon this new world at Jamestown got off their ship, raised up a cross, and bowed down to the Lord in prayer. It was faith that strengthened the Minutemen who stood up at Lexington Green and Concord Bridge and Philadelphia. 250 years ago next week, our founders invoked the Creator four times in the Declaration of Independence. Four times. I wasn’t mentioned once. I’m very upset. Not once!

“Faith pushed the pioneers to journey west. Faith led Americans to abolish slavery, and faith built this country into the most exceptional nation in the history of the world. It was going very badly a couple of years ago, very badly, but it’s back really strong, but we have to be very careful because bad things are happening. I watch what’s happening and we’re gonna be discussing that in just a minute.

“Americans have always deeply believed in the promise of Christ’s words and the gospel of Matthew. 'With God, all things are possible,' right? All things. That’s why as we prepare to enter the 250th year, last month, tens of thousands of patriots came together on our National Mall, and we officially rededicated America as 'One Nation Under God,' and we’re not changing.” -DJ Trump

-Kathryn Wilkens, NewsBreak

An Australian's Response to a Trump Rant

 

Mate. You run a country with 600,000 homeless people sleeping on the street tonight. A country where 40% of adults can't cover a $400 emergency without borrowing money. A country where insulin costs more than a car payment and people are rationing it to survive. A country where medical debt is the number 1 cause of bankruptcy. A country where women are dying in hospital car parks because doctors are too scared of abortion laws to treat a miscarriage.

You lock up more of your own citizens than any nation on earth. More than China. More than Russia. More than North Korea. The land of the free has 2 million people in cages, and a quarter of them haven't even been convicted of anything. They're just too poor to make bail.

Your life expectancy is going backwards. You're the only developed nation where that's happening. Your infant mortality rate is worse than Cuba's. Your kids do active shooter drills between math and English while you sell the gunmaker's stock to your mates.

Your minimum wage hasn't moved in 15 years. You've got teachers working 2 jobs and veterans sleeping under bridges and you just spent a trillion dollars flattening a country that didn't attack you. And you’ve got a convicted felon, adjudicating raping, pedophile protecting, porn star shagging insurrectionist running the biggest dumpster fire war campaign since the Taliban thanked you very much for losing again.

And you're calling Greenland poorly run? Greenland has universal healthcare. Free education. One of the lowest incarceration rates in the world. Nobody goes bankrupt there because they got sick. Nobody dies in a waiting room because their insurance said no.

'NATO wasn't there when we needed them." When exactly was that champ? September 11? Because NATO invoked Article 5 for the first and only time in history FOR YOU. Soldiers from dozens of countries deployed, fought, bled, and died in Afghanistan FOR YOU. Australia wasn't even in NATO and we still showed up. For 20 years.

And you pulled out at 2am without telling anyone and left them to deal with the mess. So maybe before you start calling other countries poorly run, have a look at your own backyard, you spray-tanned aluminum siding salesman. The only thing poorly run in this picture is your f------ mouth.

-Bob Ferguson 

Israel continues to commit genocide by deliberately targeting Palestinian children in Gaza, an ⁠independent UN inquiry has found

 

The report by the UN independent international commission of inquiry examined violations against Palestinian children since the start of the war in Gaza and said about 30% of the people killed by Israeli forces have been children. A previous report by the commission in September found Israel had committed genocide in Gaza and that Israeli officials, including the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, incited these acts. Netanyahu is separately wanted by the international criminal court for war crimes.

What does the report say? That Palestinian children were deliberately targeted and killed during the ‌war, including after a ceasefire came into effect ‌in October 2025. “The evidence shows that Palestinian children have been deliberately targeted and killed by the Israeli security forces,” Srinivasan Muralidhar, the commission’s chair, said in a statement accompanying the report. How has Israel’s government reacted? The Israeli mission in Geneva said Israel rejected the commission’s “libelous sham”. The country has fought hard against allegations of genocide, while receiving critical diplomatic support from its allies including the US and the UK. What about legal and rights experts? A significant body of research has concluded that Israel is intent on destroying Palestinians, including analyses by UN investigators, rights bodies such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, and genocide scholars worldwide.

-The Guardian

“A Huge Grab of Power”: Trump Is Defying Congress on Foreign Aid

 

After the Trump administration upended the world’s largest foreign aid provider last year, terminating thousands of programs and firing nearly all of its staff, its plan for the agency was clear: Eliminate it entirely.

But because it is a congressionally created agency, President Donald Trump needed lawmakers’ permission to do so. So, this year, Trump officials asked Congress for permission to shutter the U.S. Agency for International Development and dramatically reduce federal spending on food, medicine and lifesaving work around the world. 

Congress said no. Lawmakers, who hold the government’s purse strings and have oversight of federal agencies, wanted USAID to remain, even in its diminished form. They detailed precisely how much the State Department should spend on foreign aid and for what, including $9.4 billion on global health to treat and prevent maladies like HIV, tuberculosis and malaria, and more than $5 billion on emergency humanitarian aid. They also insisted on regular, detailed reports about how the administration was spending the money. 

Trump signed the bill, enshrining their orders into law.

Now, eight months into the fiscal year, Trump officials are failing to follow many of those orders, ProPublica has found. Officials have delayed spending on global health, have not issued funds for some projects and have labeled money destined for humanitarian aid as “unallocated” to control how it can be spent, according to a ProPublica review of government records and interviews with legal experts, current and former government employees, and members of Congress. And when lawmakers have asked about their actions, officials often have not responded.

