Senate expected to vote on Robert F Kennedy Jr’s bid to be health secretary
The Senate is expected to vote today on the confirmation of Robert F Kennedy Jr – a prominent lawyer and vocal vaccine critic – as the nation’s health secretary, controlling $1.7tn in spending for vaccines, food safety and health insurance programs for roughly half the country.
Despite several Republicans expressing deep skepticism about his views on vaccines, Kennedy is expected to win confirmation.
Writing for CBS News, Kaia Hubbard noted that “Kennedy’s path to confirmation was once considered among the most fragile of president Trump’s nominees,” but the Senate has cleared the final hurdle to a vote on his appointment 53 to 47 along party lines.
Last week Republican Sen Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, despite having expressed doubts about Kennedy Jr’s votes on vaccines, supported the appointment at the committee stage, and Republican Sen Susan Collins from Maine, who has expressed some disquiet about Trump nominations, also vowed to support Kennedy Jr.
During the pandemic, Kennedy Jr, 71, devoted much of his time to a nonprofit that sued vaccine makers and harnessed social media campaigns to erode trust in vaccines as well as the government agencies that promote them. He has said he is “uniquely positioned” to revive trust in public health agencies.
Key events
The Senate is expected to vote on Robert F Kennedy Jr’s nomination to lead the Department of Health and Human Services at 10.30am.
Brooke Rollins, Donald Trump’s nominee as agriculture secretary, will also have her confirmation vote around then.
Both nominees are expected to be confirmed, though in Kennedy’s case, only after substantial controversy.
Nato is testing its ability to rapidly deploy across eastern Europe – without direct US assistance – as Washington shifts its approach toward European defense and the war in Ukraine.
The six-week Steadfast Dart 2025 exercises across Bulgaria, Romania and Greece are taking place as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine approaches the three-year mark. They involve about 10,000 troops from nine nations and represent the largest Nato operation planned this year.
The US absence from the exercises comes as European nations scramble to build greater military self-sufficiency over their concerns about the Trump administration’s commitment to common defence and demands for increased European military spending, the Associated Press reports.
Greek and Spanish marines led Thursday’s military demonstration, an amphibious assault near the central Greek city of Volos, in the first full-scale operational deployment of Nato’s new Allied Reaction Force.
Established last July, the force represents Nato’s latest strategic evolution, designed to deploy at scale within 10 days and combining conventional forces with cyber and space-based technologies.
Trump and Musk’s attack on USAid is causing global chaos. Millions of lives are now at risk
Devi Sridhar
Amid the daily troubling news coming from the United States are the ongoing and increasingly damaging efforts by President Donald Trump, supported by secretary of state Marco Rubio and Elon Musk, to shut down the US Agency for International Development (USAid). Musk has called it a “criminal organization” and said that it was “time for it to die”. The agency website is down, so little official information is available. But in the week since funding to the agency was frozen, and the majority of staff placed on leave, thousands of public health and development programmes worldwide have been thrown into turmoil, and now face an uncertain future.
USAid is the main federal agency that works to provide foreign aid assistance to the poorest countries and people in the world. On Friday, a US judge prevented about 2,000 USAid employees from being placed on leave, and ordered the reinstatement of about 500 more. But Trump and Musk appear to want to move forward with a plan that would see its global workforce reduced from about 10,000 staff and contractors, to just over 600.
It’s hard to overstate how disruptive this has already been to humanitarian work worldwide: most programmes have just been shut overnight with staff laid off, drugs and food left in warehouses, and patients and others not able to access services. The people affected live in some of the most vulnerable countries like Ukraine, Jordan, Ethiopia, Somalia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Afghanistan.
You can read the full opinion piece here:
Donald Trump said he plans to unveil reciprocal tariffs on Thursday but gave no other details, Reuters reports.
“Today is the big one: reciprocal tariffs,” Trump wrote on his social media platform.
Guardian columnist and former economics editor Larry Elliott writes today that Donald Trump sees his trade war as a show of strength, but, in fact, it’s the opposite.
You can read the opinion piece here: Larry Elliot – Donald Trump sees his trade war as a show of strength. In fact, it’s the opposite
A group representing China’s steel industry has warned that a new 25% tariff on imports of the product into the United States would have an “adverse impact” on the sector, Chinese state media reported Thursday.
