Trump Official Accused PEPFAR of Funding Abortions in Russia. It Wasn't True.
On June 25, Russell Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, told a Senate committee that the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, known as PEPFAR, had spent $9.3 million 'to advise Russian doctors on how to perform abortions and gender analysis.'
His statements had immediate consequences for the committee's vote and had the potential to create long-term damage to PEPFAR, a program that has long had bipartisan support and has been estimated to have saved 26 million lives since President George W. Bush started it in 2003.
Mr. Vought was at the Senate Appropriations Committee to defend a package of cuts proposed by the Trump administration to this year's spending on global health programs and public broadcasting. If the Senate votes to approve the package, global health programs will lose $900 million, including $400 million from PEPFAR for the current fiscal year. PEPFAR and other programs also face huge cuts, even terminations, for the coming fiscal year. The full Senate is expected to vote on the 'rescissions bill' by Thursday.
At the hearing, Mr. Vought listed funding of abortions in Russia as evidence of PEPFAR's waste of government funds. The example prompted Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina and a longtime supporter of PEPFAR, to say he would vote in favor of rescinding funds from the program.
'You know why I'm going to vote for it? Just as a statement that PEPFAR is important, but it's not beyond scrutiny,' Mr. Graham said. 'There is a consequence to this crap.'
PEPFAR has not operated in Russia since 2012, when President Vladimir Putin kicked the United States Agency for International Development out of the country. U.S. law prohibits the use of any federal funds to pay for abortions. Funding abortions through PEPFAR would imply not just waste, but serious crimes or negligence, or both.
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In their own words: Trump, Patel, Bongino and Bondi on the Epstein scandal
PHOENIX (AP) — When Jeffrey Epstein died in prison, then-President Donald Trump speculated that authorities might be wrong in ruling it a suicide. Many of his allies in the pro-Trump media went further, casting Epstein's death as a murder meant to continue a decades-long coverup of pedophilia by elites. Now back in the White House, Donald Trump has elevated prominent proponents of Epstein conspiracies to senior law enforcement roles, and they're struggling to contain a fire that they spent years stoking. Much of Trump's base is choosing to believe the president's earlier claims about Epstein over his latest contention that there's nothing of substance in government files. Here's a look at how Trump and his aides, including the attorney general and FBI leadership, fanned the flames of the Epstein conspiracy theories over the years, and how they're now trying to extinguish them. In their own words: Trump and Epstein were friends Before Epstein's sexual predation was well-known, he and Trump were friends. Both were New Yorkers with homes in Palm Beach, Florida. Trump knew something about Epstein's 'social life' and interest in women 'on the younger side,' though there's no evidence Trump was aware Epstein was involved in sex trafficking of minors, as prosecutors allege. 'I've known Jeff for 15 years,' Trump told New York Magazine for a 2002 profile of Epstein. 'Terrific guy. He's a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.' The friendship later fell apart, according to Trump. He has since distanced himself from Epstein and more recently describes their relationship as far more distant than he portrayed in 2002. 'Well, I knew him like everybody in Palm Beach knew him,' Trump said on July 9, 2019, after Epstein was arrested on sex trafficking charges. 'I mean, people in Palm Beach knew him. He was a fixture in Palm Beach. I had a falling out with him a long time ago. I don't think I've spoken to him for 15 years. I wasn't a fan." Three days later, Trump was asked what led to his falling out with Epstein and whether the financier had been banned from Mar-a-Lago, Trump's Palm Beach home. 'Yes. And I did have a falling out a long time ago. The reason doesn't make any difference, frankly,' Trump said. He said he had 'no idea' Epstein was molesting women. A month later, on Aug. 10, 2019, Epstein was found dead in his New York City jail cell. His death was ruled a suicide. Trump nods toward conspiracy theories The day Epstein was found in his cell, Trump shared a social media post that linked his death to former President Bill Clinton. 'I want a full investigation, and that's what I absolutely am demanding,' Trump told reporters on Aug. 13, 2019. Pressed on whether he really believed Clinton was involved in Epstein's death, Trump responded at length about Clinton traveling on Epstein's private plane. 'Because Epstein had an island that was not a good place, as I understand it,' Trump said. 'And I was never there. So you have to ask: Did Bill Clinton go to the island?' In a 2020 interview with Axios, Trump cast doubt on the New York medical examiner's ruling that Epstein's death was a suicide. He was asked about Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein's longtime companion. Maxwell had been charged a month earlier with luring teenage girls to be sexually abused by Epstein, and Trump had controversially responded: 'I wish her well.' 