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Secretary of State Marco Rubio rolled out the first stage of a major plan to reorganize the US State Department today.
Here’s a look at the changes, according to a senior State Department official and documents obtained by CNN. eliminating 132 domestic offices
• Eliminating 132 domestic offices
• Cutting around 700 positions in Washington, DC
• Closing offices focused on war crimes and global conflict
The State Department argued the changes are necessary to maintain the department’s efficacy and relevance, with a senior State Department official calling the current department organization chart “bloated” and arguing it has had a “deleterious effect on foreign policy.”
The senior State Department official said the changes wouldn’t result in immediate layoffs but signaled that officials could lose their jobs. As part of the reorganization, 700 positions within the Washington headquarters are expected to be eliminated, the official said.
“Today is the day. Under @POTUS’ leadership and at my direction, we are reversing decades of bloat and bureaucracy at the State Department. These sweeping changes will empower our talented diplomats to Put America and Americans first,” Rubio posted on X.
The goal is for the department to be reorganized in a way that is “structurally in line” with what the administration wants to accomplish, the official said. The changes would bring the total number of offices at the department from 734 to 602.
The long-anticipated reorganization proposal focuses on the domestic offices to start, not overseas embassies and consulates. Rumors about the proposed changes had stirred fear and anxiety among the State Department workforce.
Read more about the changes here.
A federal appeals court heard arguments this morning over the Trump administration’s request to lift a ruling that’s preventing enforcement of a ban on transgender service members as the government prepares to ask the Supreme Court to take up the issue.
A Justice Department attorney pressed a three-judge panel of the US DC Circuit Court of Appeals to put on hold a ruling issued last month by a federal judge in Washington, DC, that indefinitely blocked the controversial policy.
More about the case: The court has issued a short-term hold on the ruling from US District Judge Ana Reyes while it considers whether to pause her ruling for a longer period of time. But the appeals court has said it would lift that temporary hold if “any action occurs that negatively impacts service members under” the Pentagon’s new policies.
However, the policy is still on hold nationwide because of a separate ruling issued by a federal judge in Washington state. A San Francisco-based appeals court last week rejected that administration’s request to put that ruling on hold while the case unfolds.
Asked Tuesday by one of the appeals court judges in DC about the state of play, DOJ attorney Jason Manion said the administration planned to “imminently” ask the Supreme Court to put the ruling out west on hold.
It’s possible that the high court’s decision in that forthcoming emergency appeal could provide guidance to the judges overseeing the DC case on how they should proceed with the administration’s request.
The panel of DC Circuit judges includes Judge Cornelia Pillard, an appointee of former President Barack Obama, and Judges Gregory Katsas and Neomi Rao, both of whom were appointed to the bench by President Donald Trump.
During Trump’s first term, the high court allowed a similar policy from Trump to take effect, but did not rule on whether it was constitutional before President Joe Biden unraveled the ban in 2021.
President Donald Trump said that he spoke to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on the phone Tuesday morning.
The pair discussed trade and Iran, among other issues, according to the president’s Truth Social post.
Trump relayed unity between the two leaders, writing that “the call went very well” and they are “on the same side of every issue.”
European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde said today she hopes President Donald Trump doesn’t follow through on threats he’s made to fire Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell.
“We’re both used to political pressure in one way or the other,” she told CNBC in an interview. Lagarde refused to answer whether the prospect of Powell being fired by Trump, which is legally a gray area, will weigh on financial markets.
“I hope it is not on the table,” she added.
Trump in his attacks on Powell has commended the ECB for lowering interest rates seven times over the past year, the most recent of which came last week.
“Europe has already ‘lowered’ seven times,” Trump wrote in a post on his social media platform on Monday. “Powell has always been ‘To (sic) Late,’ except when it came to the Election period when he lowered in order to help Sleepy Joe Biden, later Kamala, get elected. How did that work out?” he said.
President Donald Trump’s Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff is expected to travel to Moscow this week, Russian presidential aide Yuri Ushakov told reporters today, according to state news agencies RIA Novosti and TASS.
The Kremlin did not disclose any further details about the visit.
This will mark Witkoff’s fourth visit to Russia this year. He last traveled to St. Petersburg two weeks ago for a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin to discuss a possible settlement in Ukraine.
Before that, Witkoff visited Moscow in mid-March, holding Ukraine talks with senior Russian officials and later with Putin. His first visit took place in early February and included discussions on a potential prisoner exchange involving US citizen Mark Fogel.
