white house office

WASHINGTON — President Trump has told House Speaker Mike Johnson that he won’t be spending $4.9 billion in congressionally approved foreign aid, effectively cutting the budget without going through the legislative branch.

Trump, who sent a letter to Johnson, R-La., on Thursday, is using what’s known as a pocket rescission — when a president submits a request to Congress to not spend approved funds toward the end of the fiscal year, so that Congress cannot act on the request in the 45-day timeframe and the money goes unspent as a result. It’s the first time in nearly 50 years a president has used one. The fiscal year draws to a close at the end of September.

The letter was posted Friday morning on the X account of the White House Office of Management and Budget. It said the funding would be cut from the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, an early target of Trump’s efforts to cut foreign aid.

The last pocket rescission was in 1977 by then-President Jimmy Carter, and the Trump administration argues that it’s a legally permissible tool. But such a move, if standardized by the White House, could effectively bypass Congress on key spending choices and potentially wrest some control over spending from the House and the Senate.

The 1974 Impoundment Control Act gives the president the authority to propose canceling funds approved by Congress. Congress can vote on pulling back the funds or sustaining them, but by proposing the rescission so close to Sept. 30 the White House ensures that the money won’t be spent and the funding lapses.

Trump had previously sought to get congressional backing for rescissions and succeeded in doing so in July when the House and the Senate approved $9 billion worth of cuts. Those rescissions clawed back funding for public broadcasting and foreign aid.

The Trump administration has made deep reductions to foreign aid one of its hallmark policies, despite the relatively meager savings relative to the deficit and possible damage to America’s reputation abroad as foreign populations lose access to food supplies and development programs.

In February, the administration said it would eliminate almost all of USAID’s foreign aid contracts and $60 billion in overall assistance abroad. USAID has since been dismantled, and its few remaining programs have been placed under State Department control.

The Trump administration on Wednesday appealed to the Supreme Court to stop lower court decisions that have preserved foreign aid, including for global health and HIV and AIDS programs, that Trump has tried to freeze.

The New York Post first reported the pocket rescission.

Boak writes for the Associated Press.

More than 400 Hollywood creatives, including director Guillermo del Toro and actors Cynthia Erivo and Joseph Gordon-Levitt, are urging the U.S. government to uphold existing copyright protections against artificial intelligence.

“We firmly believe that America’s global AI leadership must not come at the expense of our essential creative industries,” they wrote in a letter to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy last week.

“There is no reason to weaken or eliminate the copyright protections that have helped America flourish,” the letter said. “Not when AI companies can use our copyrighted material by simply doing what the law requires: negotiating appropriate licenses with copyright holders — just as every other industry does.”

The message was sent in response to the Trump administration’s request for public comment on the White House’s AI Action Plan, which aims to secure and advance the country’s position in the AI industry. Silicon Valley tech companies Google and OpenAI wrote their own letters.

There has been tension between AI companies and creatives, who object to AI models being trained on their work without their permission. The Writers Guild of America has pushed studios to sue AI companies that are engaging in this practice. Other organizations including the New York Times have sued OpenAI for copyright infringement.

Tech industry executives have said that they should be able to train AI models with content available online under the “fair use” doctrine, which allows for the limited reproduction of material without permission from the copyright holder.

In its letter to the White House, OpenAI’s chief global affairs officer, Chris Lehane, said, “Applying the fair use doctrine to AI is not only a matter of American competitiveness — it’s a matter of national security.”

The San Francisco startup known for ChatGPT argued that the rapid advances by China startup DeepSeek show that “America’s lead on frontier AI is far from guaranteed.” DeepSeek claimed it could compete with OpenAI at lower cost.

In January, President Trump announced the Stargate project, in which OpenAI, Oracle and Softbank will work on a venture to put hundreds of billions of dollars into building AI infrastructure in the U.S.

“If [China’s] developers have unfettered access to data and American companies are left without fair use access, the race for AI is effectively over,” Lehane said in his letter. “Ultimately, access to more data from the widest possible range of sources will ensure more access to more powerful innovations that deliver even more knowledge.”

Google, in its letter, called for “balanced copyright rules,” arguing that fair use and other exceptions to copyright protections “have been critical to enabling AI systems to learn from prior knowledge and publicly available data, unlocking scientific and social advances.”

But Hollywood creatives said that there is no reason to weaken or eliminate copyright protections and that AI companies can use copyrighted material by negotiating licenses with copyright holders.

The U.S. arts and entertainment industry supports more than 2.3 million U.S. jobs with more than $229 billion in wages annually; weakening copyright protections could undermine its economic and cultural strength, the creatives wrote in their letter.

Google and OpenAI “are arguing for a special government exemption so they can freely exploit America’s creative and knowledge industries, despite their substantial revenues and available funds,” the letter said.

