Trump, Donald J

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      Trump Targets Agency Overseeing the Presidio, a Cherished San Francisco Park

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      President Trump moved to drastically shrink the Presidio Trust, the federal agency that oversees the Presidio of San Francisco, a national park at the base of the Golden Gate Bridge and one of the city’s most cherished public spaces, in an executive order issued Wednesday evening.The order, which calls for “dramatically” reducing the size of the federal government, said the Presidio Trust was an “unnecessary governmental entity.” The order also targeted three other agencies — the Inter-American Foundation, the United States African Development Foundation and the United States Institute of Peace — by requiring them to reduce their work and personnel “to the minimum presence and function required by law.”The Presidio Trust was established by Congress in 1996 to help oversee the Presidio, a 1,500-acre former military base that today includes hiking trails, museums, schools, campgrounds, restaurants, a golf course and a hotel, according to its website. The National Park Service and the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy, a nonprofit group, also help to oversee the park.The trust is led by a board of directors — six of whom are appointed by the president — and employs a staff of ecologists, building stewards, utility workers, tech professionals and others.It wasn’t immediately clear what effect the executive order would have on the park. The Presidio Trust did not immediately respond to a request for comment early Thursday.Nancy Pelosi, the former speaker of the House and a frequent critic of Mr. Trump’s, played a central role in the creation of the trust, and the park is in her district. Ms. Pelosi’s office told The San Francisco Standard that it was reviewing the order.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      A Trump DOGE Dividend Could Raise Inflation

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      President Trump floated giving taxpayers a piece of any savings that Elon Musk’s cost-cutting generates, which could reignite inflation.President Trump’s speech at the FII Priority conference in Miami Beach was standing room only, with boldfaced names of the business world in attendance.Al Drago for The New York TimesDealBook’s Lauren Hirsch is in Miami Beach at the FII Priority conference, where President Trump floated the idea of sending Americans a dividend or refund check from money saved by DOGE rather than use all of it to pay down the debt. More below.Separately, since you may read about this elsewhere, I thought I’d share with you a secret I’ve been keeping: For the past eight years, I’ve been working on a follow-up to my book, “Too Big to Fail.” I’ve written what I think of as a prequel: a nonfiction, character-driven, behind-the-scenes account of 1929, the year of the most infamous market crash of all time. The book will be out in October. I’ll talk more about it then.Trump floats a new stimulus ideaPresident Trump swept into Miami Beach on Wednesday to speak at the FII Priority conference with yet another eyebrow-raising idea: using the savings he says Elon Musk’s cost-cutting team is finding to send taxpayers checks and repay the national debt.It isn’t clear whether this would actually happen. But Trump’s potential move — described to a crowd that included Musk; Eric Schmidt, formerly of Google; and Michael Klein, the deal-maker mogul — raises questions about the president’s economic priorities.What Trump described: forking over 20 percent of the savings that Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency initiative has cut from government spending “to American citizens” and 20 percent to paying down the national debt. (He didn’t say what would happen to the remaining 60 percent.)What is Trump actually trying to accomplish? He has promised to cut the national debt, though critics say his plans for sweeping tax cuts and more would aggravate the nation’s fiscal burden.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trump Says DOGE Savings Could Be Returned to Taxpayers

