Welcome back to The Best & The Brightest. I’m Leigh Ann
Caldwell. There are a lot of nasty illnesses circulating out there, and sadly they’ve impacted my monthly mahjong game. Stay safe and healthy, everyone.
Meanwhile, in just the past 24 hours or so, Trump has said he’d like the U.S. to “take over” and develop Gaza—a suggestion that press secretary Karoline Leavitt sorta kinda walked back, saying zero
taxpayer dollars would be deployed to reconstruct the enclave and that no U.S. troops had been committed “just yet.” Simultaneously, multiple outlets reported that the administration was preparing an executive order to start dismantling the Department of Education, and Trump expressed hope that his own
secretary of the agency, Linda McMahon, would “put herself out of a job.”
And there’s more, of course: Axios reported that 20,000 government employees have already accepted Trump’s possibly legally dubious—and so far unfunded—“buyout”
(tomorrow is the deadline), while noting this is below the normal attrition rate. Meanwhile, C.I.A. employees got similar buyout offers, The Wall Street Journal reported, as downsizing efforts expanded to national security agencies. The administration also continues to shrink, and potentially neuter, the Consumer Financial
Protection Bureau and USAID. I have a lot more on the latter below.
But first…
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- The
incredible shrinking Congress: As I wrote last week, President Trump and co-president Elon Musk are moving to exert maximum control over the executive branch. So far, the Republican-led Congress has proven to be a willing partner, which will likely be a major ongoing theme of this private email, given Trump’s seemingly limitless support in the conference.
Take, for example, Trump’s since-paused threat to place tariffs on U.S. partners and allies. True, some
farm-state Republicans like Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley worried aloud about the impact on Canadian potash prices, but most didn’t say much. As a couple of Republican aides told me, no one wants to cross Trump, even the lobbying groups who advocate for industry-friendly policies. (The American Farm Bureau Federation issued only a gentle release noting
that tariffs would put American farmers “in a tough spot.”) That’s moot for now. Trump backed off his tariffs threat, claiming victory after securing fentanyl- and border-related assurances from Mexico’s Claudia Sheinbaum and Canada’s Justin Trudeau—not because he encountered Republican pushback.
As for the Democrats, they’re livid. In response to Trump’s tear-it-all-down week, they’re making a spectacle and will talk on the Senate floor all night tonight
while forcing Republicans to use all 30 hours of allowable debate time to confirm Russ Vought—a huge proponent of vastly expanded executive powers, which he wrote about extensively in Project 2025—as director of the Office of Management and Budget. Democrats have also held press conferences, including a weird one outside USAID. Meanwhile, Hawaii Senator
Brian Schatz, whom my partner John Heilemann spoke with earlier this week, is vowing to hold up all of Trump’s State Department nominees until USAID is functional again. (He can’t fully block them, due to a rules change that lowered the confirmation threshold from 60 to 51 votes, but he can force
Republicans to squander precious floor time.)
Indeed, I’m hearing everything is on the table. This includes refusing to cooperate with Republicans to fund the government—assuming the G.O.P. can agree on a bill to keep the lights on after March 14. But conversations are robust and ongoing. For all of our sakes, let’s hope this isn’t repeated.
- The two-bill two-step: Senator Lindsey Graham, chair of the Budget Committee, will reportedly move forward on his preferred two-bill strategy to pass Trump’s agenda: one bill for border security, defense funding, and energy production; another for tax and spending cuts. But on the House side, Speaker Mike Johnson can’t decide whether to go with the one-bill approach that most people in his conference want, or the two bills
preferred by House hardliners and the Senate. (I explained the particulars of this dispute a few weeks ago, and how the choice could have tremendous consequences for Trump’s agenda.)
Johnson’s indecisiveness is part of a pattern, and is one of the biggest knocks against him: He dawdles. Indeed, he doesn’t have a core group of kitchen cabinet colleagues
that he relies on, and he’s constantly worried about losing his speakership at any given moment if he pisses off too many people. And, I’m told by many Republicans, he keeps hoping Trump will bail him out by throwing his support behind one approach or the other. But Trump has said repeatedly that he couldn’t care less about this tactical debate.
For now, it appears that Johnson has lost the crowd, and the Senate is prepared to move first. The upper chamber will have to deal with
its own dynamics, of course, but via this route, the ultimate legislative expression of Trump’s agenda will be a Senate product in which the House—with its bare majority—will have a lot less say. That could imperil the chances of House passage at all.
