Democratic Sen. Elissa Slotkin explains why she voted against Hegseth’s confirmation
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(WASHINGTON) — Michigan Democratic Sen. Elissa Slotkin explained why she voted against confirming Pete Hegseth as secretary of defense on ABC News’ “This Week” on Sunday.
Hegseth, a former Fox News host, was sworn into the role Saturday following a hair-thin vote in the Senate.
Slotkin told “This Week” co-anchor Martha Raddatz she had not been confident Hegseth would be more loyal to the Constitution than he would be to President Donald Trump.
“He couldn’t unambiguously say that he will push back if the president asked him to do something that wasn’t constitutional, and that, to me, is why I couldn’t confirm him,” Slotkin said. “There’s a lot of other things in his background I don’t like, but I look at what is the strategic and irreversible threats to our democracy, and that’s using the uniform military in ways that violate the Constitution.”
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
(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.
(WASHINGTON) — Democrats are settling into the year with some of their strongest February grassroots fundraising numbers on record, according to the Democratic National Committee, which says it brought in $9 million during the critical first full month of Donald Trump’s presidency with an average donation of less than $35.
In a memo obtained exclusively by ABC News, the DNC says the haul was from more than 200,000 grassroots donors across all 50 states. They attribute the gains, in part, to the fact that “Americans are ready to stand up and fight back against the Trump administration’s overwhelmingly unpopular agenda.” In February 2016, following the first full month of Trump’s previous term, the party recorded pulling in less than $5 million in grassroots fundraising.
The haul also comes amid Ken Martin’s first month as party chair. The DNC cites the Minnesota Democrat’s leadership as another reason they saw a boost in grassroots support. Top-performing fundraising emails, texts and peer-to-peer messages were signed by Martin in the month since his election on Feb. 1, the memo says.
But the fundraising increase comes as the Democratic Party grapples with low approval ratings and intraparty fighting around their overall direction and response to the Trump administration’s policies.
A few recent polls indicate that the general public does not see any one person as leading the Democratic Party. One, from CNN/SSRS published on Sunday, found no consensus among American adults over which Democratic leader “best reflects the core values of the Democratic Party,” while also showing that the Democratic Party’s favorability rating among Americans stands at a record low.
Just last week, a contentious battle brewed on Capitol Hill over whether to pass a GOP-approved government funding bill, hurled the party into discussions over their strategy and about potential changes in their leadership ranks.
The DNC, however, has recently made plays to carve out its own lane among the larger party as a leading voice in response to Trump and Republicans.
In the wake of the National Republican Congressional Committee’s recent calls for GOP House members to pull back on hosting in-person town hall events while constituents have become heated about DOGE’s cuts to the federal workforce, the DNC started pairing with other organizations and state parties across the country to host “People’s Town Halls” in competitive districts with vulnerable GOP House incumbents.
Another bright spot for Democrats in February, according to DNC fundraising data set to be publicly filed with the Federal Elections Commission later Thursday, is that this month marked the DNC’s best fundraising month via digital ads in an off-year, with more than $1 million raised.
“We expect significant return on investment by the 2026 midterms,” the DNC said in the memo.
The DNC is prioritizing “balancing high-performing fundraising formats” with “new content that educates donors and invites them to volunteer or give the DNC feedback to better understand their priorities in our fight against Donald Trump,” according to the memo.
(WASHINGTON) — Environmental Protection Agency staff members across the country have been told by supervisors they are prohibited from communicating with grantee partners they are supposed to supervise and monitor, according to multiple sources inside the EPA and others working directly with the agency.
And without notice, many nonprofit organizations and other EPA grant recipients have found themselves frozen out of accessing their federal funds without notice or explanation.
“I have never experienced anything like this,” said Melissa Bosworth, who runs a small nonprofit organization based out of Denver that had been administering an EPA award approved by Congress last May for tribal, school and local municipalities in the mountain west.
Nonprofit leaders from across the country with EPA grants and contracts describe weeks of a communication blackout. Bosworth said her local contacts at the EPA’s Region 8 office stopped responding within days of President Donald Trump’s inauguration. She and her partnering organization, Montana State University, noted they reached out repeatedly to their local point of contact but got no response.
ABC News reached out to the EPA’s Region 8 office for comment.
Then, at the end of February, she received formal notice that her grant had been terminated. The purpose of the grant was to help cities, tribes and schools in rural Montana, Wyoming and the Dakotas gain access to federal funding for projects focused on clean drinking water, disaster preparedness, emissions reduction and food security.
The termination notice, reviewed by ABC News, suggested her contract might have been canceled because of the president’s executive order to shutdown diversity, equity and inclusion programs.
“It was about helping fight disparities on behalf of small cities and rural schools,” she said. “So often it is the big universities and big institutions that have the expertise to get funds. I worry the disparity for rural America, tribes and the smallest communities will get worse.”
Bosworth has a son with autism, and her business partner gave birth last month to a baby with severe medical challenges. They both have now been laid off.
“We thought there was a good chance they would try to terminate our contracts, but without any actual communication, we did not have anything formal to fight against,” Bosworth told ABC News. “We did not know what was real, if we could spend money or how to ask questions. I wonder if the ambiguity was part of the strategy.”
While the communication blackout appeared to be sweeping in multiple regional offices and consequential for grant recipients, it did not seem to apply to all EPA staff nationwide.
Even before receiving the termination notice, Bosworth said she struggled to access her EPA grant. She and dozens of other nonprofit leaders from California to Tennessee said they have been frozen out of the government payment system off and on, without explanation or notice.
In an EPA regional office in Philadelphia, staff members described being told in meetings with EPA political appointees based in Washington, D.C., that they are still not permitted to process new awards or even communicate with grant award recipients as late as last week. The edict came despite recent court rulings blocking the administration’s proposed federal funding freeze.
And when local EPA staffers pressed their regional bosses about the communications blackout, those bosses told them to comply because they did not want to risk doing anything to jeopardize their jobs, according to multiple sources.
As part of his work advising agencies to reduce spending and cut staff, Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency have promised transparency and increased oversight over how taxpayer dollars are going out the door. Experts who work in grant management as well as former EPA officials argue the lack of communication will result in the opposite — less transparency and no oversight.
“The preponderance of evidence is that many program officers are under some kind of gag order, making it nearly impossible for them to do their jobs,” one former EPA official under the Biden administration told ABC News. “If you care about abuse in federal spending, this makes no sense and is absurdly hypocritical.”
Typically, EPA staff works closely with nonprofit organizations and local government partners who have been awarded grants, conducting oversight and answering and asking questions about how the government money is being spent.
Rebecca Kaduru, president at Institute for Sustainable Communities, based in Nashville, said she has lost access to the payment system at least once a week for the last month. Her organization had two EPA grants until last month, when one was terminated.
The effective gag order has left nonprofit leaders, local governments and tribes stunned and unsure about how to move forward in spending the EPA grants they were awarded.
Kaduru explained the strain of chaos of the last few months.
“Do I fire staff because I can’t pay payroll? But if I do, I am not compliant with the grant that says I have to have staff and keep our website,” she said on the phone. “It is very high risk for nonprofits.”
On Monday, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin announced the agency had decided to terminate over 400 contracts with nonprofit organizations around the country.
“Working hand-in-hand with DOGE to rein in wasteful federal spending, EPA has saved more than $2 billion in taxpayer money,” Zeldin wrote in a statement. “It is our commitment at EPA to be exceptional stewards of tax dollars.”
The EPA did not respond to questions about which contracts exactly were canceled or why, but it appeared environmental justice and community change grants were hit particularly hard in this week’s cuts.
Over 100 organizations received community change grants last year, totaling more than $1.6 billion, as part of environmental justice work funded through the bipartisan Infrastructure Reduction Act in 2022. The grants focus on helping low-income, disadvantaged and often rural communities fight air and water pollution, create green spaces and invest in renewable energy and disaster preparation.
On Tuesday, Zeldin also sent an internal memo to all regional administrators saying that the agency planned to eliminate all environmental justice positions and offices immediately.
“With this action, EPA is delivering organizational improvements to the personnel structure that will directly benefit all Americans,” the memo, which ABC News reviewed, said.
Many nonprofit leaders who received termination notices in the last few weeks expressed frustration that they were not given the chance to explain their work and said the savings, in their view, were overblown. The news comes as agency leaders were also told to draft plans with a deadline of this week for further staffing reductions.
In terms of savings, in a recent post, Zeldin claimed he saved taxpayers over $12 million by canceling the contract with Kaduru’s organization, for example. However, in actuality, it was an $8 million grant, with over half of it already spent.
Speaking to a joint session of Congress last week, Trump said his administration wants to focus on pollutants, saying, “Our goal is to get toxins out of our environment, poisons out of our food supply and keep our children healthy and strong.”
Both current career EPA staff as well as nonprofit partners said the cuts and the closure of environmental justice offices will make this work harder.
“I think it is a shame they are not looking into what we do — asking what we actually do,” Kaduru said. “It is a shame because those environmental justice programs in particular are really are good programs, and I think there is an unfortunate misunderstanding about what environmental justice [is].”
