The White House has put in motion plans for its largest wave of federal layoffs. In a memo sent to government agencies on Wednesday, the Office of Management and Budget and the Office of Personnel Management said departments should prepare for major “reductions in force” over the next two weeks. The order exempts postal workers, military personnel, political appointees and immigration and law enforcement jobs. Since coming to office, the Trump administration has laid off tens of thousands of probationary workers, put employees on administrative leave and pushed others to prematurely resign by offering “buyouts” and imposing a return-to-office policy.

Trump also moved on Wednesday to expand Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency,” requiring government contracts, grants and loans come under a centralized payment system that will be overseen by DOGE.

President Trump touted his plans for more layoffs as he held his first Cabinet meeting Wednesday. Trump asked Elon Musk to address the meeting first, even though Musk is not a Cabinet member. Wearing a T-shirt that read “Tech Support,” Musk berated government workers who failed to respond to his email demanding an accounting of their recent work accomplishments. Meanwhile, Trump announced more plans to slash government agencies, including the EPA and the Education Department.

President Donald Trump: “I spoke with Lee Zeldin, and he thinks he’s going to be cutting 65 or so percent of the people from environmental. And we’re going to speed up the process, too, at the same time. You had a lot of people that weren’t doing their job — they were just obstructionists — and a lot of people that didn’t exist. I guess, Lee, too, he found a lot of empty spots at — the people weren’t there. They didn’t exist. And I think education is going to be one of those. You go around Washington, you see all these buildings for the Department of Education. We want to move education back to the states, where it belongs.”

In more EPA news, Administrator Lee Zeldin is calling for a repeal of the 2009 “endangerment finding,” which classifies greenhouse gases as a public health threat and allows for climate regulations.

At Wednesday’s Cabinet meeting, Trump also said he is planning a 25% tariff on goods from the European Union.

In Washington, D.C., the People’s Action Institute led protests Wednesday outside the headquarters of Blackstone, UnitedHealth and American Gas Association. All three stand to benefit from the GOP budget framework passed Tuesday, which would shower tax cuts on the wealthy while slashing essential services like Medicaid.

Protester: “Use our taxpayer dollars for our healthcare, for our housing and to transition away from fossil fuels.”

U.S. aid projects around the world received termination notices from the White House early today as the Trump administration announced it was cutting 90% of USAID’s overseas contracts and $60 billion in U.S. assistance around the world.

On Wednesday, dozens of AIDS activists and fired USAID workers staged a die-in at the Capitol rotunda of the Cannon congressional office building as they chanted, “Congress has blood on its hands! Unfreeze aid now!” The protest came hours before Chief Justice John Roberts allowed the Trump administration to miss a court-ordered midnight deadline to release more than $1.5 billion in frozen foreign aid payments.

In Sudan, the freeze on U.S. aid has forced up to 80% of emergency food kitchens — or about 1,100 facilities — to close, exacerbating Sudan’s food crisis. The BBC quoted one aid worker who said the cuts left people “screaming from hunger in the streets.” Separately, the World Food Programme has temporarily halted aid distribution in North Darfur’s Zamzam camp due to intensified fighting between Sudan’s army and RSF paramilitary forces.

On Wednesday, a senior U.N. aid official briefed the Security Council on Sudan’s crisis.

Edem Wosornu: “Nearly two years of relentless conflict in Sudan have inflicted immense suffering and turned parts of the country into a hellscape. Some of the humanitarian dimensions of this crisis bear repeating: more than 12 million people displaced, including 3.4 million people who have fled across Sudan’s borders; more than half of the country — 24.6 million people — experiencing acute hunger.”

The World Health Organization warns an outbreak of an unidentified illness in the Democratic Republic of the Congo has spread to more than 419 cases and caused at least 53 deaths. The disease causes symptoms consistent with hemorrhagic fever, can kill within 48 hours of symptom onset and has a fatality rate of over 12%. The outbreak is believed to have started in a village where three young children died after consuming a bat carcass.

Israel has released more than 600 Palestinian prisoners after Hamas handed over the remains of four Israeli hostages as part of the Gaza ceasefire deal. Al Jazeera reports Israel has delayed the release of 46 Palestinian prisoners, including 24 children from Gaza. Many of the newly freed prisoners showed clear signs of torture, starvation and severe medical neglect. This is a freed prisoner, Eyad al-Saudi, speaking from Khan Younis.

Eyad al-Saudi: “Praise be to God, we feel great. But the joy is not complete. Why? Because there are young men who are still imprisoned and suffering. The period of captivity was not just being held captive. It was torture, torture beyond description.”

The Palestinian Health Ministry reports hospitals across Gaza have received the bodies of 17 people killed by Israeli attacks over the past 48 hours, despite the ceasefire. Meanwhile, Israel’s army has ordered its forces to remain in the Philadelphi Corridor separating Gaza from Egypt.

On Wednesday, President Donald Trump provoked outrage when he posted an AI-generated video to his Truth Social platform depicting his plan to expel Palestinians from Gaza and to turn it into the “Riviera of the Middle East.” The video shows Gaza as a luxury beach resort with skyscrapers, palm trees and a golden statue of Trump. Elon Musk makes several appearances, as does a shirtless Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who’s depicted sipping cocktails with Trump on a Gaza beach. Palestinians reacted to Trump’s video with disgust and indignation.