'Well, her boyfriend died in jail and people are still trying to figure out how did it happen? Was it suicide? Was he killed? And I do wish her well. I'm not looking for anything bad for her. I'm not looking bad for anybody,' Trump told Axios on Aug. 3, 2020. After Trump left office, Maxwell was convicted in 2021 and sentenced to 20 years in prison. In the years since, Trump has said he's unsure whether Epstein killed himself. In a Fox News interview during his 2024 campaign, Trump hedged when asked whether he'd release the Epstein files. His noncommittal answer came right after he'd agreed without hesitation to declassify files related to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and the John F. Kennedy assassination. "I guess I would. I think that, less so, because you don't want to affect people's lives if it's phony stuff in there because it's a lot of phony stuff with that whole world. But I think I would," Trump said on June 2, 2024. Trump allies lean in Trump's unconventional picks to lead the FBI — Director Kash Patel and Deputy Director Dan Bongino — were commentators in Trump's Make America Great Again movement before joining federal law enforcement. In their prior roles, both aggressively promoted theories that Epstein was killed to keep him quiet. In a 2023 appearance on Benny Johnson's podcast, Patel was incensed that House Republicans weren't trying harder to force the release of an alleged list of high-powered Epstein associates — a document the Patel-led FBI now says doesn't exist. 'What the hell are the House Republicans doing? They have the majority. You can't get the list? ... Put on your big boy pants and let us know who the pedophiles are," Patel said in the interview, which Johnson posted to social media on Dec. 19, 2023. As a podcaster, Bongino called the Epstein story 'one of the biggest political scandals of our time' and portrayed it as a wide-ranging conspiracy involving global elites. 'What the hell are they hiding with Jeffrey Epstein?' Bongino asked on his show on May 4, 2023. 'What do Clinton, Obama officials, big money leftists, a former Prime Minister of Israel — why do they want to make this Jeffrey Epstein story go away so bad?' Attorney General Pam Bondi stoked the conspiracy even after taking the helm at the Justice Department. The alleged Epstein client list is "sitting on my desk right now to review,' Bondi said in a February interview on Fox News. She later told reporters, 'There are tens of thousands of videos of Epstein with children or child porn.' Trump and his team try to put the genie back in the bottle Patel, Bongino and Bondi now contradict their earlier selves. The Justice Department this month said Epstein did not maintain a 'client list" of powerful men for whom he trafficked underage girls and said no more files would be released. Patel and Bongino offered assurances that they'd reviewed the evidence and there was no reason to doubt Epstein killed himself. 'I believe he hung himself in a cell in the Metropolitan Detention Center,' Patel testified in a Senate hearing on May 8. Trump himself has been the most aggressive. In a lengthy post Wednesday on Truth Social, he lashed out at his 'PAST supporters' who have believed in Epstein conspiracy theories, calling them 'weaklings' and saying he doesn't 'want their support anymore!' He claimed, without offering evidence, that Democrats concocted the Epstein stories that have animated his base. 'Their new SCAM is what we will forever call the Jeffrey Epstein Hoax,' Trump wrote. In another lengthy post on Saturday, he vouched for Bondi and pressed his supporters to move on. 'What's going on with my 'boys' and, in some cases, 'gals'? They're all going after Attorney General Pam Bondi, who is doing a FANTASTIC JOB!' Trump wrote. Solve the daily Crossword
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Families, kids most at risk of losing HUD housing with Trump's proposed time limits
WOODINVILLE, Wash. (AP) — More than 1 million low-income households — most of them working families with children — who depend on the nation's public housing and Section 8 voucher programs could be at risk of losing their government-subsidized homes under the Trump administration's proposal to impose a two-year time limit on rental assistance. That's according to new research from New York University, obtained exclusively by The Associated Press, which suggests the time restriction could affect as many as 1.4 million households helped by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. The NYU report also raises concerns about the largely untested policy, as most of the limited number of local housing authorities that have voluntarily tried the idea eventually abandoned the pilots. 'If currently assisted households are subject to a two-year limit, that would lead to enormous disruption and large administrative costs," for public housing authorities, the report said, adding that once the limit was up, housing authorities "would have to evict all of these households and identify new households to replace them.' Defining temporary assistance Amid a worsening national affordable housing and homelessness crisis, President Donald Trump's administration is determined to reshape HUD's expansive role providing stable housing for low-income people, which has been at the heart of its mission for generations. At a June congressional budget hearing, HUD Secretary Scott Turner argued reforms like time limits will fix waste and fraud in public housing and Section 8 voucher programs while motivating low-income families to work toward self-sufficiency. 