AFP USA

As Elon Musk and his aides take control of the US Treasury’s payments system, the drastic job cuts and other shake-ups he instituted on buying Twitter may offer a preview of what government workers can expect.Musk, the world’s richest person, is leading President Donald Trump’s federal cost-cutting efforts under the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).The Treasury’s closely guarded payments system handles the money flow of the US government, including $6 trillion annually for Social Security, Medicare, federal salaries, and other critical payments.Ryan Mac, co-author of the recently released book “Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter,” told AFP what the tycoon’s involvement could mean for massive federal agencies.Q: What did Musk make of Twitter?A: “Elon Musk saw Twitter as a bloated company that was being mismanaged. He fashioned himself as a great cost cutter.”He has done this for years at Tesla and SpaceX. That is the same principle he applied after buying Twitter.”Now, we are seeing the impacts of that. More than 80 percent of the company has departed, been laid off or fired.”Costs have been severely reduced, in turn that’s also reduced revenue – that side of the business has been hammered. He’s taking those same tactics to the US government.”- Is Musk stripping funds? “In the same way that Musk has zeroed out budgets at Twitter, he is doing the same with whatever federal agency he is taking an interest in.”They take a contract or expenditure down to zero, then the employee overseeing it has to argue why it’s necessary.”They reassemble the budget based on that and, hopefully, have been able to find some efficiencies or things that could have been cut.”That is something we saw at Twitter that’s now being deployed in the federal government.”We’re seeing the same names of characters, people like Steve Davis who is Elon’s right-hand man that came in to Twitter to slash costs. He’s now part of the DOGE effort with the federal government.”Will engineers rule?”We’ll start to see a heavy reliance on engineers. Elon is driven by this idea that engineers should be the decision makers; everyone else should either help them build or get out of their way.”That’s why you’re starting to see these young engineers coming to these agencies overseeing stuff.”I also expect to see burnout and people that initially sign on to work with him at DOGE start to fall out along the way. That’s a natural attrition you get with working with someone as intense as him. People no longer see eye-to-eye or get tired of the pace and leave or get fired.”Is Musk’s rule illegal?”Elon’s view on laws are they are something that can be challenged. He has this way of thinking called ‘going to first principles.’ If you tell him he can’t do something, he will ask why.”I think you are starting to see a little shift in his strategy. The ‘Fork in the Road’ email is similar to an email he sent out at Twitter after his takeover. At Twitter Elon asked workers who wanted to stay for hard core devotion to their jobs.”With the federal government, you have to opt in to resign. He has learned from his past mistake.”Did cuts break Twitter?”There were some outages, and the crash on X when Ron DeSantis announced his run for president was quite embarrassing.”X has remained online for the most part, and Elon sees that as a big win. We can talk about the cratering of revenue at X, but the site has been online, and he’ll take that as a victory.”But, the federal government is not something you can just slash willy nilly and put things back in place if it doesn’t work. People will get hurt along the way. What happens when you slash Social Security or Medicare too far? Whatever federal payment gets cut off, reassembling that is not as simple as turning on a server again or rehiring the person you just fired. “He has not built up these federal bureaucracies. Now he’s coming in and trying to fly the airplane and change the engine in mid-flight.”

US President Donald Trump on Tuesday signed an executive order withdrawing Washington from a number of United Nations bodies, including its Human Rights Council (UNHRC), and setting up a broader review of US funding for the multilateral organization.The executive order said it withdrew Washington from UNHRC and the main UN relief agency for Palestinians (UNRWA), and would review involvement in the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). The moves were made in protest against what White House staff secretary Will Scharf described as “anti-American bias” at the UN agencies.The 47 members of the UN Human Rights Council are elected by the General Assembly to three-year terms, with the United States ending its latest term on December 31. It currently has observer status at the body.Tuesday’s order would appear to end all US participation in the council’s activities, which include reviews of countries’ human rights records and specific allegations of rights abuses. “More generally, the executive order calls for review of American involvement and funding in the UN in light of the wild disparities and levels of funding among different countries,” said Scharf.Trump highlighted the “tremendous potential” of the UN but said it is “not being well run.””It should be funded by everybody, but we’re disproportionate, as we always seem to be,” he said.Trump has long railed against Washington’s levels of funding of multilateral bodies, calling for other countries to increase their contributions, notably at military alliance NATO.UNRWA is the chief aid agency for Palestinians, with many of the 1.9 million people displaced by the war in Gaza dependent on its deliveries for survival.Under Trump, Washington has backed a move by Israel to ban the agency, after the US ally accused UNRWA of spreading hate material.US funding of UNRWA was halted in January 2024 by the administration of then-president Joe Biden after Israel accused 12 of its employees of involvement in Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack.A series of probes found some “neutrality related issues” at UNRWA, but found no evidence for Israel’s chief allegations, and most other donors that had similarly suspended funding resumed their financial support. Earlier in his latest term, Trump also withdrew from the Paris climate accord and began withdrawing from the World Health Organization, of which it is the largest donor.Each of the withdrawals has been a repeat of the Republican billionaire’s first term in office, which ended in 2021.

