President Donald Trump hosted an Oval Office news conference alongside billionaire and Department of Government Efficiency architect Elon Musk. The world’s richest man is leaving his job having …
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President Donald Trumphosted an Oval Office news conference alongside billionaire and Department of Government Efficiency architect Elon Musk. The world’s richest man is leaving his job having accomplished far less than he set out to do, although his tumultuous tenure will likely leave a lasting mark on the federal government.
Stating that cost-cutting in the administration would continue despite his departure, Musk called DOGE “a way of life — like Buddhism.”
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Elon Musk’s effort to dramatically cut government spending is expected to fall far short of his grand early pronouncements, and perhaps even his most modest goals.
According to experts across the ideological spectrum, a major problem was a failure to deploy people who understood the inner workings of government to work alongside his team of software engineers and other high-wattage technology talent.
Even that might not have achieved Musk’s original target of $2 trillion, which is roughly the size of the entire federal deficit.
Musk, whose last day spearheading the Department of Government Efficiency is Friday, slashed his goal for savings from $2 trillion to $1 trillion to finally only $150 billion.
The current results put Musk’s efforts well short of President Bill Clinton’s initiative to streamline the federal bureaucracy, which saved the equivalent of $240 billion by the time his second term ended. The effort also reduced the federal workforce by more than 400,000 employees.
▶ Read more about Musk and DOGE
The president has arrived in Pennsylvania for a rally in suburban Pittsburgh.
The president disembarked Air Force One under a large umbrella and waved to reporters but did not offer any comments before climbing into his motorcade.
Trump is set to speak shortly about a details-to-come deal between U.S. Steel and Japan-based Nippon Steel.
The president’s pick to lead a federal watchdog agency is a former right-wing podcast host who has praised criminally charged influencer Andrew Tate as a “extraordinary human being” and promoted the false claim that the 2020 election was rigged.
If confirmed by the U.S. Senate, Paul Ingrassia would lead the Office of Special Counsel, an agency dedicated to protecting whistleblowers that is also responsible for enforcing the Hatch Act, which restricts the partisan political activities of government workers.
In a social media post on Thursday, Trump called Ingrassia a “highly respected attorney, writer and Constitutional Scholar.” Ingrassia was most recently working as the White House liaison for Homeland Security after briefly serving in the liaison position at the Justice Department.
Ingrassia called his nomination the “highest honor.”
Ingrassia has also promoted the lie that the 2020 election was stolen.
PBS filed suit Friday against the president and other administration officials to block his order stripping federal funding from the 330-station public television system, three days after NPR did the same for its radio network.
In its lawsuit, PBS relies on similar arguments, saying Trump overstepped his authority and engaged in “viewpoint discrimination” because of his claim that PBS’ news coverage is biased against conservatives.
“PBS disputes those charged assertions in the strongest possible terms,” lawyer Z.W. Julius Chen wrote in the suit. “But regardless of any policy disagreements over the role of public television, our Constitution and laws forbid the President from serving as the arbiter of the content of PBS’s programming, including by attempting to defund PBS.”
It is the latest of many legal actions against the administration for its moves, including several by media organizations impacted by Trump’s orders.
Workers, supporters of the president and others streamed into a massive warehouse on the grounds of the Irvin finishing plant in Pennsylvania to hear him speak about a details-to-come deal with Japan-based Nippon.
Stands were flanked with giant American flags hanging from the ceiling, and a banner read, “The Golden Age.”
Trump has pitched it as a partnership in which Nippon will have “partial ownership” of an enterprise that will keep the iconic American steelmaker under U.S. control. However, Nippon Steel has not said it is backing off its intention to buy the company outright for $14.9 billion.
Trump is holding the rally at a plant where local United Steelworkers union leaders broke with the international union to support the deal out of fear that the plant could close otherwise.
Workers say there is some split among unionized employees over the deal, but they like Nippon’s pledges to invest in the aging plant.
DOGE worked to eviscerate the U.S. Agency for International Development, which had provided a lifeline for impoverished people around the world.
Boston University researchers estimate that hundreds of thousands of people have already died as a result of the cuts.
The State Department responded by saying most of USAID’s programs on HIV, known as PEPFAR, remained operational. However, the statement did not address any of the other cuts while calling on “other nations to dramatically increase their humanitarian efforts.”
A U.S. diplomat at the United Nations says the United States supports Ukraine’s right to defend itself from Russia’s invasion.
Political adviser Anton Jongeneel said Russia called a U.N. Security Council meeting about Ukraine on Friday “to advance the claim that European countries, by providing assistance to Ukraine, are ‘undermining’ efforts to restore peace.”
“That is not the case. Ukraine, as a sovereign country, has the right to defend itself from aggression,” Jongeneel said.