'It's broken and deviated from its original purpose, which is to temporarily help Americans in need,' Turner said. 'HUD assistance is not supposed to be permanent.' Elderly and disabled people would be exempted, but there's little guidance from the agency on how time-limited housing assistance would be implemented — how it would be enforced, when the clock starts and how the exemptions would be defined. The NYU researchers dove deep into HUD's nationwide data over a 10-year period, analyzing nearly 4.9 million households that have been public housing and Section 8 voucher tenants. Of that, about 2.1 million could be affected by the time limits because they include at least one adult who is not elderly or disabled and about 70% of those households had already been living on those subsidies for two or more years. HUD spokesperson Kasey Lovett pushed back on the NYU study. 'There is plenty of data that strongly supports time limits and shows that long-term government assistance without any incentive disincentivizes able-bodied Americans to work,' Lovett said in a statement. Working families most at risk The time limits could displace more than a million children, as it would largely punish families who are working but still earning far below their area's median income. 'Housing assistance is especially impactful for children,' said Claudia Aiken, the director of new research partnerships for the Housing Solutions Lab at NYU's Furman Center who co-authored the study with Ellie Lochhead. Their health, education, employment and earnings potential can 'change in really meaningful ways if they have stable housing,' Aiken said. Havalah Hopkins, a 33-year-old single mom, has been living in a public housing unit outside of Seattle since 2022, but now fears a two-year time limit would leave her and her teenage son homeless. The 14-year-old boy has autism but is considered high-functioning, so how HUD defines disabled and 'able-bodied' for the time limit could determine if their family will be affected by the restriction. Hopkins, who does catering work for a local chain restaurant, pays $450 a month in rent — 30% of her household income — for their two-bedroom apartment in Woodinville, Washington. Asked what she likes most about her home, Hopkins said: 'I like that I can afford it.' Few successful examples Of the 17 housing authorities that tried time limits, 11 discontinued the trial. None tried two-year limits — the most common policy was a five-year limit with the option for an extra two and the limits usually applied to specific programs or referrals. Although there are over 3,000 housing authorities in the country, only 139 of them have ever been granted flexibility to consider testing a time limit while using federal funds for programs such as job training and financial counseling. 'Any conversation about time limits ends up being this really nuanced, hyper-local focus on what works for specific communities rather than this broad national-level implementation,' said Jim Crawford, director of the Moving to Work Collaborative which oversees that group of housing authorities. Even with those supports, several housing authorities said rent was still too high and well-paying jobs were scarce, according to the study. Others said they didn't have enough capacity to provide enough supportive services to help households afford rent. Shawnté Spears of the Housing Authority of the County of San Mateo in California said the agency's five-year time limits have 'given folks motivation' to meet their goals in tandem with self-sufficiency programs funded by dollars Donald Trump wants to cut. Time limits also give more households the chance to use vouchers, she said. But with the Bay Area's high rents, some tenants still have to spend more than half of their income on rent once their time is up or end up back on waitlists. 'I believe the program is very helpful in getting folks prepared but there lies this really, really significant rent burden here in our county,' said Spears. 'When folks do leave our time-limited program, they are facing an uphill battle.' ___ Kramon reported from Atlanta. ___ Kramon is a corps member for The Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues. Solve the daily Crossword
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1.4M of the nation's poorest renters risk losing their homes with Trump's proposed HUD time limit
WOODINVILLE, Wash. (AP) — Havalah Hopkins rarely says no to the chain restaurant catering gigs that send her out to Seattle-area events — from church potlucks to office lunches and graduation parties. The delivery fees and tips she earns on top of $18 an hour mean it's better than minimum-wage shift work, even though it's not consistent. It helps her afford the government-subsidized apartment she and her 14-year-old autistic son have lived in for three years, though it's still tough to make ends meet. 'It's a cycle of feeling defeated and depleted, no matter how much energy and effort and tenacity you have towards surviving,' Hopkins said. Still, the 33-year-old single mother is grateful she has stable housing — experts estimate just 1 in 4 low-income households eligible for U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development rental assistance get the benefits. And now Hopkins is at risk of losing her home, as federal officials move to restrict HUD policy. Amid a worsening national affordable housing and homelessness crisis, President Donald Trump's administration is determined to reshape HUD's expansive role providing stable housing for low-income people, which has been at the heart of its mission for generations. The proposed changes include a two-year limit on the federal government's signature rental assistance programs. At a June congressional budget hearing, HUD Secretary Scott Turner argued policies like time limits will fix waste and fraud in public housing and Section 8 voucher programs. 