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Tuesday lashed out at authoritarian left-wing regimes in Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela, accusing them of being “enemies of humanity” and of causing a regional migration crisis.Rubio is on the third leg of a visit to Latin America, his first foreign tour as the top US diplomat, which has focused largely on stemming migration to the United States.”Those three regimes that exist in Nicaragua, Venezuela and Cuba are enemies of humanity and they have created a migration crisis. If it were not for these three regimes there would not be a migration crisis in the (Western) hemisphere,” Rubio told reporters in Costa Rica.”They have created it because they are countries whose systems do not work,” Rubio, the son of Cuban migrants, said in Spanish.He took particular aim at Nicaragua, where parliament last approved a constitutional amendment giving President Daniel Ortega, a one-time guerrilla, and his wife Rosario Murillo control of all state powers.”In the case of Nicaragua, it’s turned into a family dynasty with a co-presidency where they’ve basically tried to eliminate the Catholic Church and the religious community, and anyone who tries to take power from that regime is punished,” Rubio said.”We’ve seen thousands and thousands of Nicaraguans who are fleeing that system for the same reason people are leaving Cuba or Venezuela,” he added.Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel was among the first regional leaders to react.Writing on X, he said Rubio’s remarks were proof of the “shamelessness” of US politicians and blamed his country’s outflow of migrants on the more-than-six-decade US trade embargo on the communist island.”It is proven that the migration exodus in Cuba is proportional to the tightening of the blockade, which deprives our people of essential goods,” Diaz-Canel wrote.”Humanity is endangered by your neofascism,” he added.Rubio left Costa Rica for Guatemala on Tuesday, after earlier visits to Panama and El Salvador.In a stunning move, El Salvador’s iron-fisted leader Nayib Bukele offered to jail US citizen convicts in a mega-prison for gang members opened two years ago on the edge of a jungle.Rubio thanked him profusely for the offer and said that Bukele was also willing to accept deported gang members from other Latin America countries, including Venezuela.

US President Donald Trump on Tuesday said Palestinians would “love” to leave their embattled homeland in Gaza and live elsewhere if given an option.They would “love to leave Gaza,” he told reporters as he signed a raft of initiatives at the White House. “I would think that they would be thrilled.””I don’t know how they could want to stay. It’s a demolition site,” he said, more than 15 months after US ally Israel launched a punishing invasion of the territory in retaliation for attacks launched by Palestinian militant group Hamas. Trump spoke as he was due to meet with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to discuss the truce with Hamas. He is likely to urge his ally to stick to the deal, parts of which have yet to be finalized. Trump has previously touted a plan to “clean out” Gaza, calling for Palestinians to move to Egypt or Jordan.Both countries have flatly rejected this, and on Tuesday their leaders stressed “the need to commit to the united Arab position” that would help achieve peace, according to the Egyptian presidency.”Well they may have said that, but a lot of people have said things to me,” Trump told the journalists at the White House Tuesday. Gazans have also denounced Trump’s idea, with residents in the southern city of Rafah telling AFP “we will not leave.”But Trump appeared undettered. “If we could find the right piece of land, or numerous pieces of land, and build them some really nice places, there’s plenty of money in the area for sure, I think that would be a lot better than going back to Gaza, which has had just decades and decades of death,” he said. When a reporter pressed him on where such places might be, he suggested they could be in Jordan, Egypt or “other places. You could have more than two.””You’d have people living in a place that could be very beautiful, and safe and nice. Gaza’s been a disaster for decades.”When another journalist asked if the United States would pay for such a move, he said that there were “plenty of people that would in the area, they have a lot of money,” and citing Saudi Arabia as one example. “They have no alternative right now,” he added, when an AFP journalist asked if such a move would amount to forcibly displacing Palestinians. “They’re there because they have no alternative. What do they have? It is a big pile of rubble right now…. I would think that they would be thrilled to do it.””I think they’d love to leave Gaza,” he said. “What is Gaza?”He said he did “not necessarily” support Israelis moving into the area instead.”I just support cleaning it up and doing something with it. But it’s failed for many decades. And somebody will be sitting here in ten years or 20 years from now and they’ll be going through the same stuff.” 