Donald Trump signed executive orders on Monday slapping new 25% tariffs on steel and aluminium, due to come into effect on 12 March.
“The US move is essentially an act of trade protectionism,” the China Iron and Steel Association (CISA) said in a statement published by state broadcaster CCTV, Agence France-Presse reports. “In the short term, the impact on [China’s] steel exports is limited,” the CISA said in the report.
“But in the long term, the US move could lead other countries to follow suit, thereby reducing [(China’s] steel export competitiveness,” it added.
Despite being the world’s top producer of steel, China last year accounted for only a small proportion of US steel imports.
‘No to ethnic cleansing’: over 350 rabbis sign US ad assailing Trump’s Gaza plan
Maya Yang
More than 350 rabbis, alongside additional signatories including Jewish creatives and activists, have signed an ad in the New York Times in which they condemn Donald Trump’s proposal for the effective ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from Gaza.
The ad, which was signed by rabbis including Sharon Brous, Roly Matalon and Alissa Wise, as well as Jewish creatives and activists including Tony Kushner, Ilana Glazer, Naomi Klein and Joaquin Phoenix, says: “Trump has called for the removal of all Palestinians from Gaza. Jewish people say no to ethnic cleansing!”
The ad follows Trump’s proposal to “take over Gaza” and leave 2 million Palestinians who have survived Israel’s deadly onslaught against the narrow strip with “no alternative” but to leave their homes.
Trump has called on Jordan, Egypt and other Arab countries to take in Palestinians – a proposal that has been met with widespread criticism from Arab countries and other allies while being condemned as an ethnic-cleansing plan.
Robert F Kennedy Jr has mass appeal despite his extreme ideas. This theory explains why
Darren Loucaides
“Back at home in the United States, the newspapers are saying that I came here today to speak to about 5,000 Nazis,” Robert F Kennedy Jr told a large crowd in Berlin. Estimated at 38,000 people, the crowd was a mix of hippies, anti-war types, Green party voters and anti-vaxxers, rubbing shoulders with a smattering of skinheads. It was late August 2020 and a group called Querdenken had rallied this motley crew together in defiance of Covid-19 restrictions.
“Governments love pandemics,” Kennedy said. “They love pandemics for the same reason they love war – it gives them the ability to impose controls that the population would otherwise never accept.”
Last month, in Senate confirmation hearings for his appointment as the US secretary of health and human services, Kennedy was questioned on having previously compared the Center for Disease Control’s work to that of “Nazi death camps”, calling Covid-19 a bioweapon genetically engineered to target black and white people while sparing Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people, and blaming school shootings on antidepressants. “He has made it his life’s work to sow doubt and discourage parents from getting their kids life-saving vaccines,” said the Democratic senator Ron Wyden. “It has been lucrative for him and put him on the verge of immense power.”
Read the full piece here:
Peace push ‘not a betrayal’ of Ukraine, US defence secretary Hegseth insists
Jakub Krupa
US defence secretary Pete Hegseth has been speaking to reporters before today’s Nato defence ministers meeting in Brussels, where he denied that Donald Trump’s peace push with Vladimir Putin was a “betrayal” of Ukraine.
Hegeseth said that the Russian aggression on Ukraine was “a factory reset for Nato,” and a moment of “realisation that this alliance needs to be robust, strong, and real.”
“That is why president Trump has called for increased defence spending across the board for Nato, for European countries to recognise this is an urgent, real threat to the continent and this aggression needs to be a wake up call,” he said.
He said that standing up to Russian aggression is “an important European responsibility.”
Confronted by reporters with suggestions that the rapid push to peace and talks with the Russian president who annexed Crimea in 2014 and invaded Ukraine in 2022 could be seen as amounting to a betrayal of Ukraine, Hegseth insisted “That is your language, not mine. Certainly not a betrayal.”
“There is no betrayal; there is a recognition that the whole world and the US is invested in peace, in a negotiated peace,” he says.
Jakub Krupa is following developments with Ukraine on our Europe live blog here: Trump-Putin call ‘not a betrayal’ of Ukraine, insists US’s Hegseth as he heads for Nato showdown
Denver Public Schools became the first US school district Wednesday to sue the Trump administration challenging its policy allowing ICE immigration agents in schools.
