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A initiative by the United States to increase electricity supply in Africa has been dismantled by President Trump’s administration after more than a decade of work, Bloomberg News reported on Wednesday, citing people familiar with the matter.
Almost all of Power Africa’s programmes have been listed for termination and the majority of its staff fired, the report added, according to Reuters.
Opening summary
Welcome to our coverage of events on Capitol Hill. Republicans narrowly passed a budget blueprint on Tuesday evening, barely scraping together the votes to advance Donald Trump’s tax-cut and immigration agenda.
The House approved the plan in a vote of 217-215, with the representative Thomas Massie, the lone Republican voting in opposition.
No Democrats supported the measure, describing it as a betrayal of middle and low-income voters on behalf of “billionaire donors” like Trump adviser Elon Musk. They warn the budget will result in cuts to Medicaid.
The fiscal year 2025 proposal includes approximately $4.5tn in tax cuts alongside increased spending for defence and border security. To offset these costs, the plan will ask congressional committees to find about $2tn in spending reductions over the next decade.
After Tuesday’s vote, Hakeem Jeffries, the Democratic minority leader, said: “Children will be devastated. Families, devastated. People with disabilities, devastated. Older Americans, devastated. Hospitals, devastated. Nursing homes, devastated,” and he said he would “make sure that every single one of these extreme Maga Republicans is held accountable for betraying the people they represent”.
Johnson told reporters after the vote: “We have a lot of hard work ahead of us, but we are going to deliver the America First agenda.”
In other developments:
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More than 20 staffers of Elon Musk’s so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) stepped down on Tuesday, saying in a joint letter they refused to use their expertise to “dismantle critical public services”.
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Donald Trump has stepped in to defend Elon Musk from a mounting backlash in his own administration after some cabinet members told US federal workers to ignore the billionaire entrepreneur’s demand that they write an email justifying their work. “What he’s doing is saying: ‘Are you actually working?’ Trump said. “And then, if you don’t answer, like, you’re sort of semi-fired or you’re fired, because a lot of people aren’t answering because they don’t even exist.
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It comes as Federal workers faced fresh uncertainty about their futures on Tuesday after Elon Musk gave them “another chance” to respond to his ultimatum that they justify their jobs or risk termination, contradicting guidance from some Trump administration officials that the request was voluntary.
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Cabinet officials will face Musk on Wednesday as the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said that the tech billionaire will join Trump’s first cabinet meeting despite not being a member of the cabinet. He will be “talking about all of Doge’s efforts and how all of the cabinet secretaries are identifying waste, fraud and abuse at their respective agencies.
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Elon Musk’s cost-cutting drive appears to be having less impact than he is claiming. The Associated Press found that almost 40% of the federal contracts scrapped so far will not save the American taxpayer a penny. The Associated Press looked at a list of 1,125 federal government contracts that Musk’s “department of government efficiency” (Doge) boasted it had torn up in the first month of the new Trump administration. The news agency found that of those, 417 were likely to produce no savings to the federal budget.
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Workers at the US Agency for International Development (USAid) have been invited back to its office “to retrieve their personal belongings” as the Trump administration continues its bid to shut down the foreign aid agency.