US President Donald Trump’s embattled health secretary pick, vaccine conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy Jr, squeaked through a crucial vote in his confirmation bid on Tuesday as senators advanced his nomination to the floor. With Republicans having a one-seat advantage on the Senate Finance Committee, Kennedy’s future hinged on Bill Cassidy, a physician who has clashed with the former Democrat over unfounded claims linking vaccines to autism.But Cassidy backed Kennedy after the 71-year-old environmental lawyer — and nephew of former president John F. Kennedy — was given a vote of confidence from Trump, who urged support for the man whom just nine months ago he was calling “one of the most Liberal Lunatics ever to run for office.””20 years ago, Autism in children was 1 in 10,000. NOW IT’S 1 in 34. WOW! Something’s really wrong. We need BOBBY!!!” Trump posted on his Truth Social platform ahead of the vote. Cassidy is a rare occasional rebel in the Republican ranks but faces reelection next year in Louisiana and risked picking up a challenger from the Republican Party’s Trumpist far right if he upset the president.Kennedy’s nomination has faced myriad concerns from both parties, with Republicans particularly eying his past support for abortion, his record suing big business as an environmental lawyer and his 2023 run for president as a Democrat.Beyond vaccines, Democrats point mainly to sexual misconduct allegations, Kennedy’s suggestion that Covid-19 was designed to spare Jews, his linking of school shootings to antidepressants and his alleged mistreatment of animal corpses.The New York Post, a reliably Trump-supporting newspaper, wrote a scathing editorial arguing that there was “too much wackiness” in Kennedy’s background to trust him with America’s health.- Iron grip -And Elizabeth Warren, the vice chair of the Senate Democrats, called Kennedy an “anti-science conspiracy peddler who is willing to gamble with American lives,” urging senators to reject the nomination.The Senate can confirm nominees without a committee’s endorsement, but Republican Majority Leader John Thune had cast doubt on how likely this was.That raised the stakes for Tulsi Gabbard — another conspiracy theorist with a long record of publicly opposing US national security policy, including siding with its adversaries — who scraped through her own key vote.Like Kennedy, 43-year-old Gabbard was running the gauntlet of a party-line vote and just a single Republican no would have sunk her chances of endorsement by the Senate Intelligence Committee.  But Susan Collins, Todd Young and Jerry Moran — considered the swing votes — all lined up behind the Hawaiian US Army Reserve officer, clearing her path to the Senate floor by nine votes to eight.Collins said the one-time lawmaker — like Kennedy, a former Democrat who once ran for president — had addressed her concerns over her past support for pardoning NSA leaker Edward Snowden.Success for Kennedy and Gabbard, two of the least experienced nominees in modern history, would be another powerful demonstration of Trump’s iron grip on his party, days after controversial Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s confirmation.The Senate confirmed former congressman Doug Collins — no relation of the senator — as secretary of Veterans Affairs on Tuesday, a day after approving fracking executive Chris Wright to lead the Energy Department.Pam Bondi is expected to be confirmed as attorney general in the early hours of Wednesday, replacing fellow Floridian Trump loyalist Matt Gaetz, who was the president’s first choice.Gaetz, who withdrew amid allegations of drug abuse and sex with an underage girl that he denies, is looking set to be the only Trump nominee whose Cabinet ambitions will have been derailed in Congress.