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      President Trump said on Wednesday evening that the newly established Department of Government Efficiency might return a portion of the savings accrued through job cuts and other budget curbs to American taxpayers.The idea of giving back 20 percent of the money saved as a result of initiatives recommended by the new department, known as DOGE, is “under consideration,” said Mr. Trump. The potential initiative, he said, was “a new concept” under which his administration would give “20 percent of the DOGE savings to American citizens” and “20 percent goes to paying down debt.” (He didn’t mention what would be done with the other 60 percent of the money.)It was not immediately clear whether Mr. Trump was referring to paying off consumer debt or paying off the national debt, which currently stands at $36 trillion, but his comments suggested that he may have been talking about both. In January before Mr. Trump was inaugurated, Elon Musk, the entrepreneur who is leading DOGE, set expectations for cost cutting at $1 trillion.Mr. Trump provided scant details on the potential taxpayer returns, including on whether the proposal was even feasible or if he would need congressional approval. A White House spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Mr. Trump made his remarks during an international investment conference in Miami Beach, Fla., hosted by the Future Investment Initiative, a Saudi Arabian foundation that promotes the kingdom’s economy and cultural priorities through a variety of annual events.The president spoke to a packed auditorium with an audience that featured Mr. Musk; Yasir al-Rumayyan, the governor of the Saudi Arabian sovereign-wealth fund; Princess Reema Bandar al-Saud, the Saudi Arabian ambassador to the United States; and Gianni Infantino, the president of FIFA, soccer’s global governing body.Mr. Trump praised the work that DOGE was doing, promising that the department would save “billions, hundreds of billions” of dollars in wasteful spending.And he stressed the importance of paying down debt.“If it were a real estate balance sheet, the debt is tiny, but we still want to pay it down,” he said.He added: “We don’t look at it as a piece of real estate. It’s America.” More

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      Trump Says He Would Have Had a ‘Very Nasty Life’ if He’d Lost the Election

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      President Trump said Wednesday he would have had a “very nasty life” if he lost the presidential election, a surprisingly public acknowledgment that his legal challenges could have consumed his life and brought jail time.“If I lost, it would have been very bad,” Mr. Trump said at an investment summit in Miami Beach. “It was dangerous, actually very dangerous.”When Mr. Trump won in November, the Justice Department abandoned the two federal cases against him, and a judge in Manhattan issued an unconditional discharge in his hush money case.Mr. Trump gave voice to something that his advisers had long said he had in the back of his mind as he campaigned. But he did not publicly acknowledge throughout 2024 that he was campaigning for his freedom as much as for the White House itself.The president made the comments in response to a question about how he would spend a year if granted a sabbatical. Mr. Trump did not directly answer the question, saying he was honored to be president. But he said it took “a certain amount of courage” to run again because of the personal risks.Mr. Trump also said he disagreed with historians’ assessment that Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln, who was assassinated, were the two most mistreated presidents.“Nobody was treated like me,” he said. “Nobody, and I will tell you, you learn a lot about yourself, but there’s nothing I’d rather do.”During the presidential campaign, Mr. Trump faced dozens of criminal charges across four different cases. Jack Smith, who served as a special counsel, charged him in two different cases, one related to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol and another related to his handling of classified government documents after he left the White House in 2021. The documents case had been dismissed by a Trump-appointed judge, but Mr. Smith’s team was appealing it.He also faced charges in Georgia over attempts to overturn his election loss in 2020, and he was found guilty on all counts in the hush-money case in New York, where he could have faced up to four years in prison.Maggie Haberman More

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      DOGE Cuts 9/11 Survivors’ Fund, and Republicans Join Democrats in Rebuke

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      After 20 percent of the World Trade Center Health Program staff was terminated last week, Democratic lawmakers were outraged. On Wednesday, Republican lawmakers joined them.In a rare pushback against President Donald J. Trump, a coalition of congressional Republicans from the New York area rebuked the president for cuts to a federal program that administers aid to emergency workers and others suffering from toxins related to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.In a letter to Mr. Trump, seven Republicans urged Mr. Trump “as a native New Yorker who lived in New York City as it recovered from the 9/11 terrorist attacks” to reverse the cuts to the World Trade Center Health Program and rehire staff members who were fired several days ago.They echoed the immediate outcry from Democratic lawmakers and advocates when the cuts were made beginning late last week, as part of Elon Musk’s so-called department of government efficiency, or DOGE, which is cutting spending and eliminating jobs across a wide swath of federal agencies. On Monday, New York’s Democratic senators, Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand, issued a letter demanding the cuts be restored.The initial reaction from Republicans was more muted, but by Wednesday, as it became clearer that the blowback to the firings was widespread, the Republican resistance grew more vocal, especially from districts in and around New York City, where the memory of 9/11 still resonates powerfully.“This staff reduction will only make it more difficult for the program to supervise its contracts and to care for its members who are comprised of the brave men and women who ran towards danger and helped in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks,” the congressional members wrote in the letter.It was largely written by Representative Andrew R. Garbarino, a Republican from Long Island, and co-signed by five other Republican congressional colleagues from New York and Representative Chris Smith from New Jersey. The other congressional co-signers were Nick LaLota, Mike Lawler, Claudia Tenney, Nicole Malliotakis and Nick Langworthy, all supporters of Mr. Trump.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      So, You Want to Get Rid of the Penny. Do You Have a Plan for the Nickel?

