Trump targets law firm Paul Weiss, restricting government access

(WASHINGTON) — As President Donald Trump’s administration guts the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), former federal workers are being told to say goodbye to their desks — and to do so quickly.

USAID leadership sent an email to agency staffers on Tuesday instructing them that they will have 15 minutes to enter their former offices at the Ronald Reagan Building in downtown Washington, D.C., to retrieve their personal belongings.

“This Thursday and Friday ONLY–on February 27 and 28, 2025 –USAID staff will have one opportunity to retrieve their personal belongings,” the message reads, which was also posted to USAID’s government website.

“Staff will be given approximately 15 minutes to complete this retrieval and must be finished removing items within their time slot only,” the message continues.

The email includes a timetable giving staff a window in which they can collect their belongings based on their bureau or independent office.

For some, the timeframe is as long as an hour and a half; for others, it’s just half an hour.

The email also contains a lengthy list of prohibited items that USAID staff are not allowed to bring onto the premises, including BB guns, drills, knives, sabers, swords, nunchucks, ski poles, chlorine and liquid bleach.

According to the message, the items referenced “are, and have always been, prohibited from entering the Ronald Reagan Building facility through a security screening post,” which is typically only used by uncredentialled visitors who are subject to additional rules and regulations.

Several USAID officials told ABC News that including this list illustrates how agency employees who dedicated their professional lives to foreign assistance are now being treated like violent criminals.

“It sounds like they think we’re going to try to stage a Jan. 6-style ‘peaceful protest’,” an official said.

The latest directive from USAID leadership comes as 1,600 workers in the humanitarian aid bureau received termination notices over the weekend and thousands more abroad were put on administrative leave.

Prior to Trump’s second administration, more than 10,000 people worked at USAID.

Copyright © 2025, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.

(PALM BEACH, Fla.) — President-elect Donald Trump declared in a left-field proposal on Tuesday that his administration will rename the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America” in his latest attack on Mexico.

“We’re going to change because we do most of the work there and it’s ours,” Trump said. “It’s appropriate, and Mexico has to stop allowing millions of people to pour into our country,” Trump said in a long, winding news conference.

Trump criticized Mexico for the increase of drugs into the U.S. and said that he would make Mexico and Canada pay through “substantial tariffs.”

“We want to get along with everybody. But you know … it takes two to tango,” he said.

The gulf has been identified by several names throughout its history, with “Golfo de Mexico” first appearing on maps in the mid-16th century when Spain occupied the areas now known as Cuba to the south, Mexico to the west and the the U.S. states that surround it to the North.

It’s the ninth-largest body of water in the world and covers some 600,000 square miles.

Trump’s promise to rename the gulf isn’t the first.

In 2012, then-Mississippi State Rep. Steve Holland proposed a bill that also would have renamed the gulf into the “Gulf of America,” however the Democrat backtracked and said he was joking and using it as a way to criticize his Republican colleagues over their anti-immigrant stances.

“They are trying to really discriminate against immigrants, which offends me severely,” Holland told ABC News in 2012. “I just thought if we’re gonna get into it, we might as well all get into it, it’s purely tongue and cheek.”

Stephen Colbert suggested the same name during the 2010 BP oil spill on his Comedy Central show “The Colbert Report.”

“We broke it, we bought it,” he joked.

Copyright © 2025, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.

(WASHINGTON) — Federal workers across the government on Friday received emails from top officials at their agencies informing them that the resignation offers they received earlier this week are “valid, lawful, and will be honored.”

The White House’s Office of Personnel Management had told government workers in an email Tuesday that if they quit by Feb. 6, they would still get paid through Sept. 30.

Employment lawyers questioned whether such an offer was lawful because Congress, not the White House, is responsible for authorizing workers’ paychecks. Many agencies are expected to run out of money this spring, with the federal government only funded through March, raising questions about how the Trump administration can promise those who take the buyouts would still get paid if the executive branch doesn’t control spending.

Many federal workers also wondered whether the memo, titled “A Fork in the Road,” was a phishing scam, prompting OPM to release a new memo assuring workers they are “most welcome [to] stay at home and relax or to travel to your dream destination. Whatever you would like.”

On Friday morning, senior officials at the various agencies sent memos to staffers assuring them the offers were indeed real.

“On behalf of the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), I am informing you that the offer is valid, lawful, and will be honored by USDA,” said one such memo signed by Kailee Tkacz Buller, chief of staff at the Department of Agriculture.

“If you accept the deferred resignation offer, you will receive pay and benefits through September 30, 2025, and will not be subject to a reduction-in-force or other premature separation,” she wrote.

However, Max Alonzo, the national secretary-treasurer for the National Federation of Federal Employees, a labor union that represents 110,000 federal workers, said his union is advising federal workers not to respond to the email.

In part, he said, the union is worried about the lack of clarity and specifics in the offer email. He pointed to the lack of a contract and the fact that Congress has not allocated funds for large-scale federal buyouts, and he worried people might offer to resign but not actually be paid in the end or may have their benefits stripped.

“Absolutely do not resign. There is nothing that says that the day that you resign, that they can’t just let you go,” he said. “They don’t have to pay you — there’s nothing that says they have to pay you till Sept. 30. This is nothing that has been done before. This is not in our regulations. There’s no regs about it. We’re not even sure if it’s actually legal. So, yeah, absolutely do not resign.”

The buyout offers come as President Donald Trump has pushed for federal employees to return to working in person, signing an executive order on his first day in office calling for an end to teleworking.

Copyright © 2025, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.