He said Ukraine is ready to accept an immediate ceasefire and that Russia is the obstacle.
“We share the concern expressed by other members of this Council that Russia could be uninterested in peace and instead bent on achieving a military victory,” Jongeneel said. said.
He urged China, North Korea and others to stop supplying weapons or troops to fuel the war.
The tech billionaire who dominated administration briefings early in the term didn’t even get to answer a question about his own company at his farewell press conference.
Trump answered most of the questions and at the end even took one that was addressed to Musk, about the impact of his tariffs on Tesla.
The president praised Musk for assembling most of his autos in the United States, but noted that several parts are still imported both by Tesla and its competitors. He said that’ll stop.
“You build a car,” Trump said, “make it in America.”
And then the joint appearance was over. It was clear who remains at center stage.
“I don’t think Harvard has been acting very nicely,” Trump said before praising Columbia and other schools that have yielded to demands by the Trump administration as a pre-condition for restoring federal funding.
Trump accused Harvard of “trying to be a bigshot” by suing his administration to stop the freeze of more than $2 billion in grants.
The tech billionaire stood in the oval office for more than 30 minutes with a visible black eye before a reporter was able to ask him directly about it.
Initially Musk quipped that he wasn’t “anywhere near France,” a reference to video of President Macron being pushed in the face by his wife.
Then Musk said he was “just horsing around” with his 5-year-old son, named X, “and I said ‘go ahead and punch me in the face.’”
It turns out, he said, that even a 5-year-old can give you a black eye.
Trump and Musk have taken questions on an odd assortment of topics -- from colonizing Mars to the possibility of a presidential pardon for Diddy, who is still on trial.
Asked about pardoning Sean “Diddy” Combs, Trump responded, “Nobody’s asked. But I know people are thinking about it.”
The reporter acknowledged that his question was fodder for gossip columnists. But Trump took it seriously, as he did other strange queries.
The president didn’t commit one way or the other on Combs’ case, nothing, “I haven’t seen him, I haven’t spoken to him in years” but also adding, “I would certainly look at the facts.”
Trump has pardoned several high-profile supporters lately. But he insisted that Combs’ politics wouldn’t sway him.
“If I think somebody was mistreated -- whether they like me or the don’t like me -- it wouldn’t have any impact on me,” Trump said.
Trump said he spoke with French President Emanuel Macron after his wife appeared to push him as their plane landed in Vietnam.
Video captured Macron’s wife, Brigitte, pushing her husband away with both hands on his face. The couple later claimed they were just playfighting.
Asked if he had any advice for Marcon, Trump said: “Make sure the door remains closed. That was not good.”
Trump said that Macron was doing “fine” and “they’re two really good people.”
Musk got a softball question about what would be tougher: colonizing Mars or cutting government spending.
“It’s a tough call,” Musk replied.
He then began to detail how difficult it was to get his arms around government spending and cut it.
“They’re very close to an agreement on Gaza, and we’ll let you know about it during the day or maybe tomorrow,” Trump told reporters.
Trump’s optimistic outlook comes after the White House announced Thursday that Israel has accepted a new U.S. proposal for a temporary ceasefire with Hamas. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said that Israel “backed and supported” the new proposal.
Hamas officials, however, gave the Israeli-approved draft a cool response, but said they wanted to study the proposal more closely before giving a formal answer.
Musk says his government cost-cutting team was unfairly blamed for actions it never took.
He complained that about any efforts to reduce the size of government “people would assume that was done by DOGE.”
Musk added that his Department of Government Efficiency team became essentially “the DOGE bogeyman.”
“I hope to continue to provide advice whenever the president would like,” Musk said at Friday’s news conference.
“I hope so,” Trump cut in before Musk said he hopes to still achieve $1 trillion in federal spending cuts over time.
President Trump gave Musk what appeared to be a gold-colored key for his work establishing the “Department of Government Efficiency,” which sought to layoff federal workers and close government agencies to achieve cost savings.
Trump said that he would only bestow this gift to “very special people” and that it was a “presentation from our country.”
Musk likened his work in cutting the size of government to a personal form of Buddhism, saying it will continue to permeate through the government even after he’s left his post.
“It’s a way of life,” Musk said.
He also promised to continue visiting the White House and “be a friend and adviser to the president.”
Musk said that, even in his absence, his team would continue to try and cut the size of government – despite greatly exaggerating the cost savings and fiscal impact of his team’s work so far.
Trump said that even though Musk is formally departing the administration he will still be involved.
“He’s going to be back and forth, I imagine,” Trump said.
Trump noted that DOGE employees will remain embedded with government agencies and said the billionaire will probably want to keep tabs on “his baby.”
Musk himself followed the president’s oval office remarks by saying he’d be back in “this amazing room.” He praised Trump’s gold leaf additions and renovations of the fabled space.