Nine FBI agents sued the US Justice Department on Tuesday seeking to block its efforts to collect information on agents involved in investigating President Donald Trump and the January 6, 2021 Capitol riot by his supporters.The FBI agents who filed the complaint against Trump’s acting attorney general, James McHenry, were not identified for their own protection in the complaint filed in a federal district court in Washington.The lawsuit follows reports that acting deputy attorney general Emil Bove, Trump’s former personal lawyer, had asked FBI employees to respond by Tuesday to a questionnaire outlining the work they did on the sprawling Capitol riot investigation.Trump, on his first day in the White House, pardoned more than 1,500 of his supporters who stormed Congress on January 6, 2021, in a bid to block the certification of Democrat Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory.In their complaint, the FBI agents said the effort to collect information on employees who participated in the Capitol riot investigation was part of a “purge” orchestrated by Trump as “politically motivated retribution.””This directive is unlawful and retaliatory,” they said in asking a federal judge to block the compilation of a list of FBI employees who worked on the Capitol riot cases and the case brought against then-former-president Trump for stashing top secret documents at his Mar-a-Lago home in Florida.The FBI agents noted that the Justice Department had fired a number of officials last week who were involved in the prosecutions of Trump for seeking to overturn the 2020 election results and the documents case.Both cases were dismissed after Trump won the presidency.- ‘Danger of retribution’ -The FBI agents said they had been instructed to fill out a survey that would “identify their specific role in the Jan. 6 and Mar-a-Lago cases.””Plaintiffs assert that the purpose for this list is to identify agents to be terminated or to suffer other adverse employment action,” they said.They expressed fears the list could be published by Trump allies, “placing themselves and their families in immediate danger of retribution by the now pardoned and at-large Jan. 6 convicted felons.”The nine FBI agents said they represent at least 6,000 current or former FBI employees who participated in some manner in the investigation of “crimes and abuses of power by Donald Trump, or by those acting at his behest.”A copy of the questionnaire sent to FBI employees was attached to the complaint.It asks them whether they took part in any arrests, evidence collection, witness interviews or other activities related to the Capitol riot probe.FBI director Christopher Wray resigned following Trump’s reelection and the president has named Kash Patel, a staunch loyalist, to head the top US law enforcement agency.Patel, at his Senate confirmation hearing, was asked if he was aware of any plans to punish FBI agents who were involved in the investigations of Trump.”I am not aware of that,” he said.Patel also told the Senate Judiciary Committee that “all FBI employees will be protected against political retribution.”

A former Donald Trump aide who once called for “competent white men” to be “in charge” and spread conspiracy theories about the 2021 US Capitol assault has been given a top State Department post, an official said.Darren Beattie, an influential figure in Trump’s “Make America Great Again” movement and founder of the right-wing “Revolver News” site, has been named acting under secretary for public diplomacy and public affairs, a US official told AFP on Tuesday, speaking on condition of anonymity.The role is responsible for developing the public image of American diplomacy around the world.The appointment has not yet been publicly announced, but Beattie — who also reportedly has ties with white supremacists — said he would be joining the State Department in a letter published on Revolver News.The publication has repeatedly pushed the idea that the FBI spurred on the January 6, 2021 assault on the US Capitol by Trump’s supporters.”Rest assured, Revolver will continue to provide the fearless, cutting-edge, America First reporting that our readers expect and deserve,” his letter said.Beattie previously worked as a speechwriter for Trump during his first term, but he left the administration in 2018 after US media revealed he had attended a conference two years earlier where white supremacists were present.Reports of his latest appointment have sparked outrage among many, particularly over an October 4, 2024 post on X, in which he wrote: “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.”

US President Donald Trump’s administration is moving to roll back protections for endangered species and their habitats in a bid to advance his “drill, baby, drill” energy agenda.A directive signed late Monday by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum gives agencies 15 days to submit plans to unleash US energy, which critics say would weaken the Endangered Species Act and open up fragile landscapes from the Arctic to the Grand Canyon and even national monuments for exploitation.”Today marks the beginning of an exciting chapter for the Department of the Interior,” said Burgum, whose close ties to the fossil fuel industry drew sharp rebuke from environmentalists during his confirmation hearings.”We are committed to working collaboratively to unlock America’s full potential in energy dominance and economic development to make life more affordable for every American family while showing the world the power of America’s natural resources and innovation.”The order aims to reverse bans on drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and offshore waters, sweeping restrictions imposed by former president Joe Biden. It also seeks to rescind a rule that reinstated long-standing protections for birds against unintentional but preventable deaths caused by oil spills, mining pits, and building collisions.Remarkably, it contains a directive to review safeguards for all national monuments — a list of 138 historic landmarks that include sites such as Bears Ears in Utah, which was proclaimed by former president Barack Obama before Trump ordered its size to be reduced by 85 percent during his first term.Environmental groups warn the move would accelerate the decline of animal and plant species.- Birds and lizards threatened -“Even as imperiled species dwindle and vanish across America, this order will fan the flames of the extinction crisis,” said Noah Greenwald of the Center for Biological Diversity.Taylor McKinnon, who oversees the Center’s Southwest region, went further: “By making all national monuments available for review and possible termination, this order could be the most sweeping attack on public lands in the history of public lands.”Since its 1973 enactment, the Endangered Species Act has been credited with saving iconic species such as the gray wolf, bald eagle and grizzly bear from extinction.But under Trump’s first administration, key provisions were weakened — allowing economic considerations to influence decisions on species protections. Biden later rolled back those changes, and now Trump is pushing to reinstate them.Greenwald told AFP that species like the greater sage grouse, lesser prairie chicken, and sagebrush lizard — whose habitats overlap with the Greater Permian Basin, the nation’s top oil-producing and fracking site — would be at heightened risk.”Donald Trump made it clear on Day One what his priorities for public lands and waters would be, and these orders are the next step in his reckless ‘drill, baby, drill’ agenda,” said Athan Manuel, director of the Sierra Club’s Lands Protection Program.