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      President Trump’s plan to eliminate the penny could save the government money, but there’s no guarantee.President Trump recently ordered the U.S. Mint to stop producing pennies, for a simple-sounding reason. Each penny, he said, has “literally cost us more than 2 cents.”He’s right. Since 2006, the government has spent more money minting pennies than those pennies have been worth. More

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      What Is Elon Musk’s Job?

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      Even as the billionaire tech executive Elon Musk is seemingly everywhere in Washington, his role remains murky.Early on in his interview with President Trump and Elon Musk yesterday, Fox News’s Sean Hannity tried ever so gently to get to the bottom of an important question: What does Musk actually do?“He’s your tech support?” Hannity asked, referring to the words on the T-shirt Musk had opened his blazer to reveal a few moments earlier.Musk said he was.“He’s much more than that,” Trump insisted.The exchange did little to answer the question. Musk’s precise role and responsibilities remain so vague, and so shrouded in secrecy, that even he and the president haven’t quite agreed on what to call it, or exactly how to talk about it.Trump once said that it would be Musk’s job to “lead” the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, but a court filing this week said he was not actually the administrator of that effort — although it did not say who was. The White House has called Musk a “special government employee,” and Karoline Leavitt, the press secretary, insisted that the department merely advised agencies, without the authority to fire people.“He’s more powerful than a cabinet secretary, but he is not Senate-confirmed,” said Jessica Riedl, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a former Republican Senate aide, who added that, at the same time, Musk offers little public information about his day-to-day activities.The White House has not laid out exactly how many people are part of Musk’s team, or exactly what they are doing. For all of Musk’s promises of transparency, the public is learning about his team’s work largely through reporting and through, as my colleague Zach Montague pointed out today, legal filings. Even judges are having difficulties ascertaining basic facts about the group’s incursion into agencies and the data its staff is collecting.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      European Leaders Try to Recalibrate After Trump Sides With Russia on Ukraine

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      The American president’s latest remarks embracing Vladimir Putin’s narrative that Ukraine is to blame for the war have compounded the sense of alarm among traditional allies.President Emmanuel Macron of France called a second emergency meeting of European allies on Wednesday seeking to recalibrate relations with the United States as President Trump upends international politics by rapidly changing American alliances.Mr. Macron had already assembled a dozen European leaders in Paris on Monday after Mr. Trump and his new team angered and confused America’s traditional allies by suggesting that the United States would rapidly retreat from its security role in Europe and planned to proceed with peace talks with Russia — without Europe or Ukraine at the table.Mr. Trump’s remarks late on Tuesday, when he sided fully with Russia’s narrative blaming Ukraine for the war, have now fortified the impression that the United States is prepared to abandon its role as a European ally and switch sides to embrace President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.It was a complete reversal of historic alliances that left many in Europe stunned and fearful.“What’s happening is very bad. It’s a reversal of the state of the world since 1945,” Jean- Yves Le Drian, a former French foreign minister, said on French radio Wednesday morning.“It’s our security he’s putting at risk,” he said, referring to President Trump. “We must wake up.”Fear that Mr. Trump is ready to abandon Ukraine and has accepted Russian talking points has been particularly acute in Eastern and Central Europe, where memories are long and bitter of the West’s efforts to appease Hitler in Munich in 1938 and its assent to Stalin’s demands at the Yalta Conference in 1945 for a Europe cleaved in two.“Even Poland’s betrayal in Yalta lasted longer than Ukraine’s betrayal in Riyadh,” Jaroslaw Walesa, a Polish lawmaker and the son of Poland’s anti-Communist Solidarity trade union leader, Lech Walesa, said Wednesday on social media, referring to the American-Russian talks in Saudi Arabia on Tuesday.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More