'It's broken and deviated from its original purpose, which is to temporarily help Americans in need,' Turner said. 'HUD assistance is not supposed to be permanent.' But the move to restrict such key subsidies would mark a significant retreat from the scope of HUD's work. Millions of tenants moved in with the promise of subsidized housing for as long as they were poor enough to remain qualified, so time limits would be a seismic shift that could destabilize the most vulnerable households, many unlikely to ever afford today's record-high rents. New research from New York University, obtained exclusively by The Associated Press, found that if families were cut off after two years, 1.4 million households could lose their vouchers and public housing subsidies — largely working families with children. This would lead housing authorities to evict many families, the report said. A broad time limit would cause 'substantial disruption and dislocation,' the it said, noting the policy is largely untested and most of the few housing authorities to voluntarily try it eventually abandoned the pilots. A break from HUD's long-held purpose of helping house the poor could also jeopardize its contracts with private landlords, who say they're already feeling the uncertainty as public housing authorities from Seattle to Atlanta announce they're scaling back in anticipation of federal funding cuts. Critics fear the restriction could derail those working towards self-sufficiency — defeating the goal time-limit supporters hope to achieve. HUD spokesperson Kasey Lovett pushed back on the NYU study. 'There is plenty of data that strongly supports time limits and shows that long-term government assistance without any incentive disincentivizes able-bodied Americans to work,' Lovett said in a statement. She primarily cited statistics suggesting low employment among HUD-subsidized tenants. Hopkins said the policy would likely leave her and her son homeless in an economy that often feels indifferent to working poor people like her. 'A two-year time limit is ridiculous,' she said. 'It's so disrespectful. I think it's dehumanizing — the whole system.' Working families are most at risk Researchers from the Housing Solutions Lab at New York University's Furman Center analyzed HUD's data over a 10-year period and found about 70% of households who could be affected by a two-year limit had already been living on those subsidies for two or more years. That's based on 2024 estimates and doesn't include elderly and disabled people who wouldn't be subject to time limits. Exempted households make up about half of the roughly 4.9 million households getting rental assistance. In the first study to examine the proposed policy's possible impacts, the NYU researchers found time limits would largely punish families who are working but earning far below their area's median income, which would ultimately shift federal rental assistance away from households with kids. 'Housing assistance is especially impactful for children,' said Claudia Aiken, the study co-author and director of new research partnerships for the Housing Solutions Lab. Their health, education, employment and earnings potential can "change in really meaningful ways if they have stable housing,' she said. It would affect people like Hopkins, whose family was on a years-long waitlist in the expensive region where she grew up. In July 2022, she and her son moved into a two-bedroom public housing unit in Woodinville, Washington. She pays $450 a month in rent — 30% of her household income. A market-rate apartment in the area costs at least $2,000 more, according to the King County Housing Authority, which in June announced it would pause issuing some new vouchers. Hopkins knows she could never afford to live in her home state without rental assistance. It was a relief they could stay as long as they needed. She had been struggling to scrape together hundreds of dollars more a month for her previous trailer home. 'There's no words to put on feeling like your housing is secure,' Hopkins said. 'I feel like I was gasping for air and I'm finally able to breathe.' She credits the housing subsidy for her ability to finally leave an abusive marriage, and still dreams of more — perhaps her own catering business or working as a party decorator. 'We all can't be lawyers and doctors — and two years isn't enough to even become that,' Hopkins said. Since learning of Trump's proposal, Hopkins said she's been haunted by thoughts of shoving her possessions into a van with her son, upending the stability she built for him. 