House plans vote on GOP spending bill as Trump lobbies Republican holdouts

(WASHINGTON) — Dan Bongino, the former Secret Service agent turned Fox News host and conservative podcast personality, will be the next deputy director of the FBI — a choice that is drawing criticism from Democrats as another one of President Donald Trump’s allies moves into a leadership position.

Trump named Dan Bongino, a 2020 election denier, as deputy FBI director on Sunday to serve under newly confirmed FBI Director Kash Patel. Bongino, who left Fox News in 2023, hosts the popular right-wing and pro-Trump podcast called “The Dan Bongino Show,” which ranks among Apple’s top 10 news podcasts.

On Monday morning, a very emotional Bongino told his show’s listeners that he was sitting at home watching TV when Trump called him to let him know he was going to appoint him as the deputy director of the FBI. Bongino told listeners that he wanted the deputy FBI director job.

“I got a call from the president, and he couldn’t have been nicer, and obviously, keep the contents of it between us, but I think you get the gist about what it was about and I kind of broke down a bit,” he said. “This is now real.”

Typically, the position of FBI’s deputy director is held by a career agent — something Bongino is not. The FBI’s deputy director is responsible for the day-to-day operations and running the agency. The position does not require Senate confirmation.

Democrats have expressed outrage at the pick of Bongino as a leader in the agency, concerned that Trump could use his allies leading the agency to go after his adversaries.

“Trump installs another loyalist who won’t say no to any immoral or unethical act,” Democratic Sen. Adam Schiff wrote of Bongino on X, adding that his appointment degrades law enforcement agencies and public safety.

Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy wrote on X that “Trump has chosen grifters to lead the FBI.”

“Kash Patel sells ‘K$SH’ branded merch, vaccine reversal pills. Dan Bongino’s entire show is telling listeners the world is ending so they buy the dozens of survivalist products he sells,” Murphy wrote on X.

Bongino defended his appointment and said the job as the FBI’s deputy director is “unquestionably nonpartisan.”

“I’m going to ask you a simple question, have you seen what I did before I came here,” Bongino said on his podcast. “I’m committed to service. People play different roles in their lives: People are dads, people are soccer coaches. People are cops and military officers and military-enlisted people. People are carpenters, people are plumbers. We play different roles in our life, and each one requires a different skill set.”

Bongino joins an agency — like many others — undergoing changes under the Trump administration. In a message to the FBI workforce last week, Patel announced his intention to “reduce the footprint” of the FBI in “the National Capital Region,” including by “reallocating personnel to the field offices and Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville [Alabama].” One source told ABC News this could include as many as 1,500 agents and others from Washington being relocated.

The FBI, Bongino said, belongs to the American people and will work to restore trust in the agency. Bongino has said the FBI is “lost, broken” and “irredeemably corrupt,” when talking about the raid on Trump’s Palm Beach home in 2022.

“Every single DNA cell in my body is going to be dedicated towards keeping this homeland safe, no matter what, no matter what, that’s my job,” he said. “We’re going to reestablish faith in this institution, the good people that are doing their job, hitting the streets, developing sources. We’ll have your back. We are going to reestablish faith in this institution.”

The son of a plumber and a supermarket employee, Bongino grew up in Queens, New York, and started his career as a New York Police Department officer in the 1990s.

Bongino said in his 2013 book, “Life Inside the Bubble,” that joining law enforcement was a “dream of his” and he dedicated himself to his beat.

After leaving the NYPD, Bongino joined the Secret Service where he rose to the ranks and joined former President Barack Obama’s protection detail.

He said he was compelled to run for Congress in Maryland in 2014 after leaving the service because of “the fog of scandals in the Obama administration,” he told ABC News in 2013.

Bongino claimed that he overheard a series of secret negotiations around the Affordable Care Act during Obama’s first term, which drove him to leave the service and enter politics.

That campaign was unsuccessful, but it allowed Bongino to develop a platform to speak on conservative issues.

Bongino has been an outspoken supporter of Trump, and told Fox News in 2017 that the Trump-Russia collusion investigation into the 2016 presidential campaign was a “total scam.”

He also questioned the results of the 2020 election and claimed there were “anomalies” with the voting totals. Despite the numerous false allegations of fraud in the 2020 election, there has been no evidence to back them up.

After Trump was shot during the 2024 campaign, Bongino was critical of the agency he now helps lead.

“They absolutely, resolutely, 100% failed,” he said of the Secret Service on Fox News in July. He also called for the firing of then-Deputy Director Ron Rowe in addition to the then-Director Christopher Wray.

 

Copyright © 2025, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.

(WASHINGTON) — Pete Marocco, the Trump administration official tasked with the dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), at a private “listening session” held at the State Department earlier this month with dozens of aid groups — some on the brink of financial collapse — opened the proceedings by making one request: that everyone stand for the Pledge of Allegiance.

