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The Senate voted Monday to invoke cloture on Elbridge Colby’s nomination, moving the national security strategist one step closer to confirmation as undersecretary of defense for policy, the Pentagon’s No. 3 post. 

The procedural vote, which limits debate and tees up a final confirmation vote, passed by a margin of 53 to 49. Colby’s nomination advanced out of the Armed Services Committee last month, overcoming skepticism from hawkish Republicans like Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., during a closed-door vote.

Colby, a co-founder of the Marathon Initiative and a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Strategy and Force Development under the Trump administration, is best known for his role in authoring the 2018 National Defense Strategy, which reoriented long-term military strategy toward a great power competition with China. 

He has long argued the U.S. military needs to limit its resources in the Middle East in a pivot to the Indo-Pacific region. 

Colby has scored staunch backing from a number of figures in Trump world, increasing the pressure on GOP skeptics to get on board with his nomination. 

Vice President J.D. Vance paid a visit to Capitol Hill last month to offer support for his ‘friend’ Colby. 

‘In so many ways, Bridge predicted what we would be talking about four years down the road, five years down the road, 10 years down the road. He saw around corners that very few other people were seeing around,’ Vance said at the time. 

‘If you look at his long career in defense policy, he has said things that, you know, frankly, alienated Democrats and Republicans. He’s also said things that I think both Democrats and Republicans would agree with.’ 

During the hearing, Senate Armed Services Committee Chair Roger Wicker, R-Miss., questioned Colby on his previously stated position, ‘America has a strong interest in defending Taiwan, but Americans can survive without it.’ 

‘Your views on Taiwan’s importance to the United States seems to have softened considerably,’ Wicker told Colby. 

Colby disputed that point, arguing he had been sounding the alarm that the U.S.’ ‘military balance has declined’ in relation to China.

‘What I have been trying to shoot a signal flare over is that it is vital for us to focus and enable our own forces for an effective and reasonable defense of Taiwan and for the Taiwanese, as well as the Japanese, to do more,’ said Colby.  

When pressed by Cotton during the hearing, Colby said he believes Iran to be an ‘existential’ threat to the U.S. 

‘Yes, a nuclear-armed Iran – especially, Senator, given that … we know they’ve worked on ICBM-range capabilities and other capabilities that would pose an existential danger to the United States,’ Colby said.

He promised to provide ‘credible good military options’ to the president if diplomacy with Iran fails. 

It was a different tune than he’d sung in years past. 

‘The only thing worse than the prospect of an Iran armed with nuclear weapons would be consequences of using force to try to stop them,’ Colby had said in 2012. 

‘I would say a lot of what I was arguing against at the time, these conversations 15 years ago, a lot of the opponents I felt had a casual or in some cases even flippant attitude towards the employment of military force,’ Colby said. ‘That’s a lot of what I was arguing against. Was my wording always appropriate, was my precise framing always appropriate? No.’

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The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) announced $51 million in cuts from the U.S. African Development Foundation, which included hundreds of thousands of dollars for marketing shea butter and pineapple juice, as well as mango drying facilities.

DOGE made the announcement on X, highlighting several initiatives the money was put toward.

For instance, $229,296 was used to market 100% organic shea butter in Burkina Faso; $246,217 was spent on mango drying facilities in the Ivory Coast; and $239,738 was spent on marketing pineapple juice in Benin.

The department also said $99,566 was spent to increase yogurt production in Uganda; $84,059 was spent on a business incubator for spa and wellness entrepreneurs in Nigeria; $50,000 was spent to train farmers how to grow dragon fruit in Senegal; and $48,406 was spent on a WhatsApp marketing chatbot in Kenya.

DOGE, led by Elon Musk, is a temporary organization within the White House created via executive order earlier this year.

President Donald Trump tasked the organization with optimizing the federal government, streamlining operations and slashing spending and gave the agency 18 months to do it.

Late last month, DOGE shared that it had terminated 113 contracts valued at $4.7 billion, including a U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) consulting contract valued at $145,000 for Peru climate change activities.

The funding that was canceled also included $10 million for ‘gender equity in the Mexican workplace,’ $12.2 million for ‘worker empowerment in South America’ and $6.25 million for ‘improving respect for workers’ rights in agricultural supply chains’ in the countries of Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador.

The department has canceled numerous diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives at federal agencies, consulting contracts, leases for underused federal buildings and duplicate agencies and programs.

As of Monday, DOGE claims on its site that it has saved Americans $140 billion, or about $870 per taxpayer.

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Two key bills backed by President Donald Trump are set to get a vote this week after advancing through the House Rules Committee on Monday evening.

The No Rogue Rulings Act (NORRA Act) by Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., would limit district court judