Government Efficiency

Inside a 90-square-mile stretch of rural reservation between the eastern Jemez Mountains and the banks of the Rio Grande River sits the Santa Clara Pueblo Community Library, an anchor for the northern New Mexico tribe it serves.

Internet service across the Santa Clara Pueblo reservation is sparse, the tribe’s governor, James Naranjo, told NBC News, and resources to expand access to technology and literacy programs for its 1,700 members are already stretched thin.

More than $220 million worth of contracts cancelled by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) have been brought back.

Forty-four of the government contracts ended by DOGE and Musk have been revived by federal agencies, according to a federal spending data review by The New York Times.

However, DOGE still lists 43 of those contracts on its website as having been terminated, and some were added after they had been restored. This led to several data errors on the site.

House Republicans unveiled the cost-saving centerpiece of President Donald Trump’s “ big, beautiful bill ” late Sunday, at least $880 billion in cuts largely to Medicaid to help cover the cost of $4.5 trillion in tax breaks.

Tallying hundreds of pages, the legislation is touching off the biggest political fight over health care since Republicans tried to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, during Trump’s first term in 2017 — which ended in failure.

Mass terminations and billions of dollars’ worth of cuts at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) have gutted key programs – from child support services to HIV treatment abroad – and created a “real danger” that disease outbreaks will be missed, according to former workers.

Workers at the HHS, now led by Robert F Kennedy Jr, and in public health warned in interviews that chaotic, flawed and sweeping reductions would have broad, negative effects across the US and beyond.

The federal human resources agency at the heart of billionaire Elon Musk's efforts to slash the federal workforce is poised to roll out software to speed layoffs across the U.S. government, two people familiar with the matter told Reuters.

The Trump administration nixed the Healthcare Infection Control Practices Advisory Committee (HICPAC), ending three decades of medical advice used by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) according to NBC.

A handful of committee members said the CDC delivered the news about HICPAC’s termination to members Friday, per the outlet.

The termination took effect more than a month previously, on March 31, according to a letter reviewed by NBC. 

President Donald Trump signed an executive order Monday afternoon ending the allocation of federal funding toward risky gain-of-function research in foreign countries like China, where the Covid-19 pandemic is believed to have originated.

The order targets the funding of gain-of-function research conducted in “countries of concern,” including Iran, and other nations that don’t have high oversight standards for biological research, according to a White House fact sheet. The directive is said to prevent the potential outbreak of another pandemic.

A “catastrophic” exodus of thousands of employees from the US Department of Labor threatens “all of the core aspects of working life”, insiders have warned, amid fears that the Trump administration will further slash the agency’s operations.

The federal agency has already lost about 20% of its workforce, according to employees, as nearly 2,700 staff took retirement, early retirement, deferred resignation buyouts or “fork in the road” departures earlier this year.

The White House wants to reduce U.S. health spending by more than a quarter next year, with the National Institutes of Health and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention facing the brunt of billions of dollars in cuts.

President Donald Trump's administration on Friday proposed a $163 billion cut to the federal budget that would sharply reduce spending in areas including health, education, and housing next year, while increasing outlays for defense and border security.

I still remember how, as a new parent, I would often tiptoe into my sleeping son's room multiple times a day — and night — to make sure he was still breathing.

Thanks to Safe to Sleep, a public awareness campaign launched three decades ago, I knew that sleep-related infant deaths were a leading cause of deaths for babies in the U.S.