Trump listed examples of what he called “countless wasteful and unnecessary contracts” that DOGE has cancelled, including Education Department diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives; temporary housing for migrants in New York City and “social and behavioral change” in Uganda.
“We are totally committed to making the DOGE cuts permanent,” he said.
While Trump celebrated DOGE’s slashing of federal government contracts, billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk accomplished far less than he hoped. He dramatically reduced his target for cutting spending — from $2 trillion to $1 trillion to $150 billion — and increasingly expressed frustration about resistance to his goals.
Trump is terminating the head of the National Portrait Gallery, continuing his aggressive moves to reshape the federal government’s cultural institutions.
Trump announced Friday on his Truth Social platform that he was ousting Director Kim Sajet, calling her a “ highly partisan person, and a strong supporter of DEI, which is totally inappropriate for her position.”
Sajet, a Dutch citizen raised in Australia, was appointed to the post in 2013 by President Barack Obama. She had previously served as president of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania..
Trump has repeatedly criticized the national network of museums and cultural centers as leftist and anti-American. Earlier this spring, he ousted the leadership of the Kennedy Center for Performing Arts, dismissing the chairman and president and replacing most of the board with loyalists, who then voted Trump the new chairman.
In early May, he abruptly dismissed Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden.
Trump kicked off his Oval Office press conference with Musk with some warm words for the billionaire Tesla CEO.
“Today it’s about a man named Elon,” Trump said.
He praised Musk’s “very great talents” and said that he’d led “the most sweeping and consequential” efforts to slash the federal workforce and reduce the size of government.
Trump added to Musk, “We’ll remember you” while announcing more cuts in the future.
But Trump also lamented that the process was taking a long time: “Sadly, it takes a long time.”
Musk wore a black baseball cap reading “DOGE” and offered brief comments like “yeah” and other words of agreement to Trump’s comments.
During a Friday news conference, Trump celebrated an appeals court decision made Thursday that allowed him, for now, to continue collecting tariffs under an emergency powers law.
“The tariffs are so important,” he said. “That’s why were were so happy with the decision yesterday where the tariffs continued. Because without the tariffs, our nation would be imperiled.”
Musk’s status as a special government employee is expiring. He says he’s stepping back from politics to spend more time running his embattled companies.
His DOGE initiative fell vastly short of the $2 trillion the tech mogul initially promised to save. It did gut some agencies like USAID, the United States’ main foreign aid arm.
Former USAID global health chief Atul Gawande and researchers at Boston University estimate that disease and malnutrition deaths from the cuts will be in the hundreds of thousands in the first year alone.
In a response to the earlier post by President Trump, the Chinese embassy in Washington said the two sides “have maintained communication over their respective concerns in the economic and trade fields on various bilateral and multilateral occasions at multiple levels” since the Geneva talk.
But the embassy also said the Chinese government had “repeatedly raised concerns with the U.S. regarding its abuse of export control measures in the semiconductor sector and other related practices.”
“China once again urges the US to immediately correct its erroneous actions, cease discriminatory restrictions against China and jointly uphold the consensus reached at the high-level talks in Geneva,” the embassy said.
Ernst was fielding another question on potential changes to Medicaid eligibility at a town hall in north-central Iowa on Friday when she quipped that “we all are going to die.”
She had largely kept her cool as shouts and groans emerged from the crowd at a high school in Parkersburg, Iowa, as she defended President Trump’s “big, beautiful” tax and immigration package. But as she talked through the types of people that Republicans say should not be covered by Medicaid, including immigrants in the U.S. illegally, someone in the crowd yelled that people are going to die.
“People are not ... well, we all are going to die,” Ernst said as the crowd booed. “So, for heaven’s sakes. For heaven’s sakes, folks.”
“What you don’t want to do is listen to me when I say that we are going to focus on those that are most vulnerable,” Ernst went on. “Those that meet the eligibility requirements for Medicaid we will protect.”
Biden used his first public remarks since his office announced his diagnosis with an aggressive form of prostate cancer to honor his late son, Beau, and other military veterans.
The Democrat spoke in a loud steady voice as he addressed an annual gathering in honor of Memorial Day at Veterans Memorial Park in New Castle, Delaware, not far from his home in Wilmington.
“This day is the 10th anniversary of the loss of my son Beau, who spent a year in Iraq, and, to be honest, it’s a hard day,” Biden said. “Being with all of you, quite frankly, makes things a little bit easier, it really does. So, thank you for allowing me to grieve with you.”
Biden called upon the group to remember the sacrifices of those lost in battle, whose echoes he said can still be heard urging citizens to “stay true to what America stands for.”
“They’re not asking us to do their jobs,” he said. “They’re asking us to do our job, to protect our nation, in our time, now, to defend democracy, be part of something bigger than ourselves.”
