Education department plans to cut half its workforce as Trump vows to wind agency down – US politics live | Trump administration

Key events

Knowing what’s on the mind of Donald Trump is a difficult thing to do, but it’s fair to say that Republican congressman Thomas Massie appears to currently be living rent free in his head.

The president was up into the wee hours of this morning, attacking the Kentucky lawmaker. Why? Because he was the sole no vote on the House GOP’s government funding bill yesterday. On Truth Social, his preferred method of communication despite his X account being reactivated, Trump wrote this, at 1.23am:

So Massie can vote for Debt Ceiling AND Budget to be put into the Trump Administration, making them both the Republicans problem and responsibility, but can’t give us a simple Continuing Resolution vote allowing us the time necessary to come up with a “GREAT, BIG, BEAUTIFUL BILL??? Republicans only “NO Vote. GRANDSTANDER!

The “GREAT, BIG, BEAUTIFUL BILL” Trump is referring to is a forthcoming piece of legislation he expects Congress to produce that will enact his administration’s priorities, including extending tax cuts, paying for mass deportations and approving energy policies that spur oil and gas production.

Passing that bill is expected to be a tough haul for the Republican-controlled Congress, particularly in the House, where the GOP’s margin is a small as a single seat. A defection by Massie, and perhaps other lawmakers, could imperil that upcoming legislation’s prospects of enactment, and thus, Trump is warning him and anyone else who oppose the party’s line that he’ll attack them personally if they resist.

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We’ll be seeing Donald Trump a little earlier then usual this morning, when he welcomes Micheál Martin, the taoiseach of Ireland, to the White House at 10.45am.

They’re expected to take a few questions before retiring for meetings. Trump later goes to the US Capitol for the Friends of Ireland Luncheon, then back to the White House for a St Patrick’s Day reception with Martin.

Big day for Ireland in Washington. Also, many opportunities for Trump to take questions from the press and weigh in on whatever it is that might be on his mind.

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Updated at 08.38 EDT

The US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, said on Wednesday that the minerals deal will give the US a “vested interest’” in Ukraine’s security.

He added that Europeans will “have to be involved” in Ukraine diplomacy, according to Agence France-Presse.

We have a separate blog covering the latest news in Europe, including the ceasefire negotiations in Ukraine, and you can follow it here:

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Updated at 08.15 EDT

This explainer by my colleague, Abené Clayton, breaks down who Mehmet Oz, Trump’s pick to lead Medicare and Medicaid, is and provides a timeline of his questionable medical advice and time in politics:

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Updated at 08.08 EDT

US senator Warren demands Medicare nominee Mehmet Oz sever industry ties

Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the agency overseeing Medicare should divest financial ties to healthcare and pharmaceutical companies that could benefit from his policy decisions, Democratic senator Elizabeth Warren said on Wednesday, according to Reuters.

Television personality and surgeon Mehmet Oz is scheduled to appear on Friday before the Senate finance committee, on which Warren sits. The panel will hold a confirmation hearing for his nomination to be administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), a wide-reaching agency with annual spending of $2.6tn.

In a letter addressed to him seen by Reuters, Warren called on Oz to divest from his financial holdings related to industries regulated by the agency and commit to strong ethics safeguards.

Oz owns healthcare stocks in UnitedHealth Group, which administers Medicare Advantage plans, and drugmakers Abbvie and Eli Lilly, which manufacture drugs the agency negotiates prices for, his latest ethics disclosure shows. He owns stocks and serves as adviser to several companies selling nutritional supplements, medical diagnostic technologies and botanical products, as well as a cardiology practice and a retirement resort, reports Reuters.

Oz has offered to divest much of that and resign his advisory posts, Warren noted with appreciation. “Still, given your close ties to the industry that you would regulate, if you are confirmed, the public would have reason to question your impartiality and commitment to serving the public’s interest,” she wrote, according to Reuters.

Oz must fully divest from these conflicts and pledge not to use his position to enrich himself or his business associates, she said. This would exceed the legally required divestment. She also called for Oz to commit to a four-year lobbying ban after leaving his post.

Warren has been successful in getting information out of Trump’s nominees; she pressed secretary of health and human services Robert F Kennedy Jr on his conflicts in a similar letter that led to his updating his ethics agreement and revealing further conflicts.

Reuters reports that the letter is unlikely to affect Oz’s chances of getting confirmed. Republicans control the Senate and have so far allowed even the most controversial of Trump’s nominees to sail through the process.