Secretary of Education Linda McMahon said today she spoke to the presidents of Columbia and Harvard about “how we could make sure that the universities were abiding by the law,” insisting the Trump administration’s recent demands are not about freedom of speech.
“I made it very clear that these are not First Amendment infractions. This is civil rights. This is making sure that students on all campuses can come and learn and be safe … and that is why we have had these funds either withheld or frozen during this period of time of negotiation,” she said on CNBC’s “Squawk Box.”
The education secretary emphasized that the letter Harvard University received from the administration that outlined a slew of demands tied to federal funding was a “point of negotiation.”
Harvard President Alan M. Garber said last week the demands in the letter were “unprecedented” and made “to control the Harvard community,” adding that the university “will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights.”
On Monday, Harvard sued the Trump administration over the government’s funding freeze, calling it “unlawful and beyond the government’s authority.”
McMahon said today that the letter was not a “final offer,” saying she hoped the university will “come back to the table.”
McMahon said she’s “pleased” with negotiations with Columbia University — which made policy changes in March in response to Trump administration demands — though she said the negotiations are not finalized.
McMahon also addressed the news that the Department of Education will restart collecting federal student loans in default on May 5, telling CNBC, “It is not fair that other people are having to assume this, you know, this burden that other taxpayers are paying for these loans.”
Harvard University sued the Trump administration Monday in a new escalation of the fight over institutional oversight, independence and federal funding for the Ivy League school.
Here are key things to know about the lawsuit:
- What Harvard is saying: University President Alan M. Garber said in a letter to the Harvard community that the administration’s recent actions — including a $2.2 billion federal funding freeze at Harvard, with even more money potentially on the line — “have stark real-life consequences for patients, students, faculty, staff, researchers, and the standing of American higher education in the world.” Garber, who is Jewish, said in his letter he knows there are valid concerns to the rise of antisemitism and that the university has task force groups designated to help “address intolerance” in our community.
- Trump administration’s demands: The Trump administration wants Harvard to give it access to all university reports on antisemitism and anti-Muslim bias on campus generated since October 2023, as it ramps up a confrontation with the school that risks billions in federal money amid a broader push to bring elite US colleges in line with its political ideology.
- Why this matters: Harvard emerged as the first elite US university to publicly rebuke the White House’s demands, which Trump officials have said aim to combat antisemitism following contentious campus protests in response to the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza.
Read more about the lawsuit here.
President Donald Trump’s unpredictable tariff policy and countermeasures by America’s trading partners will likely deal a heavy blow to economies worldwide, with US prosperity hit particularly hard, the International Monetary Fund warned.
Global economic growth will slow down to 2.8% this year, from 3.3% last year and significantly below the historical average, the IMF forecast in its World Economic Outlook today. The slowdown expected in the United States is even steeper, with its economy likely to grow only 1.8%, compared with a 2.8% expansion in 2024.
Both predictions are more pessimistic than what the fund projected in January, before a flurry of tariff announcements by the US president took America’s average import tax to its highest level in a century.
“The swift escalation of trade tensions and extremely high levels of policy uncertainty are expected to have a significant impact on global economic activity,” the Washington, DC-based institution said. And risks remain “firmly tilted to the downside,” it added.
More on Trump’s tariffs: They account for almost half of the sharp downgrade in the IMF’s US growth forecast for this year, Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas, the economic counsellor at the fund, wrote in a blog post, noting that uncertainty over policy dented demand in the US even before the recent tariff announcements.
The latest World Economic Outlook was put together under “exceptional” circumstances, the IMF said. Trump’s April 2 unveiling of sweeping tariffs “forced us to jettison our projections – nearly finalized at that point,” it wrote.
Underscoring the importance of trade to the economic outlook, the IMF said ratcheting up of trade tensions combined with uncertainty about where trade policies are headed, could further reduce growth, whereas “de-escalation from current tariff rates and new agreements providing clarity and stability in trade policies” could do the opposite.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth continued to double down on Tuesday that three senior Pentagon officials who were fired last week were leaking information to the press, and that he did not share any classified information in a second Signal group chat reported over the weekend.
“When we had leaks, which we have had here, we did a serious leak investigation. And through that leak investigation, unfortunately, we found some folks that we believe were not holding to the protocols that we hold dear here at the Defense Department. Through that investigation, they have been moved on, and that investigation continues,” Hegseth said Tuesday morning in an interview on “Fox and Friends.”