The United States has frozen its financial contributions to a multinational security support mission in Haiti, a United Nations spokesperson said on Tuesday, a move that would stop $13.3 million in pending aid.”We received an official notification from the US asking for an immediate stop work order on their contribution to the multinational security support force,” said Stephane Dujarric, the UN secretary-general’s spokesperson, referring to the already underfunded Kenya-led force.The UN Security Council gave the green light in October 2023 to the Multinational Security Support (MSS) mission designed to support Haiti’s authorities in their fight against criminal gangs, which control swaths of the country.Washington’s funding freeze comes as part of newly elected President Donald Trump’s push to slash US overseas aid, a drive that has included an effort to shutter the operations of the government’s main aid agency, USAID.In late January, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned that Haiti’s capital could become overrun by gangs if the international community does not step up aid to the security mission.More money, equipment and personnel are needed for the international force, Guterres said, adding that any further delays risk the “catastrophic” collapse of Haiti’s security institutions and “could allow gangs to overrun the entire metropolitan area” of the capital Port-au-Prince.Haiti’s Foreign Minister Jean-Victor Harvel Jean-Baptiste, speaking at a meeting of the UN Security Council, has said that the country faced “major difficulties” that threaten not just the population but also “the very survival of the state.” The MSS is not a UN force, but the UN has set up a voluntary fund to finance it, which has raised $110 million to date, an amount that has been deemed largely insufficient.Just under 800 of the 2,500 security personnel hoped for have been deployed.The United States had committed $15 million to the fund — the second-largest contribution, after Canada’s $63 million — with $1.7 million already disbursed.Haiti currently has no president or parliament and is ruled by a transitional body, which is struggling to manage extreme violence linked to criminal gangs, poverty and other challenges.More than 5,626 people were killed in Haiti last year as a result of gang violence, about a thousand more than in 2023, the UN said. More than a million Haitians have been forced to flee their homes, three times as many as a year ago.

The first US flights carrying detained migrants to America’s notorious Guantanamo military base in Cuba were underway Tuesday as President Donald Trump’s administration cracks down on illegal migration, the White House said.Guantanamo is primarily known as a detention center for suspects accused of terrorism-related offenses, but the base also has a history of being used to hold migrants, and Trump last week ordered the preparation of a 30,000-person “migrant facility” there.”Today, the first flights from the United States to Guantanamo Bay with illegal migrants are underway,” Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said on Fox Business.Trump has launched what his second administration is casting as a major effort to combat illegal migration, trumpeting immigration raids, arrests and deportations on military aircraft.The president has made the issue a priority on the international stage as well, threatening Colombia with sanctions and massive tariffs for turning back two planeloads of deportees.The Guantanamo prison was opened in the wake of the 9/11 attacks and has been used to indefinitely hold detainees seized during the wars and other operations that followed. The conditions there have prompted consistent outcry from rights groups, and UN experts have condemned it as a site of “unparalleled notoriety.”- ‘Perfect place’ -Democratic presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden both sought to close the facility, but Congress has opposed efforts to shutter Guantanamo and it remains open to this day.It still holds 15 people incarcerated for militant activity or terrorism-related offenses, among them several accused plotters of the 9/11 attacks, including self-proclaimed mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.But migrants will be detained in a separate part of the base.According to US Southern Command, there are some 300 American military personnel at Guantanamo supporting “illegal alien holding operations.”The base has for decades been used to hold Caribbean asylum seekers and refugees caught at sea, and was used in the 1990s to house tens of thousands of Haitians and Cubans who fled crises in their homelands.They were accommodated in tent cities, with many eventually sent home after being held at Guantanamo for years.Thousands of undocumented migrants have been arrested since Trump’s January 20 inauguration, including some accused of crimes.An unknown number have been repatriated to Colombia, Mexico, Guatemala, Brazil and other countries, and Trump has vowed to expel millions.US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Monday described Guantanamo as the “perfect place” to detain migrants as he visited the border with Mexico — an area where the Trump administration has boosted the country’s military presence in recent weeks.The Pentagon will provide any necessary assets “to support the expulsion and detention of those in our country illegally,” Hegseth said.