The agency runs Medicare, the federal health insurance programme for people aged 65 or older and disabled people, and oversees Medicaid, the state-based health insurance programme for low-income people. The two programmes provide health insurance for more than 140 million people in the US. It also runs the main programme for income-based government-subsidised health insurance under the Affordable Care Act (ACA), also known as Obamacare. Oz would take over at a time when Republicans are proposing deep cuts to Medicaid, reports Reuters.

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Updated at 08.08 EDT

A growing international move to boycott the US is spreading from Scandinavia to Canada to the UK and beyond as consumers turn against US goods.

Most prominent so far has been the rejection by European car buyers of the Teslas produced by Elon Musk, now a prominent figure in Trump’s administration as the head of the “department of government efficiency” a special group created by Trump that has contributed to the precipitous declines in Tesla’s share price. About 15% of its value was wiped out on Monday alone.

The fall in Tesla sales in Europe has been well documented, as has a Canadian consumer boycott in response to trade tariffs and Trump’s calls for Canada to become America’s 51st state, but the past week has seen daily reports of cultural and other forms of boycotts and disinvestment.

In Canada, where the American national anthem has been booed during hockey matches with US teams, a slew of apps has emerged with names such as “buy beaver”, “maple scan” and “is this Canadian” to allow shoppers to scan QR barcodes and reject US produce from alcohol to pizza toppings.

Figures released this week suggested the number of Canadians taking road trips to the US – representing the majority of Canadians who normally visit – had dropped by 23% compared with February 2024, according to Statistics Canada.

While Canada and Mexico have been at the frontline of Trump’s trade war, the boycott movement is visible far beyond countries whose economies have been targeted.

In Sweden, about 40,000 users have joined a Facebook group calling for a boycott of US companies – ironically including Facebook itself – which features alternatives to US consumer products.

“I’ll replace as many American goods as I can and if many do so, it will clearly affect the supply in stores,” wrote one member of the group.

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Updated at 08.09 EDT

Congressional brinkmanship, including repeated near-misses with shutdowns and over the nation’s $36 trillion in debt, has contributed to global ratings agencies’ moves to downgrade the US federal government’s once-pristine credit rating, reports Reuters.

Democrats have long chided Republicans for threatening or voting for government shutdowns, and Republicans were quick to call them out for considering votes that could risk one.

“While Senate Republicans are working hard to prevent a government shutdown, it will ultimately be up to Senate Democrats to decide whether or not they turn out the lights on the federal government,” Republican Senate majority leader John Thune of South Dakota said on X.

Hours before the House passed its measure on Tuesday, Senate Democrats huddled behind closed doors in an extended lunchtime discussion on their way forward, cognizant that Republicans were poised to blame them for a shutdown if they block the House-passed bill, reports Reuters.

Without action by Congress, existing federal funds run out at midnight Friday for agencies that oversee programmes for veterans, law enforcement, medical researchers, schools, air traffic controllers and many others.

Top Senate Democrat Chuck Schumer’s office did not respond to requests for comment on how he planned to proceed, accoding to Reuters.

Other Democrats said they were unsure on their path forward. “The last thing in the world I want to do is give Elon Musk more power than he already has” by voting for this funding bill, Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut told reporters after the House vote. “He’s an unelected autocrat.”

But Blumenthal said there were additional considerations to weigh before deciding how he will vote on the spending bill.

Still, other Senate Democrats last week made clear that they do not favour voting for government shutdowns under any circumstance, according to Reuters.

House Republicans have rejected a proposal by several Democrats and even some leading Senate Republicans to take a middle ground by passing a 30-day extension of funding to give the time needed to complete the regular appropriations bills that are more comprehensive.

Democratic senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut said he might propose “some kind of open amendment process” which would give Senate Democrats a chance to make changes to the bill.

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Updated at 08.10 EDT

US Senate Democrats were wrestling on Wednesday with how to respond to a stopgap funding bill passed by the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, choosing between voting for a bill many of them oppose or allowing a government shutdown, reports Reuters.

President Donald Trump’s Republicans hold a 53-47 Senate majority, but would need the support of at least some Democrats to meet the chamber’s 60-vote threshold to pass most legislation. It could vote on the measure as soon as Wednesday, depending on Democrats’ plans, a source familiar with the Senate Republican discussions said.

“There’s a lot of discussion,” said Senator Angus King, an independent who caucuses with the Democrats. The Maine lawmaker summed up the choice as voting for “a pretty bad” bill or casting a vote that would trigger a partial government shutdown beginning on Saturday, at a time when Trump and his adviser Elon Musk are already moving rapidly to slash the federal government.

“If you’re dealing with people who would just as soon have a shutdown, there’s less chance of getting something,” King said. “They could say we’re going to let the government shutdown for months.”