Hegseth also confirmed the existence of a second Signal group chat — members of which included his wife, brother, and personal lawyer — in which he shared sensitive military operation details. He said Tuesday that “was shared over Signal, then and now, however you characterize it, was informal, unclassified coordinations for media coordinations and other things.”
More context: Hegseth’s comments come a day after one of the officials, Dan Caldwell, who has known Hegseth for years and was serving as his senior adviser, told Tucker Carlson in an interview on Monday that he did not leak or photograph classified material and has not been polygraphed. Caldwell also said that as of Monday, neither he nor the other two officials – Hegseth’s former deputy chief of staff Darin Selnick, and Colin Carroll, chief of staff to the Deputy Defense Secretary — have been told what they were investigated for or if there is still an active investigation. Caldwell, Selnick, and Carroll denied leaking information in a joint statement on Saturday.
Hegseth said the investigation, which is being led by the Office of Special Investigations, or OSI, is still ongoing. Asked by Fox’s Brian Kilmeade on Tuesday why the officials were not polygraphed, Hegseth reiterated that the investigation has “led to some unfortunate places, people I have known for quite some time.”
He added that believes the information about the second Signal chat came from one of the fired individuals in an effort to “sabotage the agenda of president or the secretary.”
A group of Venezuelan migrants the Trump administration has targeted for removal under a sweeping wartime authority told the Supreme Court that the notice immigration officials provided to them about their impending removal falls short of complying with an earlier order from the high court.
English-only notices provided fewer than 24 hours before a deportation under the Alien Enemies Act “cannot by any stretch be said to comply with this court’s order that notice must be sufficient to permit individuals actually to seek habeas review,” the American Civil Liberties Union, which is representing the migrants, said in a brief filed Monday.
That is a reference to an opaque order the Supreme Court handed down in a separate but related AEA case on April 7. In that order, all nine justices agreed the Trump administration needs to provide people it was targeting under the act enough notice that they could challenge their deportations. But the justices provided no clarity about how much notice is sufficient and the Trump administration — eager to restart the removals — took a minimalist view of what it was required to do.
The ACLU also asked the Supreme Court in its latest brief to hear arguments on its request to block Trump officials from further deportations under the act while the underlying litigation continues. In an early morning order on Saturday, the court halted deportations under the act for now while it reviews the ACLU request.
GOP Rep. Byron Donalds of Florida faced frequent shouting from the crowd at a contentious town hall last night, with a number of attendees asking critical questions about the Trump administration and the Department of Government Efficiency.
The congressman repeatedly asked the crowd to let him speak, saying, “do you want to yell, or do you want to hear?” At another point, he told one attendee that she was being disrespectful for disrupting.
During the event, Donalds was asked what oversight he is imposing on Elon Musk and DOGE as a member of the House Oversight Committee — to loud applause, cheering and whistling.
The reaction from the crowd was mixed throughout the event as Donalds received applause alongside boos at various points.
“We actually have to let the DOGE actually finish its work. What they are examining right now is inefficiency in the federal system,” the congressman said.
Watch more:
@cnnAt a town hall in Estero, Florida, Rep. Byron Donalds (R-FL) responds to a question about Elon Musk and DOGE. #cnn #news
The price of gold jumped to a fresh record high today, as concerns about President Donald Trump’s intention to oust Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell weighs on investors.
Gold, considered a safer financial bet amid economic uncertainty, rose to a new record of $3,500.05 per troy ounce at one point, according to Refinitiv data, and last traded at $3,479.5 per troy ounce.
Gold has risen over 31% so far this year. It’s been one of the biggest winners as Trump advances his global tariff agenda.
In contrast to gold, investors have been dumping bonds. Heavy selling pressure continued during the trading session with the yield on 10-year Treasuries, a benchmark for various debt, increasing. Bond yields and prices trade inversely.
The rise in gold prices follows a widespread sell-off in the US, where all three major indexes — the Dow, the S&P 500 and the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite — slumped on Monday.
Weeks of market turmoil sparked by Trump’s tariffs have been further fueled by his threats to fire Powell after repeated public attacks on him, sending stocks into deeper volatility over recent trading sessions. Trump has lambasted the Fed chief for not lowering interest rates.
President Donald Trump announced last night that he has agreed to deliver commencement addresses at the University of Alabama and the United States Military Academy at West Point.
The president did not provide specific dates or times for the speeches but encouraged followers to “stay tuned” for those details in a social media post.
The announcement came the same day that Harvard University sued the Trump administration in a new escalation of the fight over institutional oversight, independence and federal funding for the school.