Colorado’s largest public school district argued in the federal lawsuit that the policy has forced schools to divert vital educational resources and caused attendance to plummet, Associated Press reports.
“DPS is hindered in fulfilling its mission of providing education and life services to the students who are refraining from attending DPS schools for fear of immigration enforcement actions occurring on DPS school grounds,” the lawsuit states.
Senate expected to vote on Robert F Kennedy Jr’s bid to be health secretary
The Senate is expected to vote today on the confirmation of Robert F Kennedy Jr – a prominent lawyer and vocal vaccine critic – as the nation’s health secretary, controlling $1.7tn in spending for vaccines, food safety and health insurance programs for roughly half the country.
Despite several Republicans expressing deep skepticism about his views on vaccines, Kennedy is expected to win confirmation.
Writing for CBS News, Kaia Hubbard noted that “Kennedy’s path to confirmation was once considered among the most fragile of president Trump’s nominees,” but the Senate has cleared the final hurdle to a vote on his appointment 53 to 47 along party lines.
Last week Republican Sen Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, despite having expressed doubts about Kennedy Jr’s votes on vaccines, supported the appointment at the committee stage, and Republican Sen Susan Collins from Maine, who has expressed some disquiet about Trump nominations, also vowed to support Kennedy Jr.
During the pandemic, Kennedy Jr, 71, devoted much of his time to a nonprofit that sued vaccine makers and harnessed social media campaigns to erode trust in vaccines as well as the government agencies that promote them. He has said he is “uniquely positioned” to revive trust in public health agencies.
75,000 federal workers sign up for Trump’s buyout as judge clears path for workforce cuts
About 75,000 federal workers accepted the offer to quit in return for being paid until 30 September, according to McLaurine Pinover, a spokesperson for the office of personnel management, Associated Press reports.
She said the deferred resignation program “provides generous benefits so federal workers can plan for their futures,” and it was now closed to additional workers.
A federal judge on Wednesday removed a key legal hurdle stalling president Donald Trump’s plan to downsize the federal workforce. The Boston-based judge’s order in the challenge filed by a group of labor unions was a significant legal victory for the Republican president after a string of courtroom setbacks.
American Federation of Government Employees National president Everett Kelley said in a statement that the union’s lawyers are assessing the next steps.
Today’s ruling is a setback in the fight for dignity and fairness for public servants. But it’s not the end of that fight. Importantly, this decision did not address the underlying lawfulness of the program.
She said the union continues to maintain that it is illegal to force citizens to make a decision, in a few short days, without adequate information, about “whether to uproot their families and leave their careers for what amounts to an unfunded IOU from Elon Musk.”
In a “factsheet” issued by the White House earlier this week, the Trump administration claimed that “excluding active-duty military and Postal Service employees, the federal workforce exceeds 2.4 million” people, and that “only 6% of federal workers report to work in-person on a full-time basis.”
Welcome and opening summary …
Welcome to the Guardian’s rolling coverage of the second Donald Trump administration and US politics. Here are the headlines …
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Donald Trump’s buyout program for federal employees can proceed, a federal judge ruled on Wednesday. The move paves a path forward for the about 75,000 government workers who have volunteered to resign under the president’s plan to shrink the federal workforce
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Robert F Kennedy Jr is set to face a vote on his confirmation as secretary of health and human services early in the Senate, as does Howard Lutnick to be secretary of commerce
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Elon Musk’s so-called Doge “efficiency” agency website has added data from a controversial rightwing thinktank
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Social media platform X –owned by Musk – will pay Trump $10m to settle a lawsuit the president filed after he was banned from the platform following the January 6 attack on the US Capitol, according to a report
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The US attorney general announced on Wednesday that the Trump administration is suing New York state over its immigration policies, accusing state officials of choosing “to prioritize illegal aliens over American citizens”
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Trump said he is willing to accept Russia’s longstanding objection to Ukraine joining Nato. “They’ve been saying that for a long time, that Ukraine cannot go into Nato, and I’m OK with that”
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Tulsi Gabbard has been sworn in as Trump’s director of national intelligence
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The White House has again barred an Associated Press reporter from the Oval Office for the agency refusing to adopt the name “Gulf of America” for the Gulf of Mexico