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And now a quick word from my partner Dylan Byers on the ‘60 Minutes’ showdown…
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Dylan Byers
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On Monday, while CBS News was taking the irregular step of acquiescing to a Federal
Communications Commission request for the unedited footage and transcript of Bill Whitaker’s 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris, the show’s executive producer was fervently trying to defend the network’s integrity, and his own. In an all-hands meeting, Bill Owens acknowledged that CBS was complying with F.C.C. demands, but asserted that he would not apologize for the editing discrepancy at the heart of the federal
inquiry: the fact that 60 Minutes and Face the Nation each aired different portions of the vice president’s remarks. “The company knows I will not apologize for anything we have done,” he said. “The edit is perfectly fine. Let’s put that to bed so we can get on with our lives.”
Owens’s remarks hardly calmed the waters at CBS, where employees are still quietly rebelling against owner
Shari Redstone’s plan to settle the lawsuit that President Trump brought against the network over the interview. As I reported last week, Shari has privately determined that a low-eight-figure gift to the Trump Presidential Library is a small price to pay to close her tortured $8 billion sale of Paramount. On the other
hand, as I also noted, there’s no guarantee that Shari’s capitulation will buy any less scrutiny of the sale. (My partner Eriq Gardner offered a similar assessment yesterday, with characteristic acuity.) Maybe that explains why she hasn’t settled yet, but my latest intel tells me she still
wants to put this to bed.
In any event, Owens’s remarks triggered mixed emotions among the 60 Minutes anchors and correspondents in the room and, eventually, journalists across CBS News. On the one hand, everyone at the network, all the way up to CBS News C.E.O. Wendy McMahon, opposes the settlement and views it as a gross incursion on press freedom. Some in
Monday’s meeting discussed issuing public statements or even resigning, though both Scott Pelley and Anderson Cooper advised their colleagues against such dramatic steps. (Anderson candidly posited that, in today’s media landscape, there were few other places, if any, where they could go and produce similar work.) Some interpreted Owens’s remark as a dare to the parentco to fire him, which might then catalyze an actual rebellion.
At the same time, not everyone at the network necessarily concurs with Owens’s declaration about “the edit.”
Continue reading online…
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A longstanding tool of American foreign policy has practically collapsed in less than a
week, and Republicans—who mostly declined a chance to partly defund it just a year ago—aren’t shedding any tears. Plus, notes on Marco Rubio’s staffing headaches at State.
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USAID has stood as a government agency for 63 years, but it will become a shell of
itself in a matter of days. At midnight on Friday, according to an agency memo, all of its 10,000 employees worldwide—except for those “designated personnel responsible for mission-critical functions, core leadership, and specially designated programs”—will be placed on administrative leave. This is the biggest—and perhaps fatal—blow in the DOGE-directed blitz that eliminated the jobs of many USAID contractors
last week, closed the agency’s offices in Washington, D.C., on Monday, and halted the work and programs of employees overseas. It’s unclear what will remain at 12:01 a.m. on Saturday. (A State Department aide declined to provide a list of surviving programs.)
Despite some internal griping among Republicans, the party is pretty much on board with the White House’s dismantling of an agency codified and funded by Congress, and
which technically, legally, requires an act of Congress to shut down. The argument, of course, is that the agency is ineffective and wasteful, and that it funds left-wing causes counter to American interests. But while the Republican Party’s political gripes about USAID aren’t new, the level of support for a total shutdown certainly is startling. Rep. Eli
Crane, a hard-line Freedom Caucus member, pointed out this week that only a year ago, more than half of the House Republican conference rejected his amendment to cut USAID by 50 percent. Naturally, many of those same people are now lined up behind Presidents Trump and Musk to obliterate the whole thing.
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On the House side, Rep. Brian Mast, the new chairman of the Foreign
Affairs Committee and six-term congressman from Florida whose district includes parts of Palm Beach, is leading the anti-USAID charge. (The part of Palm Beach that houses Mar-a-Lago is actually represented by a Democrat, Lois Frankel.) Notably, Mast won his gavel—beating out three more-senior members—after dedicating his entire pitch to reforming the State Department and U.S. foreign aid programs. And he’s followed through: One of his first actions, after taking over
the committee, was to examine both of their budgets.
During Tuesday night’s private leadership meeting between Republican committee chairs in Speaker Mike Johnson’s office suite, Mast defended the administration’s actions and told other Republican leaders that USAID must be reformed. Afterward, he emailed a three-page document to all 27 Republican members on the Foreign Affairs
Committee, outlining his “full support” for gutting USAID.