The major indexes aren’t moving much as companies navigate the challenges created by President Donald Trump’s on-and-off tariffs.
Despite stronger than expected quarterly profit and revenues, shares in Gap fell nearly 20% after the clothing retailer said import taxes could cost it up to $300 million this fiscal year.
Investors worry that Trump’s policies could grind the economy into a recession, slash companies’ profits and layer even more challenges on households already sick of inflation. Stocks rallied after Trump paused his tariffs on China and the European Union. A U.S. court then on Wednesday blocked many of Trump’s sweeping tariffs. But the White House is appealing, so uncertainty continues.
Trump briefly shook markets Friday y posting a fresh threat against China, “So much for being Mr. NICE GUY!” But its impact seems limited, and futures for U.S. stock indexes quickly pared their losses.
▶ Read more on today’s market movements
Kennedy himself announced the changes in a 58-second video posted on X on Tuesday. CDC officials referred questions to Kennedy and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
Thursday’s website update says the shots “may” be given to children ages 6 months to 17 years who do not have moderate or severe immune system problems, if parents decide to get their children vaccinated in consultation with a doctor.
This kind of “shared decision-making” guidance means health insurers must still pay for the vaccinations, according to the CDC, but experts say vaccination rates tend to be lower. Already, just 13% of children and 23% of adults have received the 2024-25 COVID-19 vaccine, according to CDC data.
A CDC advisory panel is set to meet in June to make recommendations about the fall shots. Kennedy, a leading anti-vaccine advocate before becoming health secretary, decided not to wait.
The nation’s top public health agency posted new recommendations that say healthy children “may” — not should — get COVID-19 vaccinations.
The change comes days after U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced that COVID-19 vaccines will no longer be recommended for healthy children and pregnant women.
The updated guidance on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s website does not speak to any change in recommendations for pregnant women, which was heavily criticized by medical and public health experts.
CDC and HHS officials did not immediately respond to questions about the new guidance.
Senators, governors, business executives and other prominent figures reportedly received messages from someone impersonating Susie Wiles.
A White House official said Friday that the cybersecurity of its staff is taken seriously and the matter is under investigation. The official was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity. The FBI did not immediately respond to a message seeking comment.
The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday that the text messages and phone calls appeared to be from someone who gained access to the contacts in Wiles’ personal cellphone, but did not come from her number. As a co-manager of Trump’s campaign before taking on the lynchpin role in his new administration, Wiles has amassed a powerful network of contacts.
Recipients heard a voice that sounded like Wiles that may have been generated by artificial intelligence, or received text messages they initially thought were official White House requests, according to the report.
Justice Jackson echoed what U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani wrote in ruling that ending the legal protections early while a legal challenge continues in Boston would leave people with a stark choice: flee the country or risk losing everything. Talwani, an appointee of Democratic President Barack Obama, found that revocations of parole can be done, but on a case-by-case basis.
The Justice Department argues that the protections were always meant to be temporary, and the Department of Homeland Security has the power to revoke them without court interference. Taking on each case individually would be a “gargantuan task,” Solicitor General D. John Sauer argued.
Biden used humanitarian parole more than any other president, employing a special presidential authority in effect since 1952. Beneficiaries included the 532,000 people who have come to the United States with financial sponsors since late 2022, leaving home countries fraught with “instability, dangers and deprivations,” as attorneys for the migrants said.
The Supreme Court ruling on Friday again cleared the way for the Trump administration to strip temporary legal protections from hundreds of thousands of immigrants, pushing the total number of people who could be newly exposed to deportation to nearly 1 million.
The justices lifted a lower-court order that kept humanitarian parole protections in place for more than 500,000 migrants from four countries: Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela. The court has also allowed the administration to revoke temporary legal status from about 350,000 Venezuelan migrants in another case.
Trump’s administration filed an emergency appeal after a federal judge in Boston blocked its push to end the program.
In a dissent joined by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote that the majority is having “the lives of half a million migrants unravel all around us before the courts decide their legal claims.”
DHS says the list is based on numerous factors including whether the cities or localities identify themselves as sanctuary jurisdictions, how much they have complied with federal immigration enforcement and whether they restrict information-sharing or otherwise protect people in the country illegally. It promises regular updates.
Mayor Brandon Scott said on X that Baltimore is “not a sanctuary city,” and does not control its jails, where ICE often asks for advance notice before immigrants are released. But Baltimore is proud to be a “welcoming city” and is preparing for litigation if needed to protect its immigrants and federal money, Scott said: “We are better because of our immigrant neighbors, and are not about to sell them out to this administration.”
The Las Vegas government said on X that it isn’t sure why DHS included it on the list, and they hope to “clear up this misunderstanding.” The city said its law enforcement and jail authorities comply with federal law.