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Updated at 08.10 EDT

House Republicans pass Trump-backed bill to avoid shutdown and send it to the Senate

Joseph Gedeon

House Republicans pulled off a near party-line vote on Tuesday to pass their controversial funding bill to curb the looming government shutdown, shipping it off to the Senate, where it still will face an uphill battle to pass.

The Trump-backed bill passed 217 to 213, with the Kentucky representative Thomas Massie casting the sole Republican “no” vote, joining all almost all House Democrats who had come out hard against it for slashing social programs and granting the Trump administration broader federal powers. The Democrat Jared Golden of Maine joined Republicans in backing the measure.

The stopgap bill, revealed by House Republican leadership over the weekend, would fund the government through September and carves $13bn from non-defense spending while adding $6bn to military budgets and preserving a $20bn IRS funding freeze – priorities embraced by Donald Trump but denounced by Democrats as an assault on vulnerable Americans.

The vice-president, JD Vance, in a Tuesday huddle with Republicans on the Hill said the blame would fall squarely on the Republicans should they fail to pass the measure, according to Politico.

The House heads to recess later this week, leaving lawmakers in the Senate with a take-it-or-leave it scenario.

The bill’s priorities align closely with Trump’s agenda, particularly its provisions that could grant the administration broader authority to redirect funds between programs – a power Democrats fear could allow significant reshaping of federal priorities without congressional approval.

House Republicans were rushing to pass the bill before Thursday, when they would then hand the measure off to the Senate before heading home for a week-and-a-half long recess.

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Updated at 08.10 EDT

The Kremlin said on Wednesday it needed to be briefed by the United States on the outcome of US-Ukrainian talks in Saudi Arabia before it would comment on whether a proposed ceasefire was acceptable to Russia.

According to Reuters, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov also told reporters he did not rule out the possibility of a phone call between presidents Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump, which he said could be organised very quickly if needed.

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Updated at 08.10 EDT

Education department layoffs met with swift condemnation from Democratic and progressive officials

The announcement that the US Department of Education intends to lay off nearly half of its workforce has been met with swift condemnation from Democratic and progressive officials. The Texas representative Greg Casar wrote in a post on X that those in charge were “Stealing from our children to pay for tax cuts for billionaires”.

In a statement, Rosa DeLauro, the ranking member of the House appropriations committee, said:

Presidents Trump and Musk and their billionaire buddies are so detached from how Americans live that they cannot see how ending public education and canceling these contracts kills the American Dream … If kids from working-class families do not have access to schools, how can they build a future?”

Donald Trump campaigned on a promise to close the Department of Education, claiming it had been overtaken by “radicals, zealots and Marxists”. At education secretary Linda McMahon’s confirmation hearing, she acknowledged that only Congress had the power to abolish the agency but said it might be due for cuts and a reorganisation

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Updated at 08.11 EDT

The 25% global tariffs on steel and aluminium came into effect at midnight ET “with no exceptions or exemptions”.

The European Commission responded almost immediately, saying it would impose counter tariffs on €26bn ($28bn) worth of US goods from next month.

“We deeply regret this measure,” European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen said in a statement about the US tariffs, as Brussels announced it would be “launching a series of countermeasures” in response to the “unjustified trade restrictions”.

Australian deputy prime minister Richard Marles said on Wednesday the lack of exemptions was “really disappointing”, calling tariffs “an act of kind of economic self-harm”. He told radio station 2GB:

We’ll be able to find other markets for our steel and our aluminium and we have been diversifying those markets.”

You can read the full story here and follow the Guardian’s live coverage of the global response to Donald Trump’s new tariffs with my colleagues Julia Kollewe and Kate Lamb over on the business blog:

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Updated at 08.11 EDT

Taoiseach Micheál Martin is meeting Donald Trump this morning for the annual St Patrick’s Day celebrations, a week early this year because of congressional recess.

He plans to tell Trump that the trade imbalance raised by secretary of state Marco Rubio in a phone call with the Irish foreign minister last week masks the complexity of the relationship.

He will point out that among Boeing’s biggest customers are Ryanair and Aercap, the world’s largest aircraft leasing company, which could now be affected by tariffs.

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Updated at 08.22 EDT

A poll released on Tuesday shows that US president Donald Trump’s approval rating has dropped a few points since he first took office, reports the Hill.

Accoding to the Emerson College Polling survey, 47% of voters approved of Trump’s job performance and 45% disapproved. Those findings are down from a 49% approval and 41% disapproval rating at the beginning of Trump’s second term.

The Hill, reporting on the poll results, wote:

The public’s views of the economy under Trump seem to be a drag on his overall approval rating, with a plurality of 48% saying they don’t approve of Trump’s handling of the economy, while 37% approve.

