Pentagon reportedly planning to cut workforce by at least 50,000 – US politics live

Pentagon reportedly looking to cut civilian workforce by at least 50,000

The Pentagon is reported to be hoping to reduce its civilian workforce by about 50,000 to 60,000 people, chiefly through voluntary means, it has been reported.

ABC News quotes one senior defense official saying: “The number sounds high, but I would focus on the percentage, a 5% to 8% reduction is not a drastic one. [It] can be done without negatively impacting readiness, in order to make sure that our resources are allocated in the right direction.”

The cuts are expected to come from freezing hiring, dismissing probationary workers with less than one or two years service, and by people taking up an offer to resign on full pay until the end of September.

Key events

Trump administration planning new tariffs on ‘trillions’ of dollars of imports – reports

The Washington Post reports that the Trump administration is planning additional tariffs on imports to the US running into “trillions” of dollars.

Speaking anonymously to the paper, a person described as familiar with the planning confirmed the sum involved would be in the “trillions” of dollars.

It said that an earlier administration plan to group countries into three broad bands had been rejected, with the plan now “calibrating a new tariff rate for each trading partner”.

Donald Trump has previously described the plan to impose the tariffs on 2 April as a “liberation day”.

George Joseph and Yoav Gonen report for the Guardian

The administration of New York City’s mayor, Eric Adams, is continuing to pay more than $500,000 a month to a hotel developer who could potentially provide valuable testimony to prosecutors against the mayor and several of his top allies.

The developer, Weihong Hu, was indicted last month for allegedly bribing a New York City non-profit’s CEO. The indictment charges that she gave the non-profit’s executive stacks of cash and helped him purchase a $1.3m townhouse in exchange for more than $20m in city-funded contracts for her two Queens hotels and a catering company. Hu has pleaded not guilty to all charges.

Despite these allegations brought by the US attorney for the eastern district of New York, Adams’s administration has continued to pay one of Hu’s companies more than $542,000 a month to host another non-profit program at one of her Queens hotels, according to two city officials with knowledge of the matter.

Republicans have been put in a bind by Donald Trump’s confrontation with the judiciary and the rebuke handed out by the chief justice of the supreme court, John Roberts.

On his Truth Social platform, the president called for Judge James Boasberg to be impeached, calling him “a troublemaker and agitator” and “crooked”.

In a rare public intervention, Roberts said: “For more than two centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision.”

Political website the Hill quotes a senior Republican strategist saying:

Republicans, by and large, will support Trump publicly because of the situation, we’re dealing with Venezuelan gang members and most Americans agree they should have been deported.

Privately, most congressional Republicans will think this is really going right up to the line on having a constitutional crisis and that situations like this need to be avoided in the future. They do believe in due process.

The former Republican senator Judd Gregg also commented, saying:

When you arbitrarily try to cancel the rule of law, which is what Trump is trying to do, and leave by the edict of an individual, whether he is president or not, you’re creating almost a banana republic-type of event.

How does it affect Republicans? Significantly. Because even though senior Republicans in the Senate may disagree and hopefully would disagree strongly, it’s the president who’s head of the party and is defining the party.

The Associated Press reports that one program shuttered by the Trump administration cutting off funding to USAid is in Vietnam, where clean-up efforts have been halted.

At a former American airbase in southern Vietnam, the removal of toxic soil contaminated with the US army’s Agent Orange defoliant has been abruptly stopped, and work to clear unexploded American munitions and landmines has also been ended.

It quotes an American Vietnam war veteran who has dedicated his time to humanitarian programs in the country for the last three decades, Chuck Searcy, saying: “It doesn’t help at all. It is just another example of what a lot of critics want to remind us of: You can’t depend on the Americans. It is not a good message.”

About 2,200 files comprisng more than 63,000 pages concerning the assassination of John F Kennedy have been posted on the website of the US National Archives and Records administration. The Trump administration claims they were previously classified.

The Associated Press reports that the National Archives says the vast majority of its collection of more than 6m pages of records, photographs, motion pictures, sound recordings and artifacts related to the assassination have already been released.

No major revelations appear to be contained in the documents so far, with the New York Times reporting on the release with the headline “Here’s what to know. (Oswald still did it.)”

Adam Nagourney wrote for the paper that “Trump, in teasing the release on Monday, said there would be no redactions – but an early review found that some information appeared to have been blocked out.”

The paper quoted historian David J Garrow saying: “This dump is profoundly more impenetrable than all the previous more annotated ones.” Many of the documents released appeared to be hard to read.

Pentagon reportedly looking to cut civilian workforce by at least 50,000

The Pentagon is reported to be hoping to reduce its civilian workforce by about 50,000 to 60,000 people, chiefly through voluntary means, it has been reported.