Trump to pause Canada tariffs for at least 30 days, Trudeau says – live | Trump administration

Donald Trump’s administration is reportedly turning its sights on the Department of Education. According to a report by the Wall Street Journal, officials are looking at an executive order that could undo the department. The move is part of Elon Musk’s strategy to slash federal agencies as the head of the “department of government efficiency”.

This executive order would reportedly shutter all parts of the agency that aren’t explicitly written into a statute, the Journal reports.

While campaigning for president, Trump said the Department of Education was something he was looking to eliminate. It’s unclear if he’ll be able to do that with an executive order. Much of the department is written into statute, including grants for low-income students and enforcing laws around civil rights and for students with disabilities.

The details of the order and the timing of its release are still up in the air. The White House didn’t respond to request for comment.

In an unusual public letter, Ed Martin, the acting US attorney for the District of Columbia, has warned that his office will prosecute anyone who interferes with the work of Elon Musk’s department of government efficiency” (Doge).

“I recognize that some of the staff at DOGE has been targeted publicly. At this time, I ask that you utilize me and my staff to assist in protecting the DOGE work and the DOGE workers. Any threats, confrontations, or other actions in any way that impact their work may break numerous laws,” Martin wrote in the letter to Musk, which he also posted on X.

“Let me assure you of this: we will pursue any and all legal action against anyone who impedes your work or threatens your people. We will not act like the previous administration who looked the other way as the Antifa and BLM rioters as well as thugs with guns trashed our capital city. We will protect DOGE and other workers no matter what.”

Donald Trump appointed Martin, formerly the chair of Missouri’s Republican party and a promoter of the president’s baseless claims of fraud in the 2020 election, as the top federal prosecutor for Washington DC on an interim basis.

Wired reports that six young men are leading efforts by the “department of government efficiency” (Doge) to access federal government data.

Among them is Edward Coristine, who PBS News just reported relayed the demand that the Small Business Administration open up its systems to Doge. The rest are recent college or high school graduates, Wired reports, who appear to have little of the sort of managerial experience normally required of federal officials. Here’s more:

WIRED has identified six young men – all apparently between the ages of 19 and 24, according to public databases, their online presences, and other records – who have little to no government experience and are now playing critical roles in Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) project, tasked by executive order with “modernizing Federal technology and software to maximize governmental efficiency and productivity.” The engineers all hold nebulous job titles within DOGE, and at least one appears to be working as a volunteer.

The engineers are Akash Bobba, Edward Coristine, Luke Farritor, Gautier Cole Killian, Gavin Kliger, and Ethan Shaotran. None have responded to requests for comment from WIRED. Representatives from OPM, GSA, and DOGE did not respond to requests for comment.

…

Bobba has attended UC Berkeley, where he was in the prestigious Management, Entrepreneurship, and Technology program. According to a copy of his now-deleted LinkedIn obtained by WIRED, Bobba was an investment engineering intern at the Bridgewater Associates hedge fund as of last spring and was previously an intern at both Meta and Palantir. He was a featured guest on a since-deleted podcast with Aman Manazir, an engineer who interviews engineers about how they landed their dream jobs, where he talked about those experiences last June.

Coristine, as WIRED previously reported, appears to have recently graduated from high school and to have been enrolled at Northeastern University. According to a copy of his résumé obtained by WIRED, he spent three months at Neuralink, Musk’s brain-computer interface company, last summer.

Both Bobba and Coristine are listed in internal OPM records reviewed by WIRED as “experts” at OPM, reporting directly to Amanda Scales, its new chief of staff. Scales previously worked on talent for xAI, Musk’s artificial intelligence company, and as part of Uber’s talent acquisition team, per LinkedIn. Employees at GSA tell WIRED that Coristine has appeared on calls where workers were made to go over code they had written and justify their jobs. WIRED previously reported that Coristine was added to a call with GSA staff members using a nongovernment Gmail address. Employees were not given an explanation as to who he was or why he was on the calls.

The federal Small Business Administration has agreed to a request from an official with the “department of government efficiency” (Doge) for “access to all [administration] systems”, PBS News reports.

The request was relayed by Edward Coristine, an official with the initiative chaired by Elon Musk, who asked for details of payment systems and employees, PBS reports.

Doge has been reported to have accessed secure information at USAid and the Treasury department, including a system the government uses to disburse trillions of dollars in payments.