In a statement, Google said it’s “confident current copyright law enables AI innovation.” OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The letter was signed by people who work in the entertainment industry, including writers, actors, musicians and costume designers. Prominent signers include Marisa Tomei, Carrie Coon, Ben Stiller, Natasha Lyonne, Mark Ruffalo, Ava DuVernay and Ron Howard.

Hollywood creatives pushed for more protections against AI when actors and writers went on strike in 2023. Guilds have voiced support for new laws regulating AI. In September, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed bills that would provide more protection to digital likenesses.

Meanwhile, some creatives have embraced the technology, saying it lets them test bold ideas without as many financial constraints.

NEW YORK —  The Biden administration on Tuesday released a “road map” for maintaining government defenses against infectious diseases, just as President-elect Donald Trump pledges to dismantle some of them.

The 16-page report recaps steps taken in the last four years against COVID-19, mpox and other diseases, including vaccination efforts and the use of wastewater and other measures to spot signs of erupting disease outbreaks. It’s a public version of a roughly 300-page pandemic-prevention playbook that Biden officials say they are providing to the incoming administration.

Biden officials touted the steps they took to halt or prevent disease threats, but some public heath researchers offer a more mixed assessment of the administration’s efforts. Several experts, for example, said not nearly enough has been done to make sure an expanding bird flu pandemic in animals doesn’t turn into a global health catastrophe for people.

“Overwhelmingly you’ve heard a lot of frustration by outside experts that we’ve been underreacting to what we see as really serious threat,” said Jennifer Nuzzo, director of the Pandemic Center at the Brown University School of Public Health.

Public health experts worry the next administration could do less

Trump and his team plan to slash government spending, and Trump has endorsed prominent vaccine detractors for top government health posts. During the campaign last year, Trump told Time magazine that he would disband the White House office focused on pandemic preparedness, calling it “a very expensive solution to something that won’t work.”

Public health researchers also point to Trump’s first administration, when the White House in 2018 dismantled a National Security Council pandemic unit. When COVID-19 hit two years later, the government’s disjointed response prompted some experts to argue that the unit could have helped a faster and more uniform response.

In 2020, during the pandemic, Trump officials moved to pull the U.S. out of the World Health Organization. President Biden reversed the decision, but Trump’s team is expected to do it again. Experts say such a move would, among other things, hurt the ability to gain information about emerging new outbreaks before they comes to U.S. shores.

Officials with the Trump transition team did not respond to emails requesting information about its pandemic planning.

Many public health experts praise Trump for Operation Warp Speed, which helped spur the rapid development of COVID-19 vaccines. But several also noted that decades of planning and research under previous administrations laid the groundwork for it.

What do Biden officials say they accomplished?

COVID-19 vaccines did not start to trickle out to the public until after Biden defeated Trump in the 2020 election, and it was the Biden administration that stood up what it describes as the largest free vaccination program in U.S. history.

“President Biden came to office amidst the worst public health crisis in more than a century,” Dr. Paul Friedrichs, director of the White House Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy, said in a statement. “He partnered with stakeholders across the nation and turned it around, ending the pandemic and saving countless lives.”

Friedrichs’s office was established by Congress in 2022. He said the administration has “laid the foundation for faster and more effective responses to save lives now and in the future.”

What has been done to prepare for bird flu and other threats?

The pandemic office, which released the report Tuesday, said it has taken steps to fight bird flu, which has been spreading among animal species in scores of countries in the last few years.

The virus was detected in U.S. dairy herds in March. At least 66 people in the U.S. have been diagnosed with infections, the vast majority of them dairy or poultry workers who had mild infections. But that count includes an elderly Louisiana man who died.

Among other steps, the administration is stockpiling 10 million doses of vaccine that is considered effective against the strain that’s been circulating in U.S. cattle, and spent $176 million to develop mRNA vaccines that could quickly be adapted to mutations in the virus, with late stage trials “beginning shortly,” the document says.

Having measures in place to quickly develop and mass produce new vaccines is crucial, said Michael Osterholm, a University of Minnesota expert on infectious diseases.

“We don’t really have any understanding of what influenza virus will emerge one day to cause the next pandemic,” Osterholm said. “It sure isn’t this [bird flu strain], or it would be causing it [a pandemic] right now.”

The U.S. should maintain collaborations that train disease investigators in other countries to detect emerging infections, public health experts say.

“We have to continue to invest in surveillance in areas where we think these infectious agents are likely to emerge,” said Ian Lipkin, an infectious diseases researcher at New York’s Columbia University.

“I’m hoping that the Trump administration — as they are concerned about people coming across the border who may be infected with this or that or the other thing — will see the wisdom in trying to make sure that we do surveillance in areas where we think there’s a large risk,” he said.

Stobbe writes for the Associated Press.