Supreme Court Comes Running to Trump’s Rescue on Foreign Aid Cuts

Chief Justice John Roberts stepped in at the last minute to save Donald Trump from being forced to unfreeze $2 billion in foreign aid payments that he paused upon entering office.

Roberts issued an administrative stay on the order after lawyers for the president rushed to the Supreme Court Wednesday, desperate to subvert the decision from U.S. District Judge Amir Ali. Ali had ordered Tuesday that money for lifesaving humanitarian assistance should continue to flow to the State Department and U.S. Agency for International Development while he considered the legality of Trump’s funding freeze. 

When Trump failed to respond, Ali imposed a deadline for Trump to pay up, which would have been at 11:59 p.m. Wednesday. The Trump administration claimed it would take “multiple weeks” to satisfy the judge’s request.

The newest order from Roberts supplies the highest court in the land with more time to review the arguments in the case, and aid organizations challenging Trump’s disastrous freeze have until Friday to file their responses. It’s likely that the order will stay in effect into next week. 

Trump’s efforts to gut USAID have threatened the delivery of therapeutic food assistance to nearly 400,000 severely malnourished children abroad.

Roberts’s order is the first time the Supreme Court has responded to Trump’s flurry of legislative activity and the torrent of legal challenges it has produced. There is currently another pending Trump-related case in the Supreme Court, concerning his ousting of leadership at the Office of Special Counsel.

Earlier this year, Roberts found himself behind the steering wheel of the most conservative court in a century for the decision in Trump’s presidential immunity case. The Supreme Court’s ruling in that case single-handedly opened the door for Trump’s return to the White House and cemented this court’s conservative lean for decades to come.  

In his year-end report, Roberts echoed Trump, warning that criticism of the court constituted “illegitimate activity” that undermines independent judges—meanwhile making way for Trump and Elon Musk to challenge and in some cases openly defy the rulings of federal courts.

Trump continues to break one of his biggest promises—one that deeply impacts many of his own supporters.

The second round of aggressive Department of Government Efficiency cuts includes a massive downsizing of the Social Security Administration, which has been ordered to cut its staff in half, according to The Washington Post.

Earlier this month, President Trump promised that “Social Security won’t be touched, other than if there’s fraud or something. It’s going to be strengthened. Medicare, Medicaid—none of that stuff is going to be touched.” But last week, he endorsed House Republicans’ budget plan, which is expected to make an $880 billion cut to Medicaid to pay for tax cuts for the wealthy.

Now, DOGE is cutting the Social Security Administration in half with glee, which will certainly have an impact on benefits for millions of Americans.

This is the newest wave of DOGE’s purge.

Multiple vaccine projects have been paused by the Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. 

Kennedy paused a multimillion-dollar project to create a new Covid-19 vaccine in pill form on Tuesday, and the Food and Drug Administration canceled an advisory committee meeting on updating next season’s flu vaccine, an advisory committee said Wednesday. 

The Covid project was a $460 million contract with Vaxart to develop a new Covid vaccine in pill form, with 10,000 people scheduled to begin clinical trials on Monday. Of that, $240 million was reportedly already authorized for the preliminary study.

“While it is crucial that the Department [of] Health and Human Services support pandemic preparedness, four years of the Biden administration’s failed oversight have made it necessary to review agreements for vaccine production, including Vaxart’s,” Kennedy said, according to Fox News.

“I look forward to working with Vaxart and medical experts to ensure this work produces safe, effective, and fiscal-minded vaccine technology,” Kennedy added. 

Meanwhile, the FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee, or VRBPAC, was scheduled to meet in March to discuss the strains that would be included in next season’s flu shot, but federal officials told the committee in an email Wednesday that the meeting was canceled, said committee member Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.

Offit told NBC News that no explanation was given for the cancellation of the yearly spring meeting, which comes in the middle of a flu season in which 86 children and 19,000 adults have died, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

In an email to NBC, Norman Baylor, a former director of the FDA’s Office of Vaccine Research and Review, said, “I’m quite shocked. As you know, the VRBPAC is critical for making the decision on strain selection for the next influenza vaccine season.” Last week, an upcoming CDC vaccine advisory committee meeting was also postponed.  

These moves send a disturbing message that Kennedy’s anti-vaccine views are starting to influence health policy. On Wednesday, the secretary already had an alarming, nonchalant response to the first American measles death in a decade. Now it seems American public health efforts could experience a serious setback as long as President Trump and Kennedy are in government.

Manoshpere bigot Andrew Tate and his brother Tristan—who still face rape and human trafficking charges in Romania, among others—are on their way to the United States after the Trump administration strong-armed Romania into lifting travel restrictions.

The Tate brothers have been ardent Trump supporters for years, and it seems to have paid off. A Trump official mentioned the Tates in a call with Romania earlier this month, according to the Financial Times. Trump’s special envoy Ric Grenell brought up the brothers again to Romania’s foreign minister on his trip to Munich.

Now, the brothers—who are both dual British-American citizens—are on a plane to Florida, according to their lawyer Ioan Gliga.

The Tates will likely then have a bunch of photo ops with some of the worst people Washington, D.C., has to offer.

“I have never heard of a foreign government asking Romania to lift preventive measures to allow some suspects to leave the country,” foreign Romanian Judge Cristi Danilet told the Associated Press. “If I had been a judge, this would not have happened. If it is true, it means that there is no more rule of law and sovereign countries.”

Tate, a self-professed anti-feminist, has maintained his innocence.

Don’t expect egg prices to come down anytime soon.

The Agriculture Department announced Wednesday that the current cost of eggs could rise by more than 40 percent before the end of the year.

The sticker-shock warning came amid the unveiling of a new plan by the Trump administration to alleviate egg prices, which included investing another $1 billion in helping American farms tighten up biosecurity to keep the avian flu out of their broods and outsourcing up to 100 million eggs from other countries to feed the American market.

Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins also proposed stripping regulations from the egg industry to further dampen the rising price tags, even as one of the largest egg producers in the nation faces scrutiny for managing to raise revenues and profits amid the ongoing food crisis, and while small businesses across the nation struggle with containing the rampant illness.

Avian flu—which is largely spread by wild fowl—has added incredible strain on American chicken farmers, extinguishing some small businesses overnight as they contend with infection in their roosts. If just one hen tests positive for the H5N1 virus, it could precipitate the preventative deaths of the entire flock.

The disease, which so far has affected 166 million birds since 2022, temporarily shuttered New York City’s poultry markets earlier this month and skyrocketed the cost of a standard dozen eggs to more than $12 in Key Foods and C-Town amid a nationwide egg shortage within the last few weeks. In Connecticut, the price for a dozen eggs at Stop & Shop approached $20.

But the USDA’s revelation that egg prices could grow by another 40 percent flies in the face of Donald Trump’s repeated promises to lower the cost of groceries and the American public’s cost of living. On the campaign trail, Trump pledged to lower costs for American consumers on “day one.” But a month into his second administration, Trump has routinely avoided detailing specifics for how he’s going to provide relief for Americans’ wallets.

Meanwhile, House Republicans in Washington passed a budget resolution Tuesday that will gut Medicaid—which provides health insurance to more than 72 million Americans—by $880 billion in order to extend Trump’s tax plan, which will overwhelmingly benefit corporations and is projected to add as much as $15 trillion to the national deficit.