Voters give Trump his highest ratings for his handling of immigration, with 48% approving and 40% disapproving. His weakest areas are the economy, health care and cryptocurrency, in which he has net approval ratings solidly underwater.”

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Updated at 08.11 EDT

Even before the layoffs, the education department was among the smallest cabinet-level agencies, reports the Associated Press (AP). Its workforce included 3,100 people in Washington and an additional 1,100 at regional offices across the country, according to a department website.

The department’s workers had faced increasing pressure to quit their jobs since Donald Trump took office, first through a deferred resignation programme and then through a $25,000 buyout offer that expired 3 March.

Jeanne Allen of the Center for Education Reform, which advocates for charter school expansion, said the cuts were important and necessary. Allen said:

Ending incessant federal interference will free up state and local leaders to foster more opportunities to give schools and educators true flexibility and innovation to address the needs of students, wherever they are educated.”

Some advocates were skeptical of the department’s claim that its functions would not be affected by the layoffs, reports the AP. “I don’t see at all how that can be true,” said Roxanne Garza, who was chief of staff in the office of postsecondary education under president Joe Biden.

Much of what the department does, like investigating civil rights complaints and helping families apply for financial aid, is labour intensive, said Garza, who is now director of higher education policy at Education Trust, a research and advocacy organisation. She added:

How those things will not be impacted with far fewer staff … I just don’t see it.”

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Updated at 08.11 EDT

Education department to cut half its staff as Trump vows to wind the agency down

The US education department said on Tuesday it would lay off nearly half its staff, a possible precursor to closing altogether, as government agencies scrambled to meet president Donald Trump’s deadline to submit plans for a second round of mass layoffs.

The terminations are part of the department’s “final mission,” it said in a press release, alluding to Trump’s vow to eliminate the department, which oversees $1.6tn in college loans, enforces civil rights laws in schools and provides federal funding for needy districts.

Asked on Fox News whether the firings would lead to the department’s dismantling, secretary of education Linda McMahon said “yes,” adding that doing so “was the president’s mandate.” The layoffs would leave the department with 2,183 workers, down from 4,133 when Trump took office in January, reports Reuters.

Before announcing the layoffs, the agency ordered offices in the Washington area closed to staff from Tuesday evening through Wednesday, according to an internal notice seen by Reuters.

An education department spokesperson did not immediately respond to questions by Reuters about the nature of the security issues prompting the closures.

The layoffs are the latest step in Trump’s sweeping effort to downsize the government, led by Elon Musk and his department of government efficiency (Doge).

All US government agencies have been ordered to come up with large-scale layoff plans by Thursday, setting up the next phase of Trump’s cost-cutting campaign. Several agencies have offered employees payments to retire early to fulfil Trump’s demand, reports Reuters.

Affected education department employees will be placed on administrative leave starting on 21 March, the department said.

More on that in a moment. In other developments:

The union representing more than 2,800 department workers said it would fight the “draconian cuts” of the education department. “What is clear from the past weeks of mass firings, chaos, and unchecked unprofessionalism is that this regime has no respect for the thousands of workers who have dedicated their careers to serve their fellow Americans,” said Sheria Smith, president of the American Federation of Government Employees Local 252.

Donald Trump’s trade war kicked into a higher gear at midnight, as 25% tariffs on all imported steel and aluminum were scheduled to begin. There was widespread confusion about whether the tariffs would be delayed, or increased, amid conflicting statements from the president and his chief trade adviser, but the White House said that the previously delayed tariffs would begin, even as the stock marker plunges.

The detained Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil, a legal permanent resident, remains in federal custody, despite being charged with no crime. Khalil’s wife said in a statement before a hearing on Wednesday in Manhattan that he was forced into an unmarked car by immigration officers who refused to show a warrant.

The Republican-controlled US House of Representatives passed a stopgap funding bill, which would avert a government shutdown if it also passed the Senate before midnight on Friday.

Ukraine agreed to accept a US proposal for an immediate 30-day ceasefire and to take steps toward restoring a durable peace after Russia’s invasion, according to a joint statement by US and Ukrainian delegations meeting in Saudi Arabia. Russia has not commented.

Canada’s prime minister-designate Mark Carney said he would not lift retaliatory tariffs on American goods until Washington does the same.

At Tuesday’s promotional event for Elon Musk’s line of Tesla electric vehicles at the White House, Trump refused to drive one of the cars, and scoffed at the idea that his predecessor, Joe Biden, had done so at a similar event. There is video of Biden doing so, in August 2021, at an event to promote electric vehicles that Musk reportedly was angry at being excluded from over anti-union policies.

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Updated at 08.12 EDT