Democrats and protesters rally outside treasury department to protest Elon Musk’s access to sensitive information – as it happened

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After calling for the permanent “resettlement” of all Palestinians from Gaza earlier in the day, Trump said the US would “take over” and “own” the Gaza Strip. The US president said he envisioned “long-term” US ownership of Gaza after Palestinians were moved elsewhere:

The Trump administration is placing US Agency for International Development direct-hire staffers around the world on leave, except those deemed essential, the Associated Press reports.

A notice posted online Tuesday gives the workers 30 days to return home, upending the aid agency’s six-decade mission overseas.

Thousands of USAid employees already had been laid off and programs worldwide shut down after President Donald Trump imposed a sweeping freeze on foreign assistance.

Elon Musk’s budget-slashing Department of Government Efficiency had taken USAID’s website offline over the weekend as it steadily dismantled the agency, which has been a special target of Musk, Trump and Republicans in the first two-and-a-half weeks of Trump’s second term. The website came back online Tuesday night, with the notice of recall or termination for global staffers its sole post.

The move had been rumored for several days and was the most extreme of several proposals considered for consolidating the agency into the state department. Other options had included closures of smaller USAid missions and partial closures of larger ones.

The decision to withdraw direct-hire staff and their families earlier than their planned departures will probably cost the government tens of millions of dollars in travel and relocation costs.

Staff being placed on leave include both foreign and civil service officers who have legal protection against arbitrary dismissal and being placed on leave without reason.

The American Foreign Service Association, the union which represents US diplomats, sent a notice to its members denouncing the decision and saying it was preparing legal action to counter or halt it.

Locally employed USAid staff do not have much recourse and were excluded from the federal government’s voluntary buyout offer.

The notice says those who will exempted from leave include staffers responsible for “mission-critical functions, core leadership and specially designated programs” and would be informed by Thursday afternoon.

“Thank you for your service,” the notice concluded.

Donald Trump has vowed that US would “take over” war ravaged Gaza and “own it”, effectively endorsing the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, in an announcement shocking even by the standards of his norm-shattering presidency.

Trump, who has previously threatened Greenland and Panama and suggested that Canada should become the 51st state, added Gaza to his expansionist agenda, claiming that it could become the “Riviera of the Middle East” and declined to rule out sending US troops to make it happen.

“The only reason the Palestinians want to go back to Gaza is they have no alternative,” the president told a joint press conference with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House on Tuesday evening. “It’s right now a demolition site. This is just a demolition site. Virtually every building is down.”

Staffers with Elon Musk’s “department of government efficiency” (Doge) reportedly entered the headquarters of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) in Silver Spring, Maryland, and the Department of Commerce in Washington DC today, inciting concerns of downsizing at the agency.

“They apparently just sort of walked past security and said: ‘Get out of my way,’ and they’re looking for access for the IT systems, as they have in other agencies,” said Andrew Rosenberg, a former Noaa official who is now a fellow at the University of New Hampshire. “They will have access to the entire computer system, a lot of which is confidential information.”

Project 2025, written by several former Trump staffers, has called for the agency to be “broken up and downsized”, claiming the agency is “harmful to US prosperity” for its role in climate science.

Donald Trump and Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, addressed reporters at the White House, where the US president announced his intention to take over the Gaza Strip, move Palestinians to neighbouring countries and redevelop the territory for occupation by “the world’s people”. Here are the main takeaways from their joint press conference on Tuesday evening:

• In a shock announcement, Trump said the US will “take over” and “own” the Gaza Strip. The US president said he envisioned a “long-term” US ownership of the territory after all Palestinians were moved elsewhere. He did not explain how and under what authority the US can take over the land of Gaza. “We will own it and be responsible for dismantling all of the dangerous unexploded bombs and other weapons on the site,” he said. He said the US would “level” destroyed buildings and “create an economic development that will supply unlimited numbers of jobs and housing for the people of the area.”

• The US president called Gaza a “symbol of death and destruction” and that the only reason people want to go back there is because they have nowhere else to go. The 1.8 million Palestinians living in Gaza should move to neighbouring countries with “humanitarian hearts” and “great wealth”, Trump said. Earlier he had called for Jordan, Egypt and other Arab states to take in Palestinians. He said they could be split up across a number of separate sites. Forced displacement of the population would probably be a violation of international law and would be fiercely opposed not only in the region but also by Washington’s western allies. Some human rights advocates liken the idea to ethnic cleansing.

• He went on to say that Gaza could become “the Riviera of the Middle East” where “the world’s people” could live there, echoing the previous sentiments of his son-in-law Jared Kushner, who said Gaza had very valuable “waterfront property”.

• Trump gave a vague answer when asked a question on whether he supported a two-state solution. Asked if his view that Palestinians should be relocated from Gaza was a sign that he was against the two-state policy that has been the foreign policy approach of the United States for decades, Trump said no. “It doesn’t mean anything about a two-state or one state or any other state. It means that we want to have, we want to give people a chance at life,” he said. “They have never had a chance at life because the Gaza Strip has been a hellhole for people living there. It’s been horrible.”

• Trump claimed high-level support among unnamed leaders he had spoken to. “This is not a decision made lightly,” he said, adding that “everybody I’ve spoken to loves the idea of the United States owning that piece of land.” He said the move would bring “great stability to that part of the Middle East”.

• Trump did not rule out sending US troops to secure Gaza. “As far as Gaza is concerned, we’ll do what is necessary. If it’s necessary, we’ll do that,” he said. On Trump’s idea of taking over Gaza, Netanyahu said the US president “sees a different future for Gaza”, adding: “I think it’s something that could change history.”

• Trump said he would probably announce a position on Israeli sovereignty over the West Bank in the next month. “We haven’t been taking the position on it yet,” he said. Trump added that he planned to visit the Gaza Strip, Israel and Saudi Arabia.