Inside the Loy Henderson Conference Room, representatives from aid organizations, industry groups, and foreign embassies — reeling from the administration’s sweeping freeze on foreign aid and the unraveling of USAID — dutifully rose to their feet.

The aid groups were there in the hope that Marocco would provide answers on the future of foreign assistance. After the Pledge, Marocco outlined the Trump administration’s foreign aid plans, defending what he called a “total zero-based review,” and arguing that some areas of foreign aid required “radical change” before taking questions from those in attendance, according to an audio recording of the private meeting obtained by ABC News.

‘Nefarious actors in the agencies’

Multiple sources who attended the Feb. 13 meeting described the mood in the room as “deeply uncomfortable,” saying that some of the attendees who were representing groups teetering on bankruptcy were left “traumatized” by the tone and the lack of specific details.

During the discussion, a representative for World Vision, a global Christian humanitarian organization, asked Marocco about the impact of the freeze, noting that aid groups like his had been forced to bankroll U.S. government-funded programs with private money while awaiting overdue payments to be unpaused.

“Will the spigot open? We’ve gotten waivers, but the PMS system isn’t operating, so we’re bankrolling U.S. government-funded programs out of private money,” said Edward Brown, the vice president of World Vision, which provides poverty alleviation, disaster relief, and child welfare in nearly 100 countries.

Marocco responded that following President Donald Trump’s executive order halting foreign aid, some transactions were still being processed, prompting his team to “seize control” of the payment system to stop them — leaving some groups without payments that, weeks later, had still had not arrived.

“As far as payment, one of the reasons that there have been problems with some of the payments is because, despite the president’s executive order, despite the secretary’s guidance, we still had nefarious actors in the agencies that were trying to push out hundreds of illegal payments,” Marocco said. “And so we were able to seize control of that, stop them, take control of some of those people, and make sure that that money was not getting out the door.”

Marocco suggested that payments for organizations with existing contracts would resume the following Tuesday.

“I feel confident we’re going to have that pretty good by Tuesday of next week,” he said. “That does not mean everybody’s going to be caught up on everything that they want. But I think that our payment system will probably be fluid at that point.”

But Tuesday came and went, and many groups say they were still on the edge of bankruptcy — prompting some to escalate their legal battle against the administration.

On Monday, several USAID officials told ABC News that the payment system Marocco said would be fully restored was now technically operational, but that funding was still moving at an extremely slow pace and that many of the programs that were granted waivers to continue operations had still not received any money.

USAID officials said the lack of funding has rendered many of the exempted programs inoperative. Some have resorted to using stockpiled resources, but because these programs have been cut off from federal support for weeks, most report that they have few funds left and don’t anticipate they will be able to function for much longer, according to the officials.

On Friday, after a federal judge cleared the way for the administration to proceed with its plan to pull thousands of USAID staffers off the job in the U.S. and around the world, the Trump administration moved forward with its effort to dismantle USAID, telling all but a fraction of staffers worldwide that they were on leave as of Monday.

In a court-ordered affidavit filed last Tuesday, Marocco wrote that the agency “has authorized at least 21 payments” for grants, loans, and other foreign aid executed before Trump’s inauguration “that are in total worth more than $250 million and are expected to be paid this week.”

As of Monday, it was not clear whether those payments had been made.

When reached for comment, World Vision would not confirm to ABC News if payments had resumed, but told ABC News they were “complying with the executive order that pauses U.S. foreign assistance funding — with potential waivers for emergency food and lifesaving humanitarian assistance — for the next 90 days, while programs are reviewed for alignment with the current administration’s foreign policy.”

‘What we consider to be legitimate’

In one tense moment during the listening session, a senior Democratic Senate staffer pressed Marocco on whether, once the payments resumed, they would include reimbursements for work incurred before the Jan. 24 freeze.

“When payments resume, will they include work incurred before Jan. 24 in the payments forthcoming on Tuesday?” asked the staffer, who, when reached for comment by ABC News, asked not to be named our of fear of retribution.

Marocco would not guarantee that government-contracted work that occurred before the freeze would be reimbursed, stating that the Trump administration would only cover “legitimate expenses” — and noting that the administration’s definition of a legitimate expense may differ from the groups in the room.

“We will be looking at those,” Marocco said. “What we consider to be legitimate may not be the same thing that other people consider to be legitimate, but we’re going to.”

The staffer attempted to follow up, arguing that if the work had been incurred before the freeze, “it was legitimate at the time, right?”

“We’ve moved on to the next person,” Marocco responded.

In his affidavit filed on Tuesday, Marocco conveyed the scope and status of the government’s aid freeze. He wrote that, since Trump signed the executive order for a 90-day freeze, USAID had terminated nearly 500 grants and contracts. He said the agency “has not quantified” the total cost of those programs.

As of Tuesday, the State Department had terminated more than 750 foreign assistance-funded grants and contracts of its own and had suspended nearly 7,000 more, Marocco wrote.

