The mastermind of President Donald Trump’s effort to downsize the federal workforce, Russ Vought, promised to use the government shutdown to advance his goal of “shuttering the bureaucracy.” Presented with a layoff plan that would have moved in that direction, officials at the Department of Health and Human Services scaled it way back, POLITICO has learned. It was another example, like several during the layoffs led by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency this spring, in which Trump’s agency heads have pushed back successfully against top-down cuts they viewed as reckless. POLITICO obtained an HHS document from late September, the shutdown’s eve, that said the department wanted to cut nearly 8,000 jobs, based on guidance from Vought’s budget office. On Oct. 10, HHS only went ahead with 1,760. In the two weeks since, the number has dwindled to 954, as the department has rescinded nearly half of the total, blaming a coding error. The disorganized handling of the layoffs is reminiscent of Musk’s DOGE effort, in which employees were rehired after being fired, sometimes on court orders, sometimes because agency officials objected. In each case, the layoffs rattled agency managers and traumatized employees, as Vought wanted, but haven’t gone nearly as far in downsizing the government as forecast. While the nearly 8,000-person layoff plan this month was largely scuttled by top agency officials who intervened before the cuts could be made, the whiplash manner in which it was proposed and then scaled back shows that the administration is still following the DOGE playbook. “These appear to be leftovers from DOGE. I don’t know anyone — including in the White House — who supports such cuts,” a senior administration official told POLITICO in explaining the pullback from the promised mass layoffs. The official, granted anonymity to discuss confidential matters, pointed to the involvement of a staffer who was part of the DOGE effort in producing the administration document. That document came to its initial tally of 7,885 layoffs at HHS by adding employees who would be furloughed during the shutdown, as well as workers in divisions that would be shuttered if Congress passed Trump’s fiscal 2026 budget proposal. Trump’s May budget plan called for a 25 percent cut to HHS, but lawmakers have rejected it in the appropriations bills now in process. HHS spokesperson Emily Hilliard told POLITICO in a statement that HHS made its layoff list “based upon positions designated as non-essential prior to the Democrat-led government shutdown.” She added: “Due to a recent court order, HHS is not currently taking actions to implement or administer the reduction-in-force notices.” According to the document reviewed by POLITICO, the National Institutes of Health was to take the hardest hit among HHS agencies, 4,545 layoffs, or roughly a quarter of its workforce. It ended up firing no one. A federal judge in San Francisco blocked the firing of 362 of the 954 HHS employees who did receive the October layoff notices. More will be shielded after additional federal employee unions joined the lawsuit on Wednesday. In congressional testimony earlier this year, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said he had downsized his department’s staff to 62,000 from 82,000 when he took office. He’s nowhere close. An HHS contingency plan produced in advance of the shutdown said the department still employed 79,717. Employees who took a Sept. 30 buyout offer from Musk would bring that lower, though the number who did is unknown because the White House has not released agency-by-agency totals and has stopped publishing agency employment updates. It’s unclear who within the Trump administration came up with the initial plan for the shutdown layoffs. Hilliard did not respond to POLITICO’s question about who within HHS was responsible. Thomas Nagy, the HHS deputy assistant secretary for human resources, has been the one updating the judge, Susan Illston of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, about the layoffs. The experience of the fired 954, whose last work day is scheduled for early December, mirrors the chaos of DOGE’s spring layoffs, in which employees were left wondering whether they still had jobs amidst lawsuits and officials were forced to backtrack and rehire fired workers. In one such instance, Kennedy told a House panel in June that he had appealed directly to Vought to make sure Head Start funding was protected after the early education and health care program was left out of the president’s budget proposal. In another case, HHS fired and then rehired an award-winning Parkinson’s researcher. Kennedy also told senators that he brought back hundreds of staffers at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. That came after West Virginia Republican Sen. Shelley Moore Capito and others protested. Now many HHS employees are having déjà vu. The situation is reminiscent of the experience some former employees of the U.S. Agency for International Development had during the Trump administration dismantling of the foreign aid agency early this year. Some furloughed employees at HHS, for example, didn’t have access to their work emails to receive notices informing them they were laid off this month. “There were individuals who didn’t even know if they were in RIF status until they got the hard copy packet in the mail two days ago,” a laid-off employee at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said, using the acronym for “reduction-in-force.” A similar situation played out at HHS’ Office of Population Affairs, where nearly all of the roughly 50 employees were laid off two weeks ago, according to one person with knowledge of the situation speaking anonymously for fear of retribution. The office, which is congressionally mandated, manages hundreds of millions of dollars in funding for family planning and teen pregnancy prevention programs. Three fired employees from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration — granted anonymity to provide details about the firings without fear of retribution — said that many of the roughly 170 employees cut from the agency earlier this month are getting physical copies of their termination notices mailed to them because they’re shut out of their email accounts. “DOGE never really left, it just looks different now,” one of the SAMHSA employees said. Amanda Friedman and Sophie Gardner contributed reporting. Tim Röhn is a global reporter at Axel Springer and head of investigations for WELT, POLITICO Germany and Business Insider Germany.

Donald Trump this spring dubbed himself the “fertilization president.” But some conservative family policy advocates say he’s done little so far to publicly back that up and are pushing to get the White House in the remaining months of the year to prioritize family policy — and help Americans make more babies. A top priority is a pronatalist or family policy summit that spotlights the U.S.’s declining fertility rate. Other asks, which typically run through the White House’s Domestic Policy Council, include loosening regulations on day cares and child car seats, further increasing the child tax credit and requiring insurers to cover birth as well as pre- and post-natal care at no out-of-pocket cost. While the Trump administration has advanced a handful of policies explicitly billed as “pro-family,” some conservative advocates are dismayed that the president has not done more on one of his campaign’s most animating issues. The lack of movement threatens to dampen enthusiasm among parts of the Republican Party’s big tent coalition, including New Right populists, who worry about the erosion of the U.S. workforce, and techno-natalists, who advocate using reproductive technology to boost population growth, as the GOP stares down a challenging midterm election. “I think there are people, including the [vice president] and people in the White House, who really want to push pro-family stuff,” said Tim Carney, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute who recently wrote “Family Unfriendly,” a book that has become popular in conservative circles. But “it hasn’t risen to the forefront of the actual decision-making tree in the White House, the people who can put some velocity on things.” “It’s all nascent,” Carney added, but “it is going to be something that Republicans want to talk about in the midterms.” White House aides acknowledge advocates’ restlessness, but argue that even as it has yet to take action on the suite of explicitly pro-family proposals advocates want, they have taken a whole-of-government approach to family policy. Privately, the White House is deliberating its next moves now that the GOP’s tax and policy bill passed. It’s taking a two-pronged approach: addressing financial pressures and infertility issues that prevent people from having children; and helping couples raise kids in alignment with their values. That latter bucket includes bolstering school choice and parental rights, promoting kin- and faith-based child care, and other actions that can help with the costs of raising children, including health care and housing. “You saw what we were able to accomplish in 200 days. It was a lot. Just wait for the next three-and-a-half years,” said a White House official, who was granted anonymity to discuss internal strategy. “There’s a lot of opportunity to accomplish a lot through pure administrative action, through the bully pulpit and, of course, if we need to, through working with Congress.” The official couldn’t rule out a family policy event hosted by the White House in the future. “Look, the president loves to convene stakeholders and thought leaders and policy leaders,” the official added. While they understand the White House has had its attention fixed on other issues, like foreign policy, immigration, and trade, pronatalists are anxious for the administration to do something about the declining birth rate. They see it as, quite literally, an existential crisis. “Demographic collapse has become the global warming of the New Right,” said Malcolm Collins, who along with his wife Simone, are two of the most outspoken techno-natalists and have pitched the White House on several policies. “And this is true, not just for me, but for many individuals within the administration, and many individuals within the think tanks that are informing the administration.” The Trump administration has advanced a handful of policies that conservatives argue will support families and, they hope, encourage people to have children. The president’s so-called One Big Beautiful Bill made permanent the child tax credit first passed as part of Trump’s first-term Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, increased the rate and adjusted it for inflation on an ongoing basis. The legislation also established a one-time $1,000 so-called baby bonus for children born in 2025 through 2028. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy instructed his agency to give preference in competitive grants to communities with higher-than-average birth and marriage rates. Critics of the administration note that the megalaw will make it harder for people to keep their Medicaid insurance, the president’s proposed 2026 budget eliminates childcare subsidies for parents in college, and Trump’s CDC eliminated a research team responsible for collecting national data on IVF success rates. But family policy advocates say on the whole they see progress, though not nearly enough to reverse the trend of declining birth rates. “From my conversations with folks in the administration, there is definitely interest in doing something visible on the family stuff. They feel like they’re going down the list — homelessness, crime, obviously immigration — of different things and families’ time will come,” said Patrick Brown, a fellow at the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center who focuses on family policy. The U.S. birth rate has been declining since the Baby Boom ended in the early 1960s, falling from 3.65 births per woman in 1960 to 1.599 in 2024, according to the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics. There are similar trends across high-income nations, in part the result of easier access to contraception, changing societal values favoring careers over having children and high costs of