Mohamed Badr: “Since 1948, they have been trying to displace Palestinians. The people are clinging to their land and their homeland, because this is the land of their fathers and grandfathers, and this is the land in which the blessed Al-Aqsa Mosque is located. We reject any operation or any thought of displacement.”

Russian diplomats are meeting their U.S. counterparts in Istanbul for talks on normalizing diplomatic missions, three years after the Biden administration withdrew U.S. Embassy staff from Russia as Vladimir Putin ordered the invasion of Ukraine. A U.S. Embassy official in Turkey said Ukraine is not on the agenda at the talks. The Istanbul meeting comes ahead of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s trip to Washington, D.C., where he’s due to meet President Trump at the White House Friday to sign an agreement giving the U.S. access to Ukraine’s rare earth minerals and other resources. On Wednesday, Trump refused to commit to significant security guarantees as part of the deal.

President Donald Trump: “Well, I’m not going to make security guarantees, beyond — very much. We’re going to have Europe do that.”

Following Trump’s remarks, U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer warned Russia could reinvade Ukraine unless the U.S. commits to security guarantees. Starmer is in Washington today for talks at the White House, where he’s expected to ask Trump to commit to a British and French-led peacekeeping force for a postwar Ukraine. In Kyiv, President Zelensky said a draft agreement had restored some language on future security guarantees.

President Volodymyr Zelensky: “Of course, this agreement is about economics. But I asked for there to be at least an understanding that we are seeing things the same way, that all of it is part of future security guarantees. So, even in the framework agreement, I wanted for there to be at least a sentence: security guarantees for Ukraine. As far as I was briefed by the government officials, this sentence is there now.”

The oil giant BP has announced it’s cutting planned investments in clean energy and redirecting that spending toward fossil fuels to the tune of $10 billion per year. The climate group 350.org said the news “clearly demonstrates why super-rich corporations and individuals, chasing short-term profit for themselves and shareholders, cannot be trusted with fixing the climate crisis or leading the transition to renewable energy we so badly need.”

A new study published in the journal Nature finds glaciers are melting at an accelerating rate, causing a major rise in sea levels — two centimeters this century alone. Over the past decade, over one-third more ice melted than the previous decade. Rising sea levels are leading to increasingly severe flooding for hundreds of millions of people in coastal communities.

In West Texas, an unvaccinated child has died from measles, the first known U.S. measles death since 2015. There have been at least 124 cases in West Texas and nine in New Mexico in the current outbreak. Many of the cases are centered in a Mennonite community, known for having lower vaccination rates. This is Dr. Lara Johnson, chief medical officer of Covenant Health in Texas.

Dr. Lara Johnson: “We were confident that we’d eradicated measles from the United States and had really gotten to a point where we just didn’t see these kinds of outbreaks happening. Obviously, that has changed over the last 20-something years. And so, we do see outbreaks more frequently, but that is related to how much we’re vaccinating our population.”

At the White House, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. downplayed the outbreak, calling it “not unusual.”

A new Pentagon memo is calling for the identification and removal of transgender military members over the next two months. Some transgender personnel may receive exemptions, according to the memo, which was issued late Wednesday in response to a lawsuit challenging Trump’s January executive order to ban transgender troops.

President Trump has announced plans to sell a $5 million so-called gold card visa granting U.S. residency and a path to citizenship. Legal experts say the move likely requires congressional approval. When asked by a reporter if Russian oligarchs could purchase U.S. citizenship, Trump responded “possibly,” adding, “I know some Russian oligarchs that are very nice people.”

In other immigration news, the Trump administration transported at least another nine immigrant prisoners to the Guantánamo military base in Cuba on Tuesday. At least three lawsuits have been filed against the transfers.

In the U.K., over 500 prominent media and entertainment figures signed onto a letter condemning the BBC for pulling the documentary “Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone” from its streaming service. The move from BBC came after complaints by pro-Israel activists that the film, about Gazan youth, is narrated by the 14-year-old son of a deputy agriculture minister in Gaza’s Hamas government. The protest letter states, “This broad-brush rhetoric assumes that Palestinians holding administrative roles are inherently complicit in violence — a racist trope that denies individuals their humanity and right to share their lived experiences.”

Here in New York, students at Barnard and Columbia University are taking part in a sick-out today to protest the expulsion of two Barnard students for participating in a Palestinian rights protest that allegedly disrupted a class called “History of Modern Israel.” On Wednesday, dozens of students took over a floor of Barnard College, dispersing only after Barnard’s administration agreed to meet with them today.

New York Governor Kathy Hochul is under fire after ordering CUNY, the City University of New York, to immediately remove a job posting for a Palestinian studies professor at Hunter College. The job listing called for “a historically grounded scholar who takes a critical lens to issues pertaining to Palestine including but not limited to: settler colonialism, genocide, human rights, apartheid, migration, climate and infrastructure devastation, health, race, gender, and sexuality.” Governor Hochul said the post was antisemitic, after complaints by Zionist groups.

In media news, The Washington Post’s opinion editor David Shipley resigned Wednesday after billionaire owner Jeff Bezos announced op-eds would start focusing on “personal liberties and free markets.” It’s the latest sign of turmoil at the newspaper, coming four months after The Washington Post declined to make a presidential endorsement, leading thousands of readers to cancel their subscriptions. Former Washington Post columnist Margaret Sullivan wrote, “It’s all about getting on board with Trump. … Bezos no longer wants to own an independent news organization. He wants a megaphone and a political tool that will benefit his own commercial interests.”