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Today’s edition is meant to help you grasp the monumental task Republicans have ahead of them if their goal is to ensure that President Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s deep cuts to the federal government can be codified in Congress. Behind the scenes, a lot of lawmakers are skeptical about their ability to turn the administration’s chaotic belligerence into the concrete of legislation. (I got the details on some heated pushback to DOGE during a recent closed-door meeting.) In addition, the House has already skipped town, but don’t expect a lot of town hall meetings in GOP-held districts. They’ve quickly learned that the best way to avoid bad headlines is to just plug their ears and close their eyes. Lastly, an update on the government funding deadline, and how Democrats are hoping to save face (good luck, folks). All that and more, below.
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In a closed-door meeting last Thursday with USAID Deputy Administrator–designate Pete Marocco, Sen. Pete Ricketts (R-Neb.) pushed back on some of the Trump administration’s claims about USAID’s work. The senator’s focus was on one claim specifically: the idea, pushed by Marocco, that less than a third of the budget for the global anti-AIDS program PEPFAR was going to life-saving care. Marocco, speaking with a group of senators, payments USAID was withholding from grantees, saying he had determined that a good chunk of what PEPFAR was doing was not actually “life-saving.” The lawmakers gathered there wanted to know if the deputy administrator–designate even knew if things are or are not working.
“PEPFAR is a program that is recognized for doing a lot of good,” Ricketts told me on Tuesday. “We’re in a phase of just pausing everything. There’s always gonna be opportunities to improve programs. I don’t think that means we’re necessarily gonna get rid of them.”
As for his back-and-forth with Marocco, which was detailed in a readout of the meeting obtained by The Bulwark, a spokesman for Ricketts did not respond to a request for comment.
But the pushback Marocco received foreshadowed a larger reality: The prospect of ending these far-reaching programs—like PEPFAR and, on a much larger scale, the foreign aid administered by the USAID—remains distant. Beyond that, DOGE’s haphazard cuts are difficult to codify because they have a weak legal foundation and are hard to explain, let alone justify (hence the repeat un-firings)...
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