living. The issue came to the fore during the campaign when Trump promised government-funded in vitro fertilization in an effort to allay concerns over his anti-abortion stance. A few months later, then-Sen. JD Vance doubled down on controversial comments about the country being run by “a bunch of childless cat ladies” and argued for more babies in the U.S. Elon Musk, perhaps the most prominent pronatalist, was Trump’s biggest financial booster during the campaign and a key adviser in the early days of the administration. There is no agreed-upon solution to the problem of a declining birth rate. Hungary is held up as a model by pronatalists for its family friendly policies but its birth rate remains low, despite exempting women with four or more children from paying income tax, among other incentives. The birth rate also remains low in Nordic countries like Sweden, Norway and Finland that have generous paid parental leave and heavily subsidized childcare. Still, advocates in the U.S. have a list for the Trump administration they believe will make a difference, arguing that even if they fail to increase the birth rate, they would support families. Some policies that pronatalists hope the Trump administration will pursue are more typically associated with the left, such as expanding child tax credits, which Trump did in the GOP megalaw, and reducing the costs of child care. But others have a home in the libertarian wing of the GOP, such as cutting regulations on day care and curbing car seat rules. Some of these proposals, pronatalists acknowledge, come with more risk but would overall result in more births. For decades, social conservatives led the GOP’s charge on families, arguing in support of policies that promote two-parent, heterosexual families. But declining birth rates, coupled with a broadening of the GOP coalition, has broadened the lens to focus on increasing the birth rate, a new pronatalist tinge. In an effort to keep their nascent and fragile coalition unified, neither social conservatives nor the techno-natalists are pushing policies at the extremes — like banning IVF or creating genetically modified super soldiers. That helps explain why the president has not taken action on one of his most concrete promises, making IVF free, despite receiving a report on it in May. A second White House official, granted anonymity to discuss internal deliberations, said expanding IVF access for families remains “a key priority,” but declined to offer specifics on the status of any policy moves. “This issue is a winner for the Republican Party, it’s a winner for women, it’s a pro-life issue,” said Kaylen Silverberg, a fertility doctor in Texas who has consulted with the White House on IVF. “This will result in more babies, period.” But social conservatives are morally opposed to IVF both because of a belief life begins at conception and because they don’t think that science should interfere with the natural act of procreation. The proposal would also be quite costly. Instead, they want the White House to support something called reproductive restorative medicine, which can include supplements and hormone therapy, that they say will help women naturally improve their fertility. “The point of President Trump’s campaign pledge was to help couples with infertility have children. There’s a way to do that that’s cheaper, faster, less painful and more preferable to couples,” said Katelyn Shelton, a visiting fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center’s Bioethics, Technology and Human Flourishing Program who worked at the Department of Health and Human Services during the first Trump administration. While most of the family policy conversation has been concentrated on the right, it’s also starting to grow on the left, alongside the so-called “abundance” movement focused on reducing government bureaucracy. Both the National Conservative Conference and the Abundance Conference this week in Washington hosted panels on family policy. Reducing barriers to building housing is “good for families,” said Leah Libresco Sargeant, a senior policy analyst at the Niskanen Center, a think tank that describes itself as supporting free markets and effective government, who co-moderated the Abundance Conference’s family policy panel. “That’s not kind of a family centered policy per se, [but] it’s a good policy that’s good for families.” Ultimately, many conservative family policy advocates argue there is only so much government can do to address what they see as a fundamentally cultural and religious problem. It’s a posture that the GOP’s historically small-government contingent takes as it pushes back on their new populist bedfellows. “I do not think that the problem of people not having enough kids is a problem of economics. I think that is very often a line that is used in order to promote a larger government populism,” said conservative commentator Ben Shapiro. “This is a predominantly religious problem, it’s a cultural problem.” Pronatalists have a lot of hope in the future of the GOP in part because of Vance, the administration’s most prominent and ideologically committed proponent of family policies, to carry the mantle, either during Trump’s presidency or as part of his own 2028 presidential bid. They love that Vance brings his children on official trips and is open about carving out time during the day to spend with them. “Our political leaders are inherently cultural leaders,” Carney said. “Bringing his kids with him to Europe and at the inauguration — where the little one, she was sucking on her fingers, so they had put Band-Aids on some of them so she wasn’t sucking all of them at once — all of those things that show a loving family and that kind of stuff, I think that can be culturally really productive.”