• Netanyahu described Trump as “the greatest friend Israel has ever had in the White House”. The Israeli leader said “we have to finish the job in Gaza”, and said “Israel will end the war by winning the war.” Netanyahu praised Trump for “thinking outside the box with fresh ideas” and “showing willingness to puncture conventional thinking”.

• The Saudi government, in a statement, stressed its rejection of any attempt to displace Palestinians from their land and said it would not establish relations with Israel without establishment of a Palestinian state. Meanwhile Hamas condemned Trump’s calls for Palestinians in Gaza to leave as “expulsion from their land”. The Palestinian envoy to the United Nations said that world leaders and people should respect Palestinians’ desire to remain in Gaza.

While the White House sold Trump’s shocking announcement that “the US will take over the Gaza Strip” and take “a long-term ownership position” in the Palestinian territory” as proof of his “unwavering pursuit for peace”, current and former members of Congress expressed shock and outrage.

“He’s totally lost it. A US invasion of Gaza would lead to the slaughter of thousands of US troops and decades of war in the Middle East” Democratic Senator Chris Murphy wrote on X. It’s like a bad, sick joke.”

“I think most South Carolinians would probably not be excited about sending Americans to take over Gaza”, Republican Senator Lindsey Graham told Jewish Insider. “It might be problematic.”

“That’s insane”, Democratic Senator Chris Coons told NBC News. “ I can’t think of a place on earth that would welcome American troops less and where any positive outcome is less likely.”

Senator John Fetterman, a Democrat who has been a staunch supporter of Israel’s war in Gaza, was more open to the idea. “It’s a provocative part of the conversation, but it’s part of the conversation, and that’s where we are” Fetterman told Jewish Insider. “The Palestinians have refused, or they’ve been unwilling to deliver a government that provided security and economic development for themselves”.

Justin Amash, a former Republican member of Congress whose father was expelled from his home by Israeli forces in 1948, was appalled. “If the United States deploys troops to forcibly remove Muslims and Christians – like my cousins – from Gaza, then not only will the US be mired in another reckless occupation but it will also be guilty of the crime of ethnic cleansing” Amash wrote on X. “No American of good conscience should stand for this.”

The US International Trade Commission on Tuesday said it had canceled an ongoing multi-year investigation into the impact of trade policy on under-served communities and workers at the request of the Trump administration.

The ITC, an independent, nonpartisan federal agency told witnesses that it was canceling a hearing on the racial and diversity impacts of trade on Wednesday after the US Trade Representative’s office withdrew its request for the broader study. A copy of the email was seen by Reuters.

The agency had planned a total of six virtual hearings on the issue, including separate sessions on persistent poverty in rural areas and urban areas, and had planned in-person conversations in five US cities from March to May.

A US judge on Tuesday blocked the Trump administration from moving transgender women to men’s prisons and ending their gender-affirming care, Reuters reports.

In a broad ruling temporarily halting an executive order that Trump, a Republican, signed on his first day back in office on 20 January, US District Judge Royce Lamberth in Washington found that three transgender inmates who sued would probably succeed in arguing the policy was unconstitutional.

The decision marked the second time that a federal judge had sided with LGBTQ legal rights groups who sued to prevent the U.S. Bureau of Prisons from implementing the order.

Lamberth’s order applies to all 16 transgender women currently housed in federal women’s prisons. It goes further than a 27 January decision by a federal judge in Boston blocking prison officials from transferring an individual transgender woman to a men’s facility.

A spokesperson for the Justice Department, which defended the Trump administration in court, declined to comment. The Bureau of Prisons did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Near the tail-end of the demonstration, news broke that the treasury said Musk’s team had been granted “read-only” access to “coded data” of the government’s payments system, according to Bloomberg.

In a letter to Senator Ron Wyden, Jonathan Blum, the treasury’s principal deputy assistant secretary for legislative affairs, wrote that the system remains “robust and effective” and that no valid payment requests from government agencies had been rejected.

But that did little to quell protesters’ concerns about Musk’s involvement with systems in the first place, including many who were former federal contractors, such as Alexa Fraser, who worked in public health research.

“What protections did he turn off to get in there? Who has he sold it to?” she told the Guardian. “We have no reason to think his security situation is better now.”

Dave Stoakley, who drove more than two hours from central Virginia to protest, saw the situation as part of a larger pattern. “I think it’s an intentional dismantling of the government,” he said. “They’re throwing out the good with the bad.”

Blumenthal captured the crowd’s fears in stark terms: “Every American’s information is at risk. What does Elon Musk do with everything he touches? He makes money!”

Hundreds of protesters and a contingent of Democratic lawmakers rallied outside the Department of the Treasury in Washington on Tuesday, denouncing what they called Elon Musk’s “hostile takeover” of federal financial systems, as demonstrations spilled on to, and took over, the street outside the building.

The protests targeted reports of the “department of government efficiency” (Doge) team’s reported access to sensitive government financial data, including information related to social security payments, Medicare reimbursements, and tax refunds – systems that process trillions of dollars in annual transactions.

“He has access to all our information, our social security numbers, the federal payment system,” Representative Maxwell Frost told the crowd. “What’s going to stop him from stealing taxpayer money?”

About a dozen members of Congress, including Maxine Waters, Al Green, Ayanna Pressley, and senators Jeff Merkley and Richard Blumenthal, joined the condemnations. Jasmine Crockett’s voice boomed across the crowd: “We are not going to sit around while you go and desecrate our constitution. We are going to be in your face and on your asses!”

Minutes earlier, a handful of lawmakers, including Crockett, Pressley, Frost and Jamie Raskin, had attempted to get inside the treasury department before being rebuffed: