Warehouses in the US are full of foods that fight malnutrition, while kids go hungry in places like South Sudan.

Elon Musk may be gone from the Trump administration — and his friendship status with President Donald Trump may be at best uncertain — but his whirlwind stint in government certainly left its imprint. The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), his pet government-slashing project, remains entrenched in Washington. During his 130-day tenure, Musk led DOGE in eliminating about 260,000 federal employee jobs and gutting agencies supporting scientific research and humanitarian aid. But to date, DOGE claims to have saved the government $180 billion — well short of its ambitious (and frankly never realistic) target of cutting at least $2 trillion from the federal budget. And with Musk’s departure still fresh, there are reports that the federal government is trying to rehire federal workers who quit or were let go. For Elaine Kamarck, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, DOGE’s tactics will likely end up being disastrous in the long run. “DOGE came in with these huge cuts, which were not attached to a plan,” she told Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram. Kamarck knows all about making government more efficient. In the 1990s, she ran the Clinton administration’s Reinventing Government program. “I was Elon Musk,” she told Today, Explained. With the benefit of that experience, she assesses Musk’s record at DOGE, and what, if anything, the billionaire’s loud efforts at cutting government spending added up to. Below is an excerpt of the conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify. What do you think Elon Musk’s legacy is? Well, he will not have totally, radically reshaped the federal government. Absolutely not. In fact, there’s a high probability that on January 20, 2029, when the next president takes over, the federal government is about the same size as it is now, and is probably doing the same stuff that it’s doing now. What he did manage to do was insert chaos, fear, and loathing into the federal workforce. There was reporting in the Washington Post late last week that these cuts were so ineffective that the White House is actually reaching out to various federal employees who were laid off and asking them to come back, from the FDA to the IRS to even USAID. Which cuts are sticking at this point and which ones aren’t?First of all, in a lot of cases, people went to court and the courts have reversed those earlier decisions. So the first thing that happened is, courts said, “No, no, no, you can’t do it this way. You have to bring them back.” The second thing that happened is that Cabinet officers started to get confirmed by the Senate. And remember that a lot of the most spectacular DOGE stuff was happening in February. In February, these Cabinet secretaries were preparing for their Senate hearings. They weren’t on the job. Now that their Cabinet secretary’s home, what’s happening is they’re looking at these cuts and they’re saying, “No, no, no! We can’t live with these cuts because we have a mission to do.”As the government tries to hire back the people they fired, they’re going to have a tough time, and they’re going to have a tough time for two reasons. First of all, they treated them like dirt, and they’ve said a lot of insulting things. Second, most of the people who work for the federal government are highly skilled. They’re not paper pushers. We have computers to push our paper, right? They’re scientists. They’re engineers. They’re people with high skills, and guess what? They can get jobs outside the government. So there’s going to be real lasting damage to the government from the way they did this. And it’s analogous to the lasting damage that they’re causing at universities, where we now have top scientists who used to invent great cures for cancer and things like that, deciding to go find jobs in Europe because this culture has gotten so bad.What happens to this agency now? Who’s in charge of it?Well, what they’ve done is DOGE employees have been embedded in each of the organizations in the government, okay? And they basically — and the president himself has said this — they basically report to the Cabinet secretaries. So if you are in the Transportation Department, you have to make sure that Sean Duffy, who’s the secretary of transportation, agrees with you on what you want to do. And Sean Duffy has already had a fight during a Cabinet meeting with Elon Musk. You know that he has not been thrilled with the advice he’s gotten from DOGE. So from now on, DOGE is going to have to work hand in hand with Donald Trump’s appointed leaders.And just to bring this around to what we’re here talking about now, they’re in this huge fight over wasteful spending with the so-called big, beautiful bill. Does this just look like the government as usual, ultimately?It’s actually worse than normal. Because the deficit impacts are bigger than normal. It’s adding more to the deficit than previous bills have done. And the second reason it’s worse than normal is that everybody is still living in a fantasy world. And the fantasy world says that somehow we can deal with our deficits by cutting waste, fraud, and abuse. That is pure nonsense. Let me say it: pure nonsense.Where does most of the government money go? Does it go to some bureaucrats sitting on Pennsylvania Avenue? It goes to us. It goes to your grandmother and her Social Security and her Medicare. It goes to veterans in veterans benefits. It goes to Americans. That’s why it’s so hard to cut it. It’s so hard to cut it because it’s us. And people are living on it. Now, there’s a whole other topic that nobody talks about, and it’s called entitlement reform, right? Could we reform Social Security? Could we make the retirement age go from 67 to 68? That would save a lot of money. Could we change the cost of living? Nobody, nobody, nobody is talking about that. And that’s because we are in this crazy, polarized environment where we can no longer have serious conversations about serious issues. See More:

Lousy ROI Elon Musk counts the cost of his four-month blitz through US government Term at DOGE did serious damage to his brands, only achieved a fraction of hoped-for savings. Joe Miller and Alex Rogers, Financial Times – May 30, 2025 9:28 am | 59 Elon Musk wields a chainsaw at the Conservative Political Action Conference in February to illustrate his aim to cut government waste Credit: Jose Luis Magana/AP Elon Musk wields a chainsaw at the Conservative Political Action Conference in February to illustrate his aim to cut government waste Credit: Jose Luis Magana/AP Story text Size Small Standard Large Width * Standard Wide Links Standard Orange * Subscribers only   Learn more Elon Musk’s four-month blitz through the US government briefly made him Washington’s most powerful businessman since the Gilded Age. But it has done little for his reputation or that of his companies. Musk this week formally abandoned his role as the head of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (Doge), which has failed to find even a fraction of the $2 trillion in savings he originally pledged. On Thursday, Donald Trump lamented his departure but said Musk “will always be with us, helping all the way.” Yet the billionaire will be left calculating the cost of his involvement with Trump and the meagre return on his $250 million investment in the US president’s election campaign. “I appreciate the fact that Mr Musk put what was good for the country ahead of what was good for his own bottom line,” Tom Cole, the Republican chair of the House Appropriations Committee, told the Financial Times. After Doge was announced, a majority of American voters believed Musk would use the body to “enrich himself and undermine his business rivals,” according to a survey, instead of streamlining the government. Progressive groups warned that he would be “rigging federal procurement for billionaires and their pals” and cut regulations that govern his companies Tesla and SpaceX. Democratic lawmakers said Doge was a “cover-up” of a more sinister, self-serving exercise by the world’s richest person. Early moves by the Trump administration suggested Musk might get value for money. A lawsuit brought by the Biden administration against SpaceX over its hiring practices was dropped in February, and regulators probing his brain-implant company Neuralink were dismissed. Musk’s satellite Internet business Starlink was touted by Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick as a potential beneficiary of a $42 billion rural broadband scheme. An executive order calling for the establishment of a multibillion-dollar Iron Dome defense system in the US looked set to benefit Musk, due to SpaceX’s dominance in rocket launches. The gutting of various watchdogs across government also benefited Musk’s businesses, while a number of large US companies rushed to ink deals with Starlink or increase their advertising spending on X. Starlink also signed agreements to operate in India, Pakistan, and Vietnam, among other countries it has long wished to expand into. But while Doge took a scythe to various causes loathed by Musk, most notably international aid spending and government contracts purportedly linked to diversity initiatives or “woke” research, it also caused severe blowback to the billionaire’s businesses, particularly Tesla. At one point during his Doge tenure, Tesla’s stock had fallen 45 percent from its highest point last year, and reports emerged that the company’s board of directors had sought to replace Musk as chief executive. The 53-year-old’s personal wealth dropped by tens of billions of dollars, while his dealerships were torched and death threats poured in. Some of the brand damage to Tesla, until recently Musk’s primary source of wealth, could be permanent. “Eighty percent of Teslas in the US were sold in blue zip codes,” a former senior employee said. “Obviously that constituency has been deeply offended.” Starlink lost lucrative contracts in Canada and Mexico due to Musk’s political activities, while X lost 11 million users in Europe alone. Probes of Tesla and SpaceX by government regulators also continued apace, while the Trump administration pressed ahead with plans to abolish tax credits for electric vehicles and waged a trade war vehemently opposed by Musk that threatened to further damage car sales. In the political arena, few people were cheered by Doge’s work. Democrats were outraged by the gutting of foreign aid and by Musk’s 20-something acolytes gaining access to the Treasury’s payment system, along with the ousting of thousands of federal workers. Republicans looked askance at attempts to target defense spending. And true budget hawks were bitter that Musk could only cut a few billion dollars. Bill Gates even accused Musk of “killing the world’s poorest children” through his actions at Doge. Musk, so used to getting his way at his businesses, struggled for control. At various points in his tenure he took on Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Transport Secretary Sean Duffy, and trade tsar Peter Navarro, while clashing with several other senior officials. Far from being laser-focused on eliminating waste, Musk’s foray into government was a “revenge tour” against a bureaucracy the billionaire had come to see as the enemy of innovation, a former senior colleague of Musk’s said, highlighting the entrepreneur’s frustration with COVID-19 regulations in California, his perceived snub by the Biden administration, and his anger over his daughter’s gender transition. Trump’s AI and crypto tsar, David Sacks, an influential political voice in the tech world, “whipped [Musk] up into a very, very far-right kind of mindset,” the person added, to the extent that was “going to help this administration in crushing the ‘woke’ agenda.” Neither Musk nor Sacks responded to requests for comment. Musk, who claimed Doge only acted in an “advisory role,” this week expressed frustration at it being used as a “whipping boy” for unpopular cuts decided by the White House and cabinet secretaries. “Trump, I think, was very savvy and allowed Doge to kind of take all those headlines for a traditional political scapegoat,” said Sahil Lavingia, head of a commerce start-up who worked for Doge until earlier this month. Musk, he added, might also have been keen to take credit for the gutting of USAID and other moves but ultimately garnered unwanted attention. “If you were truly evil, [you] would just be more quiet,” said Lavingia, who joined the initiative in order to streamline processes within government. “You would do the evil stuff quietly.” The noise surrounding Musk, whose ability to dominate news cycles with a single post on his social media site X rivaled Trump’s own hold on the headlines, also frustrated the administration. This week, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller took to X to indirectly rebut the billionaire’s criticism of Trump’s signature tax bill, which he had lambasted for failing to cut the deficit or codify Doge’s cuts. Once almost synonymous with Musk, Doge is now being melded into the rest of government. In a briefing on Thursday, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said that following Musk’s departure, cabinet secretaries would “continue to work with the respective Doge employees who have onboarded as political appointees at all of these agencies.” She added: “The Doge leaders are each and every member of the President’s Cabinet and the President himself.” Doge’s aims have also become decidedly more quotidian. Tom Krause, a Musk ally who joined Doge and was installed at Treasury, briefed congressional staff this week on improvements to the IRS’s application program interfaces and customer service, according to a person familiar with the matter. Other Doge staffers are doing audits of IT contracts—work Lavingia compares with that done by McKinsey consultants. Freed from the constraints of being a government employee, Musk is increasingly threatening to become a thorn in Trump’s side. Soon after his Doge departure was announced, he again criticized the White House, this time over its plan to cancel clean energy tax credits. “Teddy Roosevelt had that great adage: ‘speak softly but carry a big stick’,” Fred Thiel, the chief executive of Bitcoin mining company MARA Holdings, told the FT. “Maybe Elon’s approach was a little bit different.” © 2025 The Financial Times Ltd. All rights reserved. Not to be redistributed, copied, or modified in any way. Joe Miller and Alex Rogers, Financial Times Joe Miller and Alex Rogers, Financial Times 59 Comments

President Donald Trump has responded to billionaire and former number-one ally Elon Musk, after he heavily criticized the White House's so-called "big, beautiful bill."Over the weekend, Musk told CBS News that he's "disappointed" by the price tag of the tax and spending bill, arguing that it "increases the budget deficit, not just decreases it, and undermines the work that the DOGE team is doing.""I think a bill can be big or it can be beautiful," he added, "but I don't know if it can be both. My personal opinion."It was a once-rare but increasingly common moment of public disagreement between the two ultra-public figures, who had stood side by side during the contentious election last year when Trump ultimately retook the White House.Asked about Musk's reaction to the bill, which would indeed raise the debt ceiling by $4 trillion, Trump offered a word salad response."We have to get a lot of votes, we can't be cutting — we need to get a lot of support," the president told reporters on Wednesday, as quoted by USA Today, arguing that the bill would've lost momentum with deeper proposed cuts. "I'm not happy about certain aspects of it, but I'm thrilled by other aspects of it."It's a particularly notable inflection point for Musk, who announced that he would be stepping away from his role as a "special government employee" after months of implementing disastrous and chaotic cost-cutting measures with the help of his so-called Department of Government Efficiency."The DOGE mission will only strengthen over time as it becomes a way of life throughout the government," he tweeted Wednesday evening.But the White House seemed eager to move on after the increased friction with Musk. His "off-boarding will begin tonight," a White House official confirmed to Reuters hours earlier.However, given the power Musk has accrued in the White House, it's unlikely the billionaire will simply vanish from the scene. As his tweet suggests, his influence will likely be felt for a long time to come.Where all of this leaves Musk's relationship with the president is hard to read. Trump has been left with the cleanup job and is looking to codify some of DOGE's catastrophic budget cuts. He's expected to send a whopping $9.4 billion rescissions package to Congress next week, proposing deep cuts to USAID — which has already been gutted by DOGE — and the Corporation of Public Broadcasting, which formed NPR and funds PBS.Musk's departure from the White House will come to the relief of many, including Republican lawmakers in Washington, DC, and investors in his ailing carmaker Tesla.The mercurial CEO's embrace of far-right ideals and his tenure in the government cutting federal funding have proven to be incredibly damaging to Tesla's brand, sending sales off a cliff worldwide.Trump, for his part, could certainly do with a whole lot less of Musk, whose popularity has tanked, dragging down the administration's favorability with him.After all, the president is certainly fully capable of sowing mayhem all by himself — without a tempestuous billionaire whispering in his ear and rebuking him in public.More on Elon Musk: Elon Musk Just Ghosted a Huge Company MeetingShare This Article

Iran and the United States prepared for a fifth round of negotiations over Tehran’s rapidly advancing nuclear program Friday in Rome, with enrichment emerging as the key issue.U.S. officials up to President Donald Trump insist Iran cannot continue to enrich uranium at all in any deal that could see sanctions lifted on Tehran’s struggling economy. Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi early Friday insisted online that no enrichment would mean “we do NOT have a deal.” “Figuring out the path to a deal is not rocket science,” Araghchi wrote on the social platform X. “Time to decide.”The U.S. will be again represented in the talks by Mideast envoy Steve Witkoff and Michael Anton, the State Department’s policy planning director. Oman’s Foreign Minister Badr al-Busaidi is mediating the negotiations as the sultanate on the Arabian Peninsula has been a trusted interlocutor by both Tehran and Washington in the talks.A car carrying Araghchi arrived at the Omani Embassy in Rome’s Camilluccia neighborhood around 12:30 p.m. Witkoff had yet to be seen, but the embassy previously served as the site of another round of talks. Enrichment remains key in negotiations The talks seek to limit Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for the lifting of some of the crushing economic sanctions the U.S. has imposed on the Islamic Republic, closing in on half a century of enmity.Trump has repeatedly threatened to unleash airstrikes targeting Iran’s program if a deal isn’t reached. Iranian officials increasingly warn they could pursue a nuclear weapon with their stockpile of uranium enriched to near weapons-grade levels.“Iran almost certainly is not producing nuclear weapons, but Iran has undertaken activities in recent years that better position it to produce them, if it chooses to do so,” a new report from the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency said. “These actions reduce the time required to produce sufficient weapons-grade uranium for a first nuclear device to probably less than one week.”However, it likely still would take Iran months to make a working bomb, experts say.Enrichment remains the key point of contention. Witkoff at one point suggested Iran could enrich uranium at 3.67%, then later began saying all Iranian enrichment must stop. That position on the American side has hardened over time.Asked about the negotiations, State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce said “we believe that we are going to succeed” in the talks and on Washington’s push for no enrichment.“The Iranians are at that table, so they also understand what our position is, and they continue to go,” Bruce said Thursday.One idea floated so far that might allow Iran to stop enrichment in the Islamic Republic but maintain a supply of uranium could be a consortium in the Mideast backed by regional countries and the U.S. There also are multiple countries and the International Atomic Energy Agency offering low-enriched uranium that can be used for peaceful purposes by countries.However, Iran’s Foreign Ministry has maintained enrichment must continue within the country’s borders and a similar fuel-swap proposal failed to gain traction in negotiations in 2010.Meanwhile, Israel has threatened to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities on their own if it feels threatened, further complicating tensions in the Mideast already spiked by the Israel-Hamas war in the Gaza Strip.Araghchi warned Thursday that Iran would take “special measures” to defend its nuclear facilities if Israel continues to threaten them, while also warning the U.S. it would view it as being complicit in any Israeli attack. Authorities allowed a group of Iranian students to form a human chain Thursday at its underground enrichment site at Fordo, an area with incredibly tight security built into a mountain to defend against possible airstrikes. Talks come as U.S. pressure on Iran increases Yet despite the tough talk from Iran, the Islamic Republic needs a deal. Its internal politics are inflamed over the mandatory hijab, or headscarf, with women still ignoring the law on the streets of Tehran. Rumors also persist over the government potentially increasing the cost of subsidized gasoline in the country, which has sparked nationwide protests in the past.Iran’s rial currency plunged to over one million to a U.S. dollar in April. The currency has improved with the talks, however, something Tehran hopes will continue as a further collapse in the rial could spark further economic unrest.Meanwhile, its self-described “Axis of Resistance” sits in tatters after Iran’s regional allies in the region have faced repeated attacks by Israel during its war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip. The collapse of Syrian President Bashar Assad’s government during a rebel advance in December also stripped Iran of a key ally.The Trump administration also has continued to levy new sanctions on Iran, including this week, which saw the U.S. specifically target any sale of sodium perchlorate to the Islamic Republic. Iran reportedly received that chemical in shipments from China at its Shahid Rajaei port near Bandar Abbas. A major, unexplained explosion there killed dozens and wounded over 1,000 others in April during one round of the talks. Gambrell reported from Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Associated Press writer Nasser Karimi in Tehran, Iran, contributed to this report. —Jon Gambrell and Giada Zampano, Associated Press

Food rations that could supply 3.5 million people for a month are moldering in warehouses around the world because of U.S. aid cuts and risk becoming unusable, according to five people familiar with the situation. The food stocks have been stuck inside four U.S. government warehouses since the Trump administration’s decision in January to cut global aid programs, according to three people who previously worked at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and two sources from other aid organizations. Some stocks that are due to expire as early as July are likely to be destroyed, either by incineration, using them as animal feed, or disposing of them in other ways, two of the sources said. The warehouses, which are run by USAID’s Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance (BHA), contain between 60,000 to 66,000 metric tons of food, sourced from American farmers and manufacturers, the five people said. An undated inventory list for the warehouses—which are located in Djibouti, South Africa, Dubai, and Houston—stated that they contained more than 66,000 tons of commodities, including high-energy biscuits, vegetable oil, and fortified grains. Those supplies are valued at over $98 million, according to the document reviewed by Reuters, which was shared by an aid official and verified by a U.S. government source as up to date. That food could feed over a million people for three months, or the entire population of Gaza for a month and a half, according to a Reuters analysis using figures from the World Food Programme, the world’s largest humanitarian agency. The U.N. body says that one ton of food—typically including cereals, pulses, and oil—can meet the daily need of approximately 1,660 people. The dismantling of USAID and cuts to humanitarian aid spending by President Donald Trump come as global hunger levels are rising due to conflict and climate change, which are driving more people toward famine, undoing decades of progress. According to the World Food Programme, 343 million people are facing acute levels of food insecurity worldwide. Of those, 1.9 million people are gripped by catastrophic hunger and on the brink of famine. Most of them are in Gaza and Sudan, but also in pockets of South Sudan, Haiti, and Mali. A spokesperson for the State Department, which oversees USAID, said in response to detailed questions about the food stocks that it was working to ensure the uninterrupted continuation of aid programs and their transfer by July as part of the USAID decommissioning process. “USAID is continuously consulting with partners on where to best distribute commodities at USAID pre-positioning warehouses for use in emergency programs ahead of their expiration dates,” the spokesperson said. Some food likely to be destroyed Although the Trump administration has issued waivers for some humanitarian programs—including in Gaza and Sudan—the cancellation of contracts and freezing of funds needed to pay suppliers, shippers, and contractors has left food stocks stuck in the four warehouses, the sources said. A proposal to hand the stocks to aid organizations that can distribute them is on hold, according to the U.S. source and two former USAID sources briefed on the proposal. The plan is awaiting approval from the State Department’s Office of Foreign Assistance, the two former USAID sources said. The office is headed by Jeremy Lewin, a 28-year-old former operative of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, who is now overseeing the decommissioning of USAID. The Office of Foreign Assistance, DOGE, and Lewin himself did not respond to requests for comment. Nearly 500 tons of high-energy biscuits stored at a USAID warehouse in Dubai are due to expire in July, according to a former USAID official and an aid official familiar with the inventories. The biscuits could feed at least 27,000 acutely malnourished children for a month, according to Reuters calculations. The biscuits are now likely to be destroyed or turned into animal feed, the former USAID official said, adding that in a typical year, only around 20 tons of food might be disposed of in this way because of damage in transit or storage. Some of those stocks were previously intended for Gaza and famine-stricken Sudan, the former official said. The State Department spokesperson did not directly respond to questions on how much of the food aid in storage was close to expiry and whether this would be destroyed. USAID plans to fire almost all of its staff in two rounds on July 1 and Sept. 2, as it prepares to shut down, according to a notification submitted to Congress in March. The two former USAID sources said many of the critical staff needed to manage the warehouses or move the supplies will depart in July. Children dying The United States is the world’s largest humanitarian aid donor, amounting to at least 38% of all contributions recorded by the United Nations. It disbursed $61 billion in foreign assistance last year, just over half of it via USAID, according to government data. U.S. food aid includes ready-to-use therapeutic food (RUTF) such as high-energy biscuits and Plumpy’Nut, a peanut-based paste. Navyn Salem, the founder of Edesia, a U.S.-based manufacturer of Plumpy’Nut, said termination of transportation contracts by USAID had created a massive backlog that had forced the firm to hire an additional warehouse to store its own production. The resulting stockpile of 5,000 tons, worth $13 million, could feed more than 484,000 children, she said. Salem said that email exchanges with Lewin have left her “hopeful” that a way will be found soon to get her product to the desperate children who need it. The UN children’s agency UNICEF warned in late March that RUTF stocks were running short in 17 countries due to funding cuts, potentially forcing 2.4 million children suffering from severe acute malnutrition to go without these crucial supplies for the rest of the year. The four USAID warehouses contain the majority of the agency’s pre-positioned food stockpiles. In normal times, these could be rapidly deployed to places like Sudan, where 25 million people—half the country’s population—face acute hunger. Jeanette Bailey, director of nutrition at the International Rescue Committee, which receives much of its funding from the U.S., said it was scaling back its programs following the cuts. She said the impact of global shortages of therapeutic foods due to the disruption to U.S. aid flows is difficult to measure, particularly in places where aid programs no longer operate. “What we do know, though, is that if a child is in an inpatient stabilization center and they’re no longer able to access treatment, more than 60% of those children are at risk of dying very quickly,” she said. Action Against Hunger, a nonprofit that relied on the United States for over 30% of its global budget, said last month that the U.S. cuts had already led to the deaths of at least six children at its programs in the Democratic Republic of Congo, after it was forced to suspend admissions. Cuts causing chaos The Bureau for Humanitarian Affairs, which coordinates the U.S. government’s aid efforts overseas, was plunged into chaos by the Trump administration’s cutbacks, the five sources said. The bureau’s staff were among thousands of USAID employees put on administrative leave pending their terminations. While some staff were brought back to work until their severance dates, aid administration has not recovered. Three sources told Reuters that the contract to maintain USAID warehouses in the South African port city of Durban had been canceled, raising questions about future aid distribution. Reuters was unable to confirm that independently. Two former USAID officials said that the Djibouti and Dubai facilities would be handed over to a team at the State Department that has yet to be formed. The State Department did not comment. A spokesperson for the World Food Programme, which relies heavily on U.S. funding, declined to comment on the stranded food stocks. Asked if it was engaged in discussions to release them, the spokesperson said: “We greatly appreciate the support from all our donors, including the U.S., and we will continue to work with partners to advocate for the needs of the most vulnerable in urgent need of life-saving assistance”. —Jessica Donati, Emma Farge, Ammu Kannampilly, and Jonathan Landay, Reuters. Writing by Ammu Kannampilly.

May 16, 20254 min readSee the Dramatic Consequences of Vaccination Rates Teetering on a ‘Knife's Edge’As U.S. childhood vaccination rates sway on a “knife’s edge,” new 25-year projectionsBy Lauren J. Young edited by Dean VisserMeasles, rubella, polio and diphtheria—once ubiquitous, devastating and deeply feared—have been virtually eliminated from the U.S. for decades. Entire generations have barely encountered these diseases as high vaccination rates and intensive surveillance efforts have largely shielded the country from major outbreaks.But amid a major multistate measles outbreak that has grown to hundreds of cases, a recent study published in JAMA projects that even a slight dip in current U.S. childhood vaccination rates could reverse such historic gains, which could cause some of these maladies to come roaring back within 25 years—while just a slight increase in rates could effectively squelch of all four.“We were quite surprised that we’re right on that knife’s edge,” says the study’s lead author Mathew Kiang, an assistant professor of epidemiology and population health at Stanford University. “A little bit more [vaccination coverage] and things could be totally fine; a little less and things are going to be quite bad.”On supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization formally declare a disease eliminated when there is zero continuous transmission in a specific region for 12 months or more. The U.S. achieved this milestone for measles, a viral illness that can lead to splotchy rashes, pneumonia, organ failure and other dangerous complications, in 2000. Poliovirus, which can cause lifelong paralysis and death, was effectively eliminated from North and South America by 1994. The U.S. rid itself of viral rubella, known for causing miscarriages and severe birth defects, in 2004. And diphtheria, a highly fatal bacterial disease, was virtually eliminated after a vaccine was introduced in the 1940s. These are “key infectious diseases that we’ve eliminated from the U.S. through widespread vaccination,” says study co-author Nathan Lo, a physician-scientist at Stanford University.Kiang, Lo and their colleagues ran multiple scenarios of childhood vaccination rates over 25 years to see if the four diseases would return to endemic levels (sustained transmission in which each infected person spreads the disease to at least one other person, on average, for a 12-month period). Measles—which is a very contagious disease and requires high population immunity to prevent spread—was the most susceptible to fluctuations in vaccination coverage. The models estimated that a 5 percent coverage decline would lead to an estimated 5.7 million measles cases over 25 years, while a 5 percent increase would result in only 5,800 cases.Polio and rubella would require sharper vaccination rate downturns (around 30 to 40 percent) before reaching comparable risks of reemergence.While projected diphtheria cases were notably lower, Lo notes that the illness has a relatively high fatality rate and can cause rapid deterioration: “Patients with diphtheria get symptomatic and within a day or two can die.”Routine childhood immunization numbers have been slowly but steadily falling in recent years for several reasons, including missed appointments during the COVID pandemic and growing—often highly politicized—public resistance to vaccinations. “The idea of reestablishment of measles is not outrageous and certainly in the moment where we’re looking at erosion of trust through our federal authorities about vaccination,” says Matthew Ferrari, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Dynamics at Pennsylvania State University, who was not involved in the study.Reduced U.S. vaccination rates can also cause “knock-on effects” that threaten disease eradication efforts around the world, Ferrari says. Additionally, recent funding cuts to international vaccine development programs such as USAID and Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, will “likely lead to increases in measles, rubella, diphtheria and polio elsewhere in the world,” he says. Outbreaks of these diseases in the U.S. largely start when unvaccinated American travelers pick one up while visiting a place where it’s more common. “If you now add the consequences of defunding vaccination around the world, then that’s going to increase the likelihood of these cases coming to the United States,” Ferrari says, adding that the study authors may have made “conservative assumptions” about these international factors.But Ferrari says the study’s scenarios assumed immediate—and in some cases unrealistically high—vaccination rate drop-offs without accounting for other possible public health efforts to control disease. “Even if we anticipated an erosion of vaccination in the United States, it probably wouldn’t happen instantly,” Ferrari says. “Detection and reactive vaccination weren’t really discussed in the paper, nor was the population-level response—the behavior of parents and the medical establishment. That’s something we can’t possibly know.... From that perspective, I think the scenarios were enormously pessimistic.”Lo and Kiang argue that politically driven shifts in vaccine policy, such as reduced childhood vaccination requirements or a tougher authorization process for new vaccines, could make a 50 percent slump in vaccination rates less far-fetched. “I think that there was a lot of pushback from very smart people that 50 percent was way too pessimistic, and I think that—historically—they would have been right,” Kiang says. “I think in the current political climate and what we’ve seen, it’s not clear to me that that is [still] true.”Kiang and Lo say that while their study shows the dangers of vast vaccine declines, it also highlights how small improvements can make a massive difference.“There’s also a more empowering side, which is that the small fractions of population that push us one way can also push us the other way,” Lo says. “Someone might ask, ‘What is my role in this?’ But small percentages [of increased vaccination], we find, can really push us back into the safe territory where this alternate reality of measles reestablishing itself would not come to pass.”

A senior Trump administration official has scrapped a plan that would have blocked data brokers from selling Americans’ personal and financial information, including Social Security numbers.  The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) said in December 2024 it planned to close a loophole under the Fair Credit Reporting Act, the federal law that protects Americans’ personal data collected by consumer reporting agencies, such as credit bureaus and renter-screening companies. The rule would have treated data brokers no differently than any other company covered under the federal law and would have required them to comply with the law’s privacy rules. The rule was withdrawn early Tuesday, according to its listing in the Federal Register. The CFPB’s acting director, Russell Vought, who also serves as the director of the White House’s Office of Management and Budget, wrote that the rule is “not aligned with the Bureau’s current interpretation” of the Fair Credit Reporting Act.  Wired first reported the rule change on Wednesday.  Data brokers are part of a multibillion-dollar industry of companies that profit from collecting and selling access to vast amounts of Americans’ personal and financial information. This personal data is then sold to other companies, as well as law enforcement and intelligence agencies, often without the explicit permission of the individuals.  Collecting huge banks of data also comes with inherent risks. Over the past year, at least two data brokers were hacked, spilling millions of Social Security numbers online and exfiltrating a huge trove of user location data that tracked millions of people’s whereabouts.  In 2024 alone, the Federal Trade Commission banned several data brokers from collecting and sharing data on individuals without their permission, following allegations of unlawfully tracking people.  Privacy advocates have long called for the government to use the Fair Credit Reporting Act to rein in data brokers. The decision by CFPB to cancel the rule comes days after the Financial Technology Association, an industry lobby group representing non-bank fintech companies, wrote to Vought in his capacity as the White House’s budget director. The lobby group asked the administration to withdraw the CFPB’s rule, claiming it would be “harmful to financial institutions’ efforts to detect and prevent fraud.” CFPB did not return a request for comment. Corrected the description of the FTA.

OpinionMay 14, 20254 min readScience Tells Us the U.S. Is Heading toward a DictatorshipThe red flags abound—political research tells us the U.S. is becoming an autocracyBy Dan Vergano President Donald Trump delivers address to a joint session of Congress, split image seen from watching television, March 4, 2025. Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis via Getty ImagesAs president, Donald Trump pretty much checks all the warning boxes for an autocrat. Last September Scientific American warned of Trump’s “nonsensical conspiracy fantasies,” that he “ignores the climate crisis” and has fondness for “unqualified ideologues,” whom he would appoint should he become president again. It’s now May and sadly, that all checks out.The U.S. is in a bad place, and scholars warn, looks to be headed for worse.Worse even than Trump’s relentless attacks on science have been his administration’s assaults on the law. His officials have illegally fired federal workers, impounded congressional appropriations and seized people off the street for deportations to foreign prisons, threatening the same for all U.S. citizens. “The depth and breadth of this administration’s disregard for civil liberties, political pluralism, the separation of powers and legal constraints of all kinds mark it as an authoritarian regime,” law professor David Pozen of the Columbia University School of Law told the New York Times in April.On supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.We should all be worried that the U.S. is headed toward an autocracy—government by one person—even without political science offering a warning. But scholarship on how nations descend into this unfortunate state, seen in places like Turkey and Hungary, might not surprise you with what it suggests about the U.S.“Since Donald Trump’s inauguration, the country has embarked on the slippery slope toward autocracy,” concludes political scientist Daniel Stockemer of the University of Ottawa, in a May report in Politics & Policy. Rather than a coup, Trump’s attacks on law firms, universities, immigrants and others constitute “a more incremental form of democratic erosion,” he writes, one that follows a six-step theory of incremental autocratization based on research on the democratic backsliding seen worldwide in recent decades. The model arose in major part from the work of political scientist Marianne Kneuer of TU Dresden. She looked at the last quarter-century’s collapse in Venezuela, examining how states turn from democratic to autocratic in stages, as opposed to a sudden coup.The U.S. has already breached the first three steps of Stockemer’s theory. The first step is one of social turmoil; this originated with the Tea Party movement during the Obama administration. Marked by angry politics, backlash against minorities and immigrants, and distrust in institutions, the U.S. has in the last two decades changed from a “full” to a “flawed” democracy, according to the Economist’s global democracy index.The second step requires a “project of radical change,” like the populist movement of Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez in the 1990s, or in the U.S. case Trump’s MAGA movement, which defends white, male privileges and holds prime loyalty for many Republicans.The third step is a “decisive electoral victory,” applicable to Chavez in 1999 or Trump in 2024, the latter a vote that also brought Trump control of a subservient Congress.That leaves us at the edge of the fourth step, the dismantling of checks and balances on executive power.“If my theory is correct, the U.S. is still in this transition phase between democracy and autocracy,” says Stockemer, by e-mail. “If they move more in the direction of autocracy, we would see that the administration tries to defy more court orders.” One key part of the fourth step is the declaration of fabricated emergencies, such as the “red scare” of the McCarthy era, to trample checks and balances, such as the judiciary’s control of the legal system. In May, for example, the White House deputy chief of staff suggested Trump could unilaterally suspend habeas corpus, a legal remedy for unlawful detention that dates at least to the Magna Carta and is in the U.S. Constitution, to summarily round up immigrants. He cited an imaginary “invasion”—even though border crossings are at their lowest point in U.S, history, according to Trump’s U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency—as a reason. The courts would likely resist such a move, as the Supreme Court did under the Bush administration in 2008, and whether the Trump administration abides by judicial decisions will determine whether the fourth step has occurred.Warnings of the fifth step on the road to autocracy, securing long-term power, come in Trump’s musing of seeking an unconstitutional third term as president. The final step, the infringement of basic rights and freedoms, also is flashing warning signs, says Stockemer. These are already evident in executive orders that disengage the U.S. from the United Nations Human Rights Council, remove transgender service members from the military and privilege Christianity. He predicts that attacks on minority voting rights in 2026 and 2028 would be an expected outcome of this step.A simpler “competitive authoritarianism” yardstick for measuring democratic collapse comes from political scientists Steven Levitsky, Lucan Way and Daniel Ziblatt earlier this month. “We propose a simple metric: the cost of opposing the government,” they write in the New York Times. By that measure, they add, the U.S. has already crossed that line, ordering Department of Justice investigations into perceived political enemies, donors to the Democratic Party and news outlets ranging from CBS News to the Des Moines Register. “The administration’s authoritarian offensive has had a clear impact. It has changed how Americans behave, forcing them to think twice,” they added.The good news is that the slide into autocracy isn’t inevitable for the U.S. The courts may hold, Congress may start listening to protestors as Trump’s approval rating slides, and the Republican coalition, described as “Big Tech on one side, white nationalists on the other,” in the Boston Review, may fracture.Even so, the damage already done is real: “It is very easy to destroy something such as USAID, but it takes a long time to rebuild it both physically and also in a trust sense, both in America and abroad,” says Stockemer, noting the rapid plummet of Canadian attitudes toward the U.S., from positive to sharply negative. “I can tear down a house in a day, but it will take a year or longer to rebuild it.”This is an opinion and analysis article, and the views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those of Scientific American.