Nowhere has that crisis been more visible than with foreign aid. Last year, the administration took the unprecedented step of gutting USAID, terminating thousands of aid programs and letting funding expire, all without permission from Congress. Lawmakers did little to stop it.

Now, in defying Congress on foreign aid that Trump himself agreed to spend, the administration is quietly escalating the battle. “It is a huge grab of power from the president, taking powers away from Congress,” said David Super, a professor of law and economics at Georgetown University and a leading scholar on administrative and constitutional law.

USAID was created by Congress decades ago as a means of promoting American diplomacy and soft power around the world. As ProPublica previously reported, when Trump officials dismantled the agency last year, stopping payments on thousands of lifesaving programs that provided food, medicine and other supplies to impoverished nations, many people died, including children. Even with USAID in shambles, Congress has made clear that it expects the administration to continue providing foreign aid — in some cases, at nearly the level it did in previous years.

“It’s proof that there is still broad, bipartisan support for America showing up in the world, helping people and working with our allies and partners on shared challenges, not just because it’s the right thing to do, but because it directly benefits us,” said Sen. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, the ranking member of the Senate committee with oversight of foreign aid funds. Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., the committee’s chair, did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

But the administration has taken a variety of steps to thwart Congress’ directives. The Office of Management and Budget, run by Russell Vought, was instrumental in blocking the spending of aid money last year. This year, it has labeled both humanitarian aid and global health money as “unallocated,” meaning the OMB must approve how it is spent.

Legal scholars say such moves, and the delayed spending by the State Department, likely violate the law. Foreign aid is a prime example of why Congress made it illegal for administrations and agencies to slow-walk such funds, said Bobby Kogan, an OMB adviser under former President Joe Biden currently with the Center for American Progress. “If you spend no money for a year and all the clinics close, then those people die,” he said.

The State Department has made little effort to spend some foreign aid money that Congress earmarked for specific purposes, including family planning, neglected diseases and nutrition, according to government staff and budget documents.  And programs have been given fewer dollars, even when Congress has kept funding steady. That includes the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, the hallmark HIV program credited with saving 26 million lives around the world. 

Administration officials are also spending on foreign aid at a much slower rate than they had in recent years, according to an analysis of federal funding data shared with ProPublica by Aid on the Hill, an advocacy group created by former USAID employees, although the State Department disputes its conclusions. Another group published a similar analysis last week.

Where Trump officials have made plans to spend funds, it’s often spurred outrage. Under the new America First Global Health Strategy, Trump officials are signing bilateral deals with poor countries, asking for access to health data as a condition for receiving lifesaving medications the U.S. once donated. 

Jeremy Lewin, a 29-year-old lawyer who came into government via Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency with no prior humanitarian experience, is in charge of foreign aid. He has said that this new strategy will not only save countless lives but also reform the aid sector and reduce dependence on U.S. funding.

Since last July, Lewin has been “performing the duties” of undersecretary for foreign assistance and humanitarian affairs, a position that must be approved by Congress, though the administration has yet to nominate him or anyone else to the job.  But he rarely, if ever, meets with career staff and doesn’t share information about his plans, even with the people who are expected to carry them out, according to six current and former career officials. Lewin insists that he approve even routine payments, creating a stranglehold on funding and information. 

And all the while, Trump appointees have failed to answer basic questions from Congress about what they are doing. Letters from lawmakers have gone unanswered and required reports unfiled. 

To understand the administration’s compliance with congressional mandates and federal law, ProPublica reviewed administration documents, including agreements, memos, and internal communications, and spoke with dozens of current and former government officials, congressional staff, and international experts in global health and humanitarian aid. Many people spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal from the administration. 

In response to a list of detailed questions about the concerns, a State Department spokesperson who declined to be named said they would continue to follow the president’s direction on foreign aid spending. “We are not withholding any funds appropriated to, or available to, State,” they said. “If additional funds are made available to State, we will work to obligate them consistent with legal requirements and Administration priorities.”

They said officials have regularly briefed Congress and that Lewin had recently spent four hours discussing foreign assistance. They also said they have “reduced by 80% the number of outstanding reports and letters” since Trump retook office.  “We are working with Congress to spend appropriated balances and find the right future-appropriated level for global health,” the spokesperson said. 

In response to a series of detailed questions about this story, OMB spokesperson Rachel Cauley said, “This is patently false,” adding that “USAID was a weaponized government agency.” She did not respond to a follow-up question asking what was false.

Spending Less — or Not at All 

After nearly all of USAID’s employees were fired and the majority of its programs closed down last summer, the agency’s remnants were transferred to the State Department. Despite repeated promises from Secretary of State Marco Rubio that lifesaving aid would continue, the State Department began winding down many of the remaining programs earlier this year.

And staff have been working with a severely constricted budget; officials gave them just half of the available money for PEPFAR, said Dr. Mike Reid, who was the program’s chief scientific officer until he left earlier this year over concerns about how the program is being run. Of the $9.4 billion for global health spending for the State Department that Trump signed into law earlier this year, Congress earmarked about $4.6 billion for PEPFAR. But staff say it’s unclear how much of that they will be allowed to spend.

Congress also explicitly directed the State Department to spend pots of money on family planning ($524 million), nutrition ($165 million) and neglected tropical diseases ($109 million), according to the bill. According to a review of government records and two people with knowledge of the department’s activities, State Department officials have made little or no effort to spend from those pots…

For the entire article: Trump Is Defying Congress on Foreign Aid — ProPublica

by Anna Maria Barry-Jester