LONDON — Keir Starmer has staked his future on convincing voters he’ll rebuild the state. First he needs to convince his Cabinet they have the tools to do it. Members of the prime minister’s top team have been privately sounding the alarm over their ability to deliver on Labour’s manifesto pledges, as Britain’s top finance minister Rachel Reeves prepares to unveil stark spending choices Wednesday. With a resurgent Nigel Farage zooming ahead in the polls and Labour MPs at Westminster in open mutiny over cuts to disability benefits, there is little appetite among ministers to deliver more bad news to voters. “There will be trade-offs, and this is definitely the event where the rubber hits the road in terms of which of Labour’s promises are they going to stick to, and which are they not going to be able to keep,” Ruth Curtice, chief executive of the Resolution Foundation think tank, said of the review. Down-to-the-wire negotiations between ministers and the Treasury were only concluded on Monday, but few predict Cabinet grumbling will cease now the deals have been done — with a tricky autumn budget to come and economic headwinds still blowing across the Atlantic. “This idea that once they’ve settled, everyone plays nice — there’s no chance,” one figure in close contact with No. 10 said, noting that Reeves remains wedded to tight pre-election spending and tax restraints, meaning more tough choices ahead. Like others in this piece they were granted anonymity to speak about internal discussions. SPENDING SPLURGE It’s not all bad news.  A spate of announcements — from investment in major transport projects to billions of pounds for science, technology and nuclear power — have been unveiled in the run-up to Wednesday’s announcement, giving Labour MPs something to cheer.  Reeves changed Britain’s debt rules last October, paving the way for billions of pounds in additional spending on infrastructure projects.  “I slightly feel like some of my colleagues across the Labour movement are not quite giving the government credit for that,” said Jonathan Ashworth, the outgoing chief executive of the Labour Together think tank.  While there has been a blitz of publicity for this capital investment, day-to-day revenue spending will tell a different story.  Even so, by the end of this parliament the amount of departmental spending will be the same as pre-austerity — the major cost-cutting project embarked on by former Conservative Chancellor George Osborne in 2010, the Resolution Foundation’s Curtice said. But for every winner there will be a loser — and ministers are bracing for the hours and days after Reeves hits send, as markets and think tanks deliver their verdicts on where the ax has fallen, and the state of U.K. finances.  ON THEIR MISSIONS It will be ministers on the front line delivering Starmer’s manifesto pledges who will have their settlements scrutinized most closely.  Starmer’s deputy Angela Rayner — a popular figure among the soft left — was among the slowest to do a deal with Reeves. It was only on Sunday night that she reached a settlement with the Treasury. Starmer’s deputy Angela Rayner — a popular figure among the soft left — was among the slowest to do a deal with Reeves. | Adam Vaughan/EFE via EPA It came after a memo in which she argued for a raft of new tax rises was leaked ahead of Reeves’ economic update in March.  Her local government and housing department has been tasked with delivering 1.5 million new homes before the next election — a key promise in Labour’s election manifesto. The person in close contact with No. 10 quoted above, speaking shortly before she reached a settlement over the weekend, characterized Rayner’s actions as a “pre-emptive strike.”   “She knows that on the delivery front, she’s going to fall short. She’s so closely associated with this 1.5 million target, and that’s just not going to happen,” they said. It won’t just be about money. Reforms to the planning system will be as crucial to delivering on the 1.5 million homes without hitting the Treasury’s bottom line. But Rayner’s situation is “in some ways similar to [Health Secretary] Wes Streeting having this massive target on his head to reduce waiting lists,” the person quoted above added. “They’re both very clear, tangible things that have reached popular prominence. One’s got shitloads of money to do it, the other hasn’t.” Rayner and Streeting have another thing in common — they’re both seen as future leadership contenders when Starmer leaves. “Not getting what you want isn’t actually that bad from a leadership point of view,” said a second person who speaks regularly to ministers and No. 10. “It means you can throw your toys out of the pram and go to your supporters and say ‘I tried.’” THIN BLUE LINE Home Secretary Yvette Cooper only completed negotiations with the Treasury on Monday after weeks of public warnings from senior police officers about the need for more resources — which senior figures in the Home Office have made no attempts to dampen. Cooper has been tasked with halving serious violent crime ahead of the next election. Yvette Cooper has been tasked with halving serious violent crime ahead of the next election. | Pool photo by Tolga Akmen via EFE/EPA One urban Labour MP said Cooper needed to secure more police funding to see off the threat of Reform in their seat, with parts of the constituency feeling “lawless” amid brazen fare-dodging, shoplifting and tool theft.  “People can just see the state of everything,” the MP said.  Energy Secretary Ed Miliband’s budget will also be under the microscope. There are still said to be private murmurings in No. 10 about how realistic net zero pledges will be.  “I think the net zero stuff will come under pressure, probably towards the end of this year,” said the first person in regular contact with No. 10 quoted above, when the November U.N. COP climate summit in Brazil brings the challenges of net zero back into focus, at the same time more defense spending will have to be found in the budget later this year. There are still those who brief against Miliband, despite the energy secretary’s apparently securing a good deal in the negotiations, and Starmer’s saying in April that energy security “is in the DNA of my government.” On the flip side, Cabinet ministers will be under pressure to deliver their reform agenda once their spending totals are locked in.  A third person, who speaks regularly to ministers, said things will get “much more stark and sharp” on this front after this week.  They warned that ministers, who will be publishing long-term policy strategies for such departments as the NHS and industry, must be able to show they have a “long-term vision.” “If the spending review feels like the same spreadsheet that Rishi Sunak and Boris Johnson used but with different numbers, then we’re in trouble,” that person warned. BRINKMANSHIP VS. REALITY Veterans of Westminster remain skeptical of just how realistic some of the threats are, pointing out that dire warnings of catastrophe have long been a feature of spending reviews, and often come to nothing. “It’s like you could grid” interventions on defense, education and similar areas, said Ashworth, who was a special adviser under ex-Chancellor Gordon Brown.   “Secretaries of state would come in and claim that whatever settlement the Treasury was working up for them would lead to catastrophe and hell on earth,” he quipped. “This is part of the Whitehall negotiation.” Labour MPs also regularly bring up the future of Reeves herself. | Tolga Akmen/EFE via EPA Or as one Cabinet minister pithily observed: “It’s all steps in the dance.” But one government official noted that ministers — who have warned the situation is “existential for the delivery of the missions” — “do seem to be quite concerned.” Defense and health have been “hoovering up a lot of capital spend,” the official added. The Department of Health is expected to emerge as the biggest winner on Wednesday, while Starmer has already set out the biggest sustained increase in defense spending since the Cold War amid NATO pressure for the U.K. to boost its spending.  RESHUFFLE RUMOR MILL Crucial to Cabinet unity will be how the spending review lands with his party.  Starmer retains the threat of a reshuffle — a good way of keeping ambitious MPs and rebellious ministers onside until it’s complete. MPs and officials have strongly suspected for months that it will happen in July. “Once that’s passed, it’s sort of going to be open season — especially as a lot of MPs now are contemplating just being a one-term MP,” said the person in regular contact with No. 10 quoted above. One senior MP warned, however, that a “significant rump” of MPs are too jaded to be won over even before the reshuffle, due to the quality of Labour’s political engagement.  They said: “If you have never cultivated people into thinking that they’ve got the chance of being on the ministerial ladder, they think, ‘well, it doesn’t fucking matter what I do over here, it doesn’t matter what I say, it doesn’t matter whether I stand up and eat shit when there’s a difficult announcement.’” Labour MPs also regularly bring up the future of Reeves herself. “I do think that Rachel has suddenly realized that she’s wildly unpopular in the PLP,” said the same second MP quoted above, who argued her “iron chancellor” image means restive cabinet ministers — not Reeves herself — will get the credit for any extra spending. Former Conservative Chief Secretary to the Treasury Greg Hands, who was also a chief whip, said: “Spending reviews always go better if the PM and Chancellor are in a strong position. I am not really sure that Keir Starmer, and especially Rachel Reeves, are in that strong a position at the moment, and that makes it slightly more open-field this time around.” PARTY WELFARE Cuts to welfare will be the biggest test of that.  Ministers are drawing up plans to introduce a bill to parliament next week containing Labour’s controversial cuts to disability benefits, in time for a showdown vote — the “second reading” — in the week of June 30 or later.  One person with knowledge of the plans said the bill was likely to be tightly focused on the cuts, while other welfare reforms will come only later in the year. This will concentrate Labour MPs’ anger, but could also allow the government to classify it as a “money bill” — meaning it would be made law within a month of being sent to the House of Lords even if peers still object. Officials have also held talks about putting the bill through a “committee of the whole house,” preventing lengthy evidence sessions that could question experts and campaigners. The person with knowledge of the plans argued: “You rip the plaster off, otherwise it just drags out for longer.” But one Labour official said: “The welfare vote will blow it all up again. I think at least one minister will resign.” SOUL SEARCHING Less than a year into the new Labour government, Starmer is not believed to be in any great danger — yet.  “I think there’s a bit more time” and the Cabinet’s falling apart is not “at that point yet,”  the second person who speaks regularly to ministers and No. 10 said.  But they warned: “I think the question that keeps reverberating round is ‘what are we for?’ And there isn’t a single ‘thing’ yet that we can point to, that this is a classic Labour agenda that we’re pushing. … I think if there isn’t something slightly symbolic to point to, people’s patience is going to start getting a bit thin.” Rupert Yorke, who was ex-PM Rishi Sunak’s deputy chief of staff and a former Treasury adviser, agrees: “We have yet to see the Treasury articulate coherently and compellingly why we are in this situation, why those trade-offs exist, and what their economic and fiscal policy is for.”  “They need to get that right, starting on Wednesday, and ensure they receive the credit for the positive aspects — or it will all be lost ultimately to Reform’s growing benefit,” he added.

If President-elect Donald Trump lives up to his promises, he is going to have a prolific first week in office come January. Trump has pledged action on dozens of policy fronts on Day One or Week One in the White House as part of an aggressive agenda to reverse immigration flows, juice American energy production, reorient global commerce and purge his political enemies. Some of his promises are improbable — such as ending the war in Ukraine in his first 24 hours — but he can achieve many of his aims through executive actions, which aides are already scrambling to prepare. POLITICO compiled a list of the biggest promises Trump made on the campaign trail or since winning the election to provide a snapshot of what his first week in office might look like: EDUCATION Repeatedly: Trump promised to sign a new executive order on Day One that would cut federal funding to any school “pushing critical race theory, transgender insanity and other inappropriate racial, sexual or political content onto our children.” May 10, 2024: Trump said on the conservative radio show “Kayal and Company” that he would end Title IX discrimination protections for transgender students on Day One. The question posed to Trump was about a regulation but his response suggested he would repeal Biden’s own Day One executive order asserting that Title IX prohibits discrimination based on gender identity and sexual orientation. ENERGY & CLIMATE Aug. 29, 2024: Trump promised during a speech in Michigan to “declare a national emergency to allow us to dramatically increase energy production” in an effort to reduce energy costs. He said that starting on Day One, he will “approve new drilling, new pipelines, new refineries, new power plants, new reactors and we will slash the red tape.” July 20, 2023: In a campaign video, Trump promised to “terminate these Green New Deal atrocities” on his first day in office, referring to the climate law the Inflation Reduction Act, which Biden signed into law in 2022. Oct. 22, 2024: Trump promised during a campaign event in North Carolina to end the Biden administration’s “electric vehicle mandate.” Biden’s EPA implemented limits on climate pollution from passenger cars, pushing for electric vehicles to make up two-thirds of new car sales by 2032. Sept. 7, 2023: Trump has promised to increase domestic oil and gas production in his second term, coining “drill, baby, drill” as the policy’s slogan. Part of this promise includes rescinding “Biden’s industry-killing, jobs-killing, pro-China and anti-American electricity regulations” on Day One, per a campaign video. May 11, 2024: Trump swore he would end offshore wind projects on Day One, saying in a speech, “They ruin the environment, they kill the birds, they kill the whales.” Scientists have not found evidence of offshore wind having this effect, The Associated Press reported. FOREIGN POLICY May 11, 2023: Trump said he would end the war between Russia and Ukraine “in 24 hours” during a CNN town hall. HEALTH CARE Feb. 1, 2023: In a campaign video, Trump promised to revoke Biden’s “cruel” gender-affirming care policies. Biden had signed an executive order calling on the Department of Health and Human Services to increase access to gender-affirming health care and counter state efforts that would limit treatment for transgender minors. Feb. 1, 2023: In the same video, Trump said he would sign an executive order “instructing every federal agency to cease the promotion of sex or gender transition at any age.” Feb. 1, 2023: The president-elect also said he would ask Congress to “permanently stop federal taxpayer dollars from being used to promote or pay for” gender-affirming surgeries. Feb. 1, 2023: He also promised to pass a law that prohibits “child sexual mutilation” in all 50 states. Feb. 1, 2023: Trump’s final Day One promise in the video was to declare that any “hospital or health-care provider that participates in the chemical or physical mutilation of minor youth” as not meeting federal health and safety standards, blocking them from receiving federal funding. IMMIGRATION May 30, 2023: In a campaign video, Trump said he plans to sign an executive order on his first day as president to end automatic citizenship for children of undocumented immigrants born in the United States. He has raised the issue often, at least since October 2018. May 30, 2023: In the same video, Trump promised to sign a separate executive order ending “birth tourism,” where pregnant women legally travel to the U.S. solely so that they can give birth here and their children can be citizens. June 28, 2023: At the Faith & Freedom Coalition’s annual conference, Trump said he would “order my government” on Day One to deny entry to all “foreign Christian-hating communists, Marxists, and socialists.” Nov. 8, 2023: At a campaign rally in Hialeah, Florida, Trump said he plans to “restore the Trump travel ban on entry from terror-plagued countries,” a policy from his first administration that blocked entry from seven Muslim-majority countries, on his first day in office. Repeatedly: Trump promised to implement mass deportations of undocumented immigrants on “Day One” of his second term. Repeatedly: Trump has promised in interviews and op-eds that on his first day back in the Oval Office, he will “seal the border,” “stop the invasion” and “terminate every open borders policy of the Biden administration.” Nov. 18, 2024: Twelve days after he became the president-elect, Trump confirmed on Truth Social that he plans to declare a national emergency and use the military for mass deportations. Sept. 28, 2024: At a campaign rally in Prarie du Chien, Wisconsin, Trump promised to “stop all of the migrant flights,” a reference to a parole program for residents of Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, on his first day in office. LABOR March 21, 2023: As part of his pledge to “dismantle the deep state,” Trump promised in a campaign video to reissue his 2020 executive order on Day One that would remove job protections for thousands of federal workers by redesignating their roles from policy positions to a “Schedule F” category — making them political appointees who could be fired by the president. LEGAL/DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE Repeatedly: Trump has promised to pardon some Jan. 6 rioters charged with storming the U.S. Capitol “if they’re innocent” on “the first day” he returns to office. Presidents can pardon anyone convicted of a federal crime. Oct. 24, 2024: Trump told conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt in an interview that he would fire special counsel Jack Smith “within two seconds” of taking office. Smith had been overseeing the Justice Department’s investigations into Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election and his keeping of classified documents, though the special counsel moved last week to drop both criminal cases. TECHNOLOGY Dec. 2, 2023: Trump promised at a campaign rally in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, to repeal President Joe Biden’s artificial intelligence executive order on Day One, which calls for new checks and risk analysis on the technology while also vetting its usefulness for the government, among other directives. Dec. 15, 2022: In a campaign video, Trump promised to issue an executive order “within hours of my inauguration” to “shatter the left-wing censorship regime and reclaim the right of free speech for all Americans.” The EO would ban federal departments and agencies from working with any group limiting speech, ban federal money for being used for labeling any speech as mis- or disinformation and fire any federal employees “engaged in domestic censorship.” TRADE Feb. 4, 2024: In an interview on Fox’s “Sunday Morning Futures,” Trump promised to impose between a 10 and 20 percent blanket tariff on all $3 trillion worth of U.S. goods imports and at least a 60 percent tariff on all Chinese goods. Nov. 25, 2024: Trump promised in a Truth Social post to implement 25 percent tariffs on Day One on all goods from Canada and Mexico until they clamp down on drugs and migrants crossing the border. He also promises an additional 10 percent tariff on all Chinese goods unless China implements the death penalty for all drug dealers linked to fentanyl.

LONDON — The official who ran England’s health department during the pandemic is being promoted to Cabinet secretary, the most senior civil servant in Britain.  Citing people familiar with the process, POLITICO first reported Monday that Prime Minister Keir Starmer has decided to appoint Chris Wormald to the post, a critical one providing advice to the Cabinet and overseeing operations at the center of government. The move was subsequently announced by the British government in a statement. Starmer — who interviewed a group of four final candidates for the role — said there was “no-one better placed” to lead the organization than Wormald. Wormald had the most experience running government departments of any of the candidates, having been in charge of the Department of Health since 2016.  His appointment follows the resignation on health grounds of Simon Case, who was appointed in September 2020 and served through one of the most tumultuous periods of recent British history.  Case’s tenure, which began under Boris Johnson, spanned the death of Queen Elizabeth II, the market meltdown induced by Liz Truss’s mini-budget and her subsequent resignation, the appointment of a new prime minister in Rishi Sunak, the outbreak of wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, and a general election that resulted in a completely new government under Starmer.  Paying tribute to the outgoing civil service boss, Starmer said Monday: “He has been a remarkable public servant over many years, and our best wishes go to him and his family as he now takes time to focus on his health.” The Labour prime minister said Wormald would be tasked with Labour’s plans for the “complete re-wiring of the British state” in a bid to “deliver bold and ambitious long-term reform.” “Delivering this scale of change will require exceptional civil service leadership,” he added. This developing story is being updated.

U.S. President-elect Donald Trump will nominate former presidential candidate and anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead the Department of Health and Human Services. The pick, which will roil many public health experts, comes after Trump promised to let Kennedy “go wild” with health and food policy in his administration after Kennedy dropped his own presidential bid to endorse the now-president-elect. It’s also a sign of the opening Trump sees after he scored a decisive electoral victory and Republicans won a comfortable majority in the Senate. “For too long, Americans have been crushed by the industrial food complex and drug companies who have engaged in deception, misinformation, and disinformation when it comes to Public Health,” Trump posted on X. “The Safety and Health of all Americans is the most important role of any Administration, and HHS will play a big role in helping ensure that everybody will be protected from harmful chemicals, pollutants, pesticides, pharmaceutical products, and food additives that have contributed to the overwhelming Health Crisis in this Country.” Kennedy, 70, may still face a steep slope to confirmation after his years of touting debunked claims that vaccines cause autism, writing a book accusing former National Institutes of Health official Anthony Fauci of conspiring with tech mogul Bill Gates and drugmakers to sell Covid-19 vaccines and saying regulatory officials are industry puppets who should be removed. Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) said Kennedy will be treated like all other nominees. “I don’t have any preconceived notion about it,” Cornyn said. When asked if vaccine positions might make confirmation difficult: “I’m sure it will come up.” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said it’s up to the Senate to confirm or reject Kennedy but was skeptical that he was the right choice. “Is RFK Jr. the best qualified person in the United States of America to lead us forward as we grapple with an enormous amount of health challenges in this country? The answer is clearly he is not,” Jeffries said. In recent weeks, Kennedy has hit the media circuit to say he isn’t taking vaccines away from anyone. “I’m going to make sure scientific safety studies and efficacy are out there, and people can make individual assessments about whether that product is going to be good for them,” he told MSNBC the day after Trump’s win. He also claimed the Trump administration would recommend against fluoride in drinking water, which is added to prevent cavities. Kennedy has said it’s “almost certainly” causing a loss of IQ in children, as some studies have found. Ursula Perano and Ben Leonard contributed to this report.