WASHINGTON: US President Donald Trump is about on Wednesday to convene his first Cupboard assembly since returning to workplace final month, in an effort to additional his agenda with most of his nominees now having been confirmed by Congress.
Billionaire supporter and advisor Elon Musk, tasked with overseeing the Division of Authorities Effectivity (DOGE), which has sought to fireside hundreds of federal employees, shall be amongst these in attendance on the assembly.
Regardless of Musk’s lack of ministerial portfolio or formal decision-making authority, he’s categorized as a “particular authorities worker” and “senior adviser to the president” by heading DOGE, in keeping with White Home Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt.
Musk, Trump’s high donor in the course of the 2024 presidential marketing campaign, won’t be the one controversial member of the Trump administration on the assembly.
Among the many most contentious are Well being and Human Companies Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a famous vaccine skeptic, Director of Nationwide Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, who has espoused conspiracy theories, and Protection Secretary Pete Hegseth, a former Fox Information host who has confronted allegations of sexual assault.
The US Senate has accredited all of Trump’s cupboard picks thus far, regardless of outcry from Democrats over their monitor data and lack of expertise.
Trump’s Republican Social gathering holds a slender majority within the Senate, and the refusal of greater than a pair Senators to vote in opposition to Trump’s picks reveals his iron grip on the social gathering, the place dissenters have largely stop or been cowed.
Former Senate Majority chief Mitch McConnell was the only real Republican dissenter to Kennedy’s affirmation as well being secretary, an appointment that brought on alarm among the many medical group over his historical past of selling vaccine misinformation and vows droop analysis on infectious illnesses.
A number of Trump cupboard appointees nonetheless await affirmation by the Senate, together with Secretary of Labor Lori Chavez-DeRemer, a former congresswoman, and Linda McMahon, who helmed the Small Enterprise Administration for a part of Trump’s first time period.
Musk, in the meantime, has already been coping with upheaval inside DOGE. One-third of his workers resigned in protest on Tuesday, days after he engineered a mass e mail to the federal authorities’s two million employees, ordering them to justify their work or danger being fired.
Authorities departments on Monday largely advised workers to both ignore the DOGE-inspired e mail or downplayed the dangers of not answering it.
Up to now, hundreds of primarily probationary employees — staff who’re lately employed, promoted or in any other case modified roles — have been terminated since Trump’s inauguration.