In that document, which I obtained, Mast noted that USAID has not been eliminated “yet,” and that he supports a merger of the $40 billion global food and relief agency with State. His list of talking points for members refers
them to sections 7063 and 7015 of the Department of State funding bill, which he says allows the administration to potentially “expand, eliminate, consolidate, or downsize covered departments, agencies, or organizations.” (Though the law also states that the administration can’t do so without “prior consultation … with the appropriate congressional committees.”)
Like the Trump White House, Mast
drew attention to what he called “radical, far-left” USAID programs, including $1 million for French-speaking LGBTQ groups in West and Central Africa, and $8,000 to promote D.E.I. among LGBTQ groups in Cyprus. His list of fewer than two dozen “woke” programs totals about $25 million, a fraction of the organization’s $40 billion budget, according to the document.
Senate Republicans don’t appear to be
shedding any tears for USAID, either. “No complaints,” one senator told me, adding that the agency’s fate hasn’t been discussed in meetings. A Republican aide echoed that sentiment, noting that no senator had raised reservations about the USAID cuts, as some had done over last week’s (quickly rescinded) O.M.B. government-wide spending freeze. When Democratic senator Chris Coons—a potential secretary of state, had Kamala Harris won the election—tried to force a
vote on a resolution to reaffirm the independence and importance of USAID, Republicans noted that it was not a hard-liner who objected. Instead, the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Idaho’s Jim Risch, voiced disagreement. This was another strong signal that the entire party is on board.
Meanwhile, Democrats and aid groups are focused on the programs engaged in life-saving humanitarian
work, and which have now ground to a halt, according to a Hill Democrat whose office has been in touch with them. For instance, $340 million worth of nonperishable food and other supplies, totaling around 550 metric tons, for the Food for Peace program is currently sitting in warehouses or even on delivery trucks, with no employees or funding to get it to where it’s supposed to go. The program, which costs around $800 million per year, was started by Eisenhower, and later became
part of USAID. Through Food for Peace, American farmers supplied about 4 billion pounds of food in 2022, helping to feed 58 million people.
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Rubio’s
Soft-Power Vacuum
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Some Republicans are quietly worried about the immediate retreat of U.S. foreign assistance,
which could leave a soft-power vacuum for China to fill. After all, the People’s Republic has already been flexing its economic diplomacy muscles to build goodwill in Africa, South America, and Southeast Asia. But Republican China hawks, I’m told, have been assuaged by their trust in Secretary of State Marco Rubio, a fellow China hawk.
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Rubio, for his part, has defended the USAID cuts, but there are early worries that
he’s being undercut by Trump and Trump’s team in other areas. Rubio, for instance, scored a big diplomatic win against China when he met with Panamanian president José Raúl Mulino on his first international trip as secretary of state this past weekend: Shortly after the meeting, Mulino announced that Panama would not renew its participation in China’s Belt and Road Initiative, a massive infrastructure program. But just hours later, Trump again threatened to “take back”
the Panama Canal, antagonizing Panama once more and enfeebling his secretary’s work.
Meanwhile, even though two of Rubio’s top aides—Michael Needham and Dan Holler—followed him to State, there are concerns that he isn’t getting his people through the White House’s Presidential Personnel Office, which oversees hiring within the administration. (A State Department aide
said there are a lot of complaints about the slow hiring process, but noted that it’s not unique to State or Rubio.) Republican and Democratic critics alike point to the hiring of two Trump loyalists at State, Pete Marocco and Darren Beattie, as potential hindrances to Rubio.
Marocco, who worked at the Commerce, Defense, and State Departments as well as USAID during Trump’s first term, has faced
accusations of creating confusing and toxic work environments. USAID personnel sent a dissent memo about Marocco just three months after he joined the agency in 2020. Meanwhile, Beattie, a former speechwriter from Trump’s first term who was fired after CNN
reported his attendance at a white nationalist conference, has been named acting secretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs.
Beattie also has a trail of racist, misogynistic, and January 6-supporting social media posts, and according to Semafor and CNN, founded the
far-right, Trump-supporting outlet Revolver. (Revolver somehow got an exclusive on the story of Beattie’s appointment.) Some senators are perturbed that Beattie, at least for the time being, will be serving in a critical, public-facing job at State—a job once held by the legendary, longtime, trusted
George W. Bush adviser Karen Hughes. If he were officially nominated, Beattie might be difficult to confirm—even in a Senate that seems to be waving through Trump’s most controversial nominees.
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