A ‘cycle of dependency’

Marocco used the meeting with the organizations to paint a dire picture of U.S. foreign aid, claiming it had “devolved into a fiscal cycle of dependency, of presumption, arrogance, and frankly, folly, that is just astonishing.” He dismissed past reform efforts as ineffective, arguing that officials had merely “nibbled around the edges” rather than addressing what he saw as systemic failures.

He insisted the review was necessary to force difficult conversations about “what these programs are actually doing” and whether they should continue at all. And he framed the overhaul as part of President Trump’s broader effort to reshape Washington’s approach to foreign assistance.

“The American people deserve better. They require better. And President Trump has promised better,” he said, criticizing aid decisions made “behind closed doors in Congress, in small groups in Washington, D.C.”

Marocco told those gathered that the administration’s review extended beyond USAID and would encompass a range of federal agencies, including NASA, the Patent and Trademark Office, the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC), and the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM).

“If there is a tax dollar that is going out to a foreigner, we need to gain control of that and understand what it is we’re trying to achieve with our partners,” he said. “We want to identify all of that. We want to fix it. That’s the goal.”

Marocco made clear that the new foreign aid structure would be tied to Trump’s political priorities.

“With the Secretary of State, you will be in line,” Marocco said. “The foreign assistance review, you will follow the president’s foreign policy objectives. Or you will not be spending money abroad.”

He told the aid groups in the room they needed to justify their programs.

“You need to think about convincing someone — perhaps one of the women who is in my mother’s Bible study,” he said. “You need to think about somebody who’s working at a McDonald’s in Mississippi. You need to think about a grad student in Harlem.”

The Trump administration has received widespread condemnation from Democrats in Congress over its effort to slash foreign aid programs. “What Trump and Musk have done is not only wrong, it’s illegal,” Rep. Don Beyer of Virginia said earlier this month during a news conference outside USAID headquarters. “USAID was established by an act of Congress, and it can only be disbanded by an act of Congress. Stopping this will require action by the courts and for Republicans to show up and show courage and stand up for our country.”

‘Catastrophic’ harm

The Feb. 13 meeting came as the legal battle over the aid freeze was escalating. Last week, a coalition of aid groups asked a federal judge to intervene, arguing that the freeze violated existing funding agreements and had caused “catastrophic” harm to their humanitarian missions. U.S. District Judge Amir Ali issued a temporary restraining order halting the freeze, but aid organizations said their funding remained locked, leaving them scrambling to keep operations afloat.

Late Tuesday, Trump administration attorneys filed court papers arguing that their interpretation of the judge’s order allows the freeze to largely remain in place. The aid groups fired back Wednesday, urging the court to enforce the ruling.

“The court should not brook such brazen defiance of the express terms of its order,” they wrote in the filing.

Judge Ali, a Biden-era appointee, wrote Thursday that while Trump administration officials had “not complied” with his order, he would not hold them in contempt of court.

But he warned those officials not to buck what he characterized as his “clear” directive to lift their “blanket freeze” on aid disbursements.

Copyright © 2025, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.

(WASHINGTON) — The only man to lead both the FBI and the CIA urged caution to senators who might vote to confirm former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence and Kash Patel to lead the FBI, according to a letter sent to senators this week.

“I am deeply concerned about the potential nominations of Mr. Kash Patel to lead the FBI and the inclusion of Former Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard as DNI in intelligence roles,” William Webster, who led the FBI during the Carter and Reagan administrations and the CIA after that, said in a letter to senators on Thursday.

Webster wrote that Patel’s loyalty to Trump may cause problems.

“Statements such as ‘He’s my intel guy’ and his record of executing the president’s directives suggest a loyalty to individuals rather than the rule of law — a dangerous precedent for an agency tasked with impartial enforcement of justice,” said Webster, who turns 101 in March.

He said that during his tenure at the FBI, he was contacted by the president only twice — once by President Jimmy Carter, who asked him to investigate an issue, and once when President Ronald Reagan had a question about Nancy Reagan’s security.

Webster added that Gabbard’s “profound lack of intelligence experience and the daunting task of overseeing 18 disparate intelligence agencies further highlight the need for seasoned leadership.”

“History has shown us the dangers of compromising this independence. When leaders of these organizations become too closely aligned with political figures, public confidence erodes and our nation’s security is jeopardized,” he wrote. “Every president deserves appointees they trust, but the selection process must prioritize competence and independence to uphold the rule of law.”

The letter was first reported by Politico.

The Trump transition team defended both Patel and Gabbard to Fox News.

“Kash Patel is loyal to the Constitution. He’s worked under Presidents Obama and Trump in key national security roles,” said Alex Pfeiffer, a Trump transition team spokesman.

Alexa Henning, a Trump transition official, also defended Gabbard.

“Lt. Col. Gabbard is an active member of the Army and has served in the military for over two decades and in Congress. As someone who has consumed intelligence at the highest levels, including during wartime, she recognizes the importance of partnerships with allies to ensure close coordination to keep the American people safe,” she told Fox News.

Copyright © 2024, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.