'Difficult to do well' The average household in HUD-subsidized housing stays about six years, studies show. HUD funds local public housing projects where nearly 1 million households live and the Section 8 vouchers that about 4 million households use to offset their private rentals. There's been little guidance from HUD on how time-limited housing assistance would be implemented — how it would be enforced, when the clock starts and how the exemptions would be defined. Both Democrats and Republicans have acknowledged the potential for time limits to help curb HUD's notorious waitlists. Hard-liners contend the threat of housing loss will push people to reach self-sufficiency; others see limits, when coupled with support and workforce incentives, as a means to motivate tenants to improve their lives. Yet there are strikingly few successful examples. NYU researchers identified just 17 public housing authorities that have tested time limits. None of the programs were designed for only two years and 11 abandoned the restriction — despite being able to use federal dollars for services to help people achieve self-sufficiency. Several agencies that dropped the limits said tenants still struggled to afford housing after their time was up. 'These policies are complex and difficult to monitor, enforce, and do well,' NYU's Aiken said. The city of Keene, New Hampshire, tried five-year time limits starting in 2001, but terminated the policy before fully enforcing it to avoid kicking out households that would still be 'rent burdened, or potentially homeless,' said Josh Meehan, executive director of Keene Housing. In California, Shawnté Spears of the Housing Authority of San Mateo County said the agency has kept its five-year time limit in tandem with educational programs she says have 'given folks motivation' to meet their goals. It also gives more people the chance to use vouchers, she said. NYU's Aiken acknowledged HUD's long waitlists make the current system 'a bit of a lottery," adding: "You could say that time limits are a way of increasing people's odds in that lottery.' The landlord's dilemma HUD's Section 8 programs have long depended on hundreds of thousands of for-profit and nonprofit small business owners and property managers to accept tenant vouchers. Now, landlords fear a two-year limit could put their contracts for HUD-subsidized housing in limbo. Amid the uncertainty, Denise Muha, executive director of the National Leased Housing Association, said multiple landlord groups have voiced their concerns about HUD's next budget in a letter to congressional leaders. She said landlords generally agree two years is simply not enough time for most low-income tenants to change their fortunes. 'As a practical matter, you're going to increase your turnover, which is a cost," Muha said. 'Nobody wants to throw out their tenants without cause.' It's always been a significant lift for private landlords to work with HUD subsidies, which involve burdensome paperwork, heavy oversight and maintenance inspections. But the trade-off is a near guarantee of dependable longer-term renters and rental income. If that's compromised, some landlords say they'd pull back from the federal subsidy programs. Brad Suster, who owns 86 Chicago-area units funded by HUD, said accepting subsidies could become risky. 'Would we have the same reliability that we know has traditionally come for countless years from the federal government?' Suster said. 'That's something landlords and owners want to know is there." The diminishing housing stock available to low-income tenants has been a brewing problem for HUD. Between 2010 and 2020, some 50,000 housing providers left the voucher program, the agency has reported. Chaos and trade-offs, critics say It's up for debate whether lawmakers will buy into Donald Trump's vision for HUD. This week the U.S. House appropriations committee is taking up HUD's 2026 budget, which so far makes no mention of time limits. HUD's Lovett noted the Senate's budget plans for the agency have not yet been released, and said the administration remains focused on future implementation of time limits. 'HUD will continue to engage with colleagues on the hill to ensure a seamless transition and enforcement of any new time limit,' Lovett said in a statement. Noëlle Porter, the director of government affairs at the National Housing Law Project, said Trump's fight for time limits is far from over, noting that legislative and rule changes could make them a reality. 'It is clearly a stated goal of the administration to impose work requirements and time limits on rental assistance, even though it would be wildly unpopular,' Porter said. Democratic Rep. James Clyburn of South Carolina says there's no evidence time limits would save HUD money. 'This doesn't help families who already are working multiple jobs to become self-sufficient,' Clyburn said at a June hearing. 'Instead, it creates chaos, financial uncertainty and pushes these families into more severe trade-offs.' Time limits could imperil Aaliyah Barnes' longtime dream of graduating college and becoming a nurse, finding a job and a home she can afford. The 28-year-old single mom in Louisville, Kentucky, this year joined Family Scholar House, which provides counseling and support for people pursuing an education — and, to Barnes' relief, housing. Her apartment is paid for by a Section 8 voucher. In March, Barnes moved in and her 3-year-old son, Aarmoni, finally got his own room, where she set up a learning wall. Previously, she had struggled to afford housing on her wages at a call center — and living with her mom, two sisters and their kids in a cramped house was an environment ridden with arguments. The stable future she's building could disappear, though, if she's forced out in two years when her schooling is expected to take three years. 'I'd be so close, but so far away,' Barnes said. ___ Kramon reported from Atlanta. ___ Kramon is a corps member for The Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues. Solve the daily Crossword