Joan E Greve

Progressives lawmakers are denouncing Elon Musk and his “department of government efficiency” after news broke yesterday that the billionaire’s associates have received access to the federal payment system, potentially exposing the sensitive personal data of millions of Americans.

“Donald Trump has given unprecedented power over the federal government to an unelected, unaccountable billionaire. Elon Musk’s treasury raid jeopardizes Americans’ sensitive information, tax returns, and Medicare and Social Security,” said representative Greg Casar, a Democrat of Texas and chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus.

Casar added, “Progressives will fight this in the courts, on the House floor, and with every tool at our disposal until Elon Musk is out of our government and no longer putting taxpayers, the sick, and the elderly at risk.”

Democratic lawmakers attempted to enter USAid’s Washington DC headquarters this afternoon to meet with employees, but were refused entry.

Senator Chris Van Hollen said they were turned away on the orders of Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” (Doge), which is said to have taken over USAid and other parts of the federal government in a campaign sanctioned by Donald Trump to dramatically shrink the federal government.

“We asked to enter the Aid building, really on behalf of the American people, but to talk to Aid employees, because … there’s been a gag order imposed on Aid employees. So we wanted to learn first-hand what’s happening,” Van Hollen told reporters.

“We were denied entry based on the order that they received from Elon Musk and Doge, which just goes to show that this was an illegal power grab by someone who contributed $267bn to the Trump effort in these elections.”

Van Hollen, who represents Maryland, a state where many employees of USAid and other federal agencies live, said Democrats would go to court to prevent the aid agency from being folded into the state department.

“Trying to shut down an agency which was established under law … that is totally against a variety of statutes, and there will be legal proceedings filed to stop them from essentially undoing Aid,” Van Hollen said. “They want to do that, they come to Congress, they make a proposal, we vote on it. I can assure you that change that they’re trying to do here illegally would not get through the United States Congress.”

Marco Rubio told reporters that he has been named acting director of USAid, and argued that the agency tasked with implementing much of the United States’s foreign aid program would function better under the state department.

“I’m the acting director of USAid. I’ve delegated that authority to someone, but I stay in touch with him,” the secretary of state told reporters during his trip to El Salvador.

He aired his grievances with USAid, whose days as a stand-alone agency appear numbered:

My frustration with USAid goes back to my time in Congress. It’s a completely unresponsive agency. It’s supposed to respond to policy directives at the state department, and it refuses to do so … There are a lot of functions of USAid that are going to continue. They’re going to be part of American foreign policy, but it has to be aligned with American foreign policy. I said very clearly … during my confirmation hearing, that every dollar we spend and every program we fund that will be aligned with the national interest of the United States, and USAid has a history of sort of ignoring that and deciding that there’s somehow a global charity separate from the national interest.

These are taxpayer dollars, and so I’m very troubled by these reports that they’ve been unwilling to cooperate with people who are asking simple questions about, what does this program do? Who gets the money? Who are our contractors? Who’s funded?

The chaos at USAid has prevented a vital tool for monitoring and preventing famines from functioning, the Guardian’s Fred Harter reports:

The system for monitoring global food crises appears to have been suspended after Donald Trump’s executive order froze US foreign aid.

The website for the US-funded famine early warning systems network (Fews Net) was not accessible on Friday. A banner said reports and data were “currently unavailable” without elaborating.

Fews Net is considered the most important tool for judging levels of hunger and preventing deadly famines. Its data helps humanitarian organisations decide how to distribute food aid to tens of millions of people around the world.

The organisations fear suspending Fews Net will put lives at risk when hunger levels are near an all-time high. Parts of war-struck Sudan have tipped into famine, while 2 million people in Myanmar’s Rakhine state are expected to face starvation by the middle of this year.

Charles Kenny, a senior fellow at the Centre for Global Development, said: “Fews Net is a vital live-saving tool. It allows food to be shipped and support to be put in place before a food shortage or crop failure turns into famine.

“Without Fews Net,” he added, “global humanitarian responders will be flying blind, with less advance warning of where famine could strike.”

Elon Musk spent the weekend attacking USAid with posts on X, including by describing the aid administrator as “beyond repair”. Here’s more, from Reuters:

Elon Musk, who is heading Donald Trump’s efforts to shrink the federal government, has said they are working to shut down the foreign aid agency USAid, in a social media discussion on X early on Monday.

The conversation, which included former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy and Republican senator Joni Ernst and Mike Lee, began with Musk saying they were working to shut down the United States Agency for International Development (USAid).

“It’s beyond repair,” Musk said, adding that Trump agreed it should be shut down.

On Sunday, Reuters reported the Trump administration removed two top security officials at USAid during the weekend after they tried to stop representatives from billionaire Musk’s so-called “department of government efficiency”, or Doge, from gaining access to restricted parts of the building, three sources said.

USAid is the world’s largest single donor. In fiscal year 2023, the US disbursed $72bn of assistance worldwide on everything from women’s health in conflict zones to access to clean water, HIV/Aids treatments, energy security and anti-corruption work. It provided 42% of all humanitarian aid tracked by the United Nations in 2024.

The website of USAid appeared to still be offline on Saturday and some users could not access it on Sunday. USAid has a staff of more than 10,000 people.

Donald Trump has agreed to press pause for a month on his plan to impose 25% tariffs on Mexico, after reaching a deal with the country’s president, Claudia Sheinbaum, for her country to deploy troops to its border with the United States. But levies on China and Canada are set to go into force tomorrow, and stock markets have been gyrating all day in advance of what traders view as an unwelcome economic development. Meanwhile, the Trump administration has made plain its intent to merge USAid with the state department under Elon Musk’s supervision, after barring employees from its headquarters today and taking down its website over the weekend. Democrats have cried foul, with one senator vowing to gum up the works in the chamber unless Trump relents.

Here’s what else has happened today so far:

• The Trump administration may today begin using an obscure 18th-century law to deport undocumented migrants without first going through the courts.

• Darren Beattie, a former White House official who wrote, “Competent white men must be in charge if you want things to work,” is reportedly set for a top role at the state department.

• Ontario’s premier has barred government business with US firms, cancelled a contract with Starlink and taken American liquor off the shelves in response to Trump’s tariffs on Canada.

In response to Elon Musk’s Trump-sanctioned meddling in USAid, the Wall Street Journal reports that Democratic senator Brian Schatz has vowed to prevent quick confirmation of the president’s picks for state department roles.

By blocking unanimous consent in the chamber, Schatz will forced Republicans to use floor time to confirm state department nominees, which will delay the passage of legislation.

“I will oppose unanimous consent,” Schatz told the Journal. “I will vote no. I will do maximal delays until this is resolved.”

The Trump administration has put Elon Musk in charge of a potential merger of USAid into the state department, Reuters reports.

Citing a senior White House official, the combination would “significantly reduce the size of the workforce [of USAid] for efficiency purposes”, and the administration plans to soon send formal notification to Congress of the move.

The plans comes as employees of the agency tasked with administering the United State’s foreign aid programs have been locked out of their offices, and the agency’s website has been taken down. Here’s more:

Darren Beattie, a former Trump White House official who was fired for attending a conference with white nationalists, is set to be appointed to a senior state department role, Semafor reports.

The appointment has not yet been made public, but Semafor says secretary Marco Rubio plans to name Beattie as acting undersecretary of state for public diplomacy. Beattie has made a number of controversial statements in public, including comparing “the coordinated efforts of government bureaucrats, NGOs, and the media to oust President Trump” to Western-backed pro-democracy efforts in eastern Europe. Last October, he wrote this on X:

Competent white men must be in charge if you want things to work.

Unfortunately, our entire national ideology is predicated on coddling the feelings of women and minorities, and demoralizing competent white men.

This is far from the first time that Mexico has deployed troops to its borders to stop migrants, at the behest of the United States.

At the start of Joe Biden’s presidency in 2021, Mexico agreed to send soldiers to its southern border stop migrants heading north to the United States. Migrants arrivals in the United States nonetheless surged during Biden’s term, and the issue was successfully used by Donald Trump to win re-election.

This time, Mexico will deploy troops to its northern border with the United States in exchange for a one-month reprieve from Trump’s tariffs. The president has also sent active-duty US soldiers to its side of the border, with the task of stopping migrants. Here’s more on that:

US stock indices have clawed back much of their losses after Donald Trump announced a pause on his plan to impose tariffs on Mexico, while the peso has also rallied.

However, tariffs on Canada and Mexico are still scheduled to go into effect on Tuesday. Our business blog has more:

In a post on X, Mexico’s president Claudia Sheinbaum said that the United States had agreed to take action on preventing guns from flowing into her country.

She added that the countries’ dialogue will focus on “security and trade”. The 25% tariffs that were supposed to begin on Tuesday are now paused for a month from today.