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Defense secretary Hegseth bans recruitment of troops with gender dysphoria, pauses gender-affirming care
Defense secretary Pete Hegseth has ordered military branches not to accept recruits with gender dysphoria, and to pause gender-affirming care for service members, Reuters reports.
The decision by the newly installed Pentagon chief is the latest attempt by the Trump administration to curtail transgender rights, but does allow soldiers with gender dysphoria to continue serving.
“Effective immediately, all new accessions for individuals with a history of gender dysphoria are paused, and all unscheduled, scheduled, or planned medical procedures associated with affirming or facilitating a gender transition for Service members are paused,” Hegseth wrote in a memo to defense department leaders. “Individuals with gender dysphoria have volunteered to serve our country and will be treated with dignity and respect.”
By way of justification, Hegseth wrote:
The Department must ensure it is building “One Force” without subgroups defined by anything other than ability or mission adherence. Efforts to split our troops along lines of identity weaken our Force and make us vulnerable. Such efforts must not be tolerated or accommodated.
The decision appears to line up with an executive order Donald Trump signed a week after taking office:
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Democratic-led states sue Trump administration over plan to slash medical research funding
Twenty-two Democratic state attorneys general have sued the Trump administration over a plan that would dramatically cut medical research funding for hospitals, universities and other research facilities.
The lawsuit came after the National Institutes of Health announced it would cap at 15% the amount of each grant that could be spent on costs associated with medical research, staff, equipment and building-related costs.
The lawsuit filed in federal court in Massachusetts argues the new policy would threaten research and run afoul of pre-existing agreements.
“We will not allow the Trump Administration to unlawfully undermine our economy, hamstring our competitiveness, or play politics with our public health,” said Andrea Joy Campbell, Massachusetts’s attorney general, who is leading the suit along with top prosecutors from Michigan and Illinois. States including California, North Carolina and Wisconsin have also signed on.
Here’s more about the funding cuts:
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Elon Musk responded in typical fashion to the criticism levelled by five former treasury secretaries against the meddling done by his “department of government efficiency” in its payment systems:
Listen Larry, we need to stop government spending like a drunken sailor on fraud & waste or America is gonna go bankrupt. That does mean a lot of grifters will lose their grift and complain loudly about it. Too bad. Deal with it.
That was on X, naturally, to Larry Summers, who served as treasury secretary under Bill Clinton.
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Updated at 17.40 GMT
Top Senate Democrat announces plan to ‘fight back’ against Trump administration
Democratic Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer has debuted steps the party will take to hold the Trump administration accountable, including holding independent hearings into its policies and leveraging their influence in government spending negotiations.
“Senate Democrats have a responsibility to fight back on behalf of American families as Republicans look the other way in obedience to Donald Trump. And we are,” Schumer wrote in a letter to Democratic senators.
His plan has four planks, the first being so-called “spotlight” hearings in which Democrats will highlight the harm done by Trump’s policies. These will likely be Democrat-only events that will lack the subpoena power of typical committee hearings, since the party is presently in the minority in the Senate:
Senate Democrats are prepared to hold independent “spotlight” hearings to expose the rampant wrongdoing of the Trump Administration – wrongdoing that our Republican counterparts, for the time being, refuse to acknowledge. These hearings will shed light on the harm inflicted by Trump’s policies on the American people while applying public pressure on Congressional Republicans to answer for their unwavering complicity.
Schumer also encouraged lawmakers to work with state attorneys general and other groups that are suing the Trump administration:
Our committees and my office are in regular communication with litigants across the country, including plaintiffs, and are actively exploring opportunities for the Democratic Caucus to file amici curiae that support their lawsuits. I encourage you to meet with your constituents and relay their stories to your state Attorneys General, highlighting how the lawless actions from the Trump Administration are harming their communities. This information will be invaluable as the AGs and advocates continue developing their cases.
And told senators to do lots of public outreach:
Through a relentless messaging push, we are exposing how their policies will drive up everyday expenses, strip essential protections, and prioritize the wealthy over working Americans.
Perhaps the biggest news here is Schumer’s allusion to the government funding negotiations that will need to reach an agreement soon, if a shutdown is to be avoided in early March. The Senate filibuster gives the party some leverage in preventing legislation Democrats disapprove of from passing, and Schumer makes clear they are willing to use it:
Democrats stand ready to support legislation that will prevent a government shutdown. Congressional Republicans, despite their bluster, know full well that governing requires bipartisan negotiation and cooperation. Of course, legislation in the Senate requires 60 votes and Senate Democrats will use our votes to help steady the ship for the American people in these turbulent times. It is incumbent on responsible Republicans to get serious and work in a bipartisan fashion to avoid a Trump Shutdown.
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Trump rules out Palestinian return to Gaza under US takeover plan
Donald Trump has said Palestinians will not be able to return to Gaza, if his plan for the United States to take control of the territory comes to fruition.
The comment came in an interview with Fox News, and is the latest controversial aspect of his plan for deeper American involvement in one of the longest running conflicts in the Middle East. We have a live blog covering the latest on the crisis in the region, and you can follow it here:
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Democratic congresswoman Val Hoyle says she has quit the congressional caucus supporting Elon Musk’s “department of government efficiency” (Doge) over what she describes as its destructive assault on core government functions.
“As the legislative branch, we came here to be good stewards of taxpayer dollars, to make good policy, and, again, work in good faith to find efficiencies, whether that’s investing in IT or, you know, combining agencies or departments, you know, making sure we don’t have too much bureaucracy,” Hoyle told CNN.
“But fundamentally, you can’t do that while government is being blown up from the inside. And let’s be clear, Donald Trump and Elon Musk have a different mission. They say it’s about efficiency and saving taxpayer dollars. It isn’t. It’s about intimidating workers, breaking our government and installing loyalists that are loyal to Donald Trump and Elon Musk, and not to the American people or the constitution.”
Only a handful of Democrats joined the Doge caucus, with most saying they were doing so because of their support for reforming aspects of the federal government’s operations.
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Updated at 16.23 GMT
House Democrats have announced the creation of a “Rapid Response Task Force and Litigation Working Group” to handle their counterattack to the Trump administration’s efforts to transform the federal government.
“We are engaged in a multifaceted struggle to protect and defend everyday Americans from the harm being inflicted by this administration. As outlined last week, it’s an all hands on deck effort simultaneously underway in Congress, the Courts and the Community,” Democratic minority leader Hakeem Jeffries wrote in a letter to colleagues.
Congressman Joe Neguse will chair the effort, along with representatives Rosa DeLauro, Gerry Connolly and Jamie Raskin as co-chairs.
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Former treasury secretaries warn of risks from Doge’s access of payment system
Five former secretaries of the treasury warn that by accessing the department’s secure payment system, the Donald Trump-sanctioned “department of government efficiency” (Doge) is putting Americans’ privacy at risk.
Writing in the New York Times, the five former secretaries, all of whom served under Democratic presidents, say that foreign actors could benefit from any data breaches that result from Doge’s meddling. Here’s what they wrote:
The nation’s payment system has historically been operated by a very small group of nonpartisan career civil servants. In recent days, that norm has been upended, and the roles of these nonpartisan officials have been compromised by political actors from the so-called Department of Government Efficiency. One has been appointed fiscal assistant secretary — a post that for the prior eight decades had been reserved exclusively for civil servants to ensure impartiality and public confidence in the handling and payment of federal funds.
These political actors have not been subject to the same rigorous ethics rules as civil servants, and one has explicitly retained his role in a private company, creating at best the appearance of financial conflicts of interest. They lack training and experience to handle private, personal data — like Social Security numbers and bank account information. Their power subjects America’s payments system and the highly sensitive data within it to the risk of exposure, potentially to our adversaries. And our critical infrastructure is at risk of failure if the code that underwrites it is not handled with due care. That is why a federal judge this past weekend blocked, at least temporarily, these individuals from the Treasury’s payments system, noting the risk of “irreparable harm.”
They also note that the Trump administration’s efforts to unilaterally prevent the Treasury from disbursing government funds are unconstitutional. “The Trump administration may seek to change the law and alter what spending Congress appropriates, as administrations before it have done as well. And should the law change, it will be the role of the executive branch to execute those changes. But it is not for the Treasury Department or the administration to decide which of our congressionally approved commitments to fulfill and which to cast aside,” the former secretaries write.
Here’s more about Doge’s activities at the Treasury department, and the concerns they have created:
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Updated at 15.47 GMT
Third federal judge rules against Trump birthright citizenship ban
A federal judge has found Donald Trump’s attempt to ban birthright citizenship for undocumented immigrants unconstitutional, in the third such setback for the order, the Associated Press reports.
The ban was among the executive orders Trump signed on his first day in office, but has been losing in court ever since. Today’s ruling comes from a US district court judge in New Hampshire, and follows similar decisions by judges in Seattle and Maryland. The Trump administration is appealing the Seattle judge’s ruling.
Here’s more on the attempted ban, and its poor showing (thus far) in courtrooms nationwide:
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Here’s more on the Trump administration’s legal offensive against the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which is being headed up by an architect of Project 2025 who is now a top White House official:
Russell Vought, Donald Trump’s newly installed acting head of the US Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, announced on Saturday he had cut off the agency’s budget and reportedly instructed staff to suspend all activities including the supervision of companies overseen by the agency.
Reuters and NBC News reported that Vought wrote a memo to employees saying he had taken on the role of acting head of the agency, an independent watchdog that was founded in 2011 as an arm of the Federal Reserve to promote fairness in the financial sector.
Vought, who was confirmed on a party line vote last week to lead the office of management and budget, also announced on Saturday evening on Elon Musk’s social media platform X that he was zeroing out the CFPB’s funding for the next fiscal quarter, saying the more than $700m in cash on hand was sufficient.
In his Saturday missive, Vought ordered staff to “cease all supervision and examination activity”, going a step further than a directive issued last week by the treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, whom Trump had briefly put in charge after firing Rohit Chopra.
According to an internal email obtained by Reuters, the Washington CFPB headquarters will be closed for the coming week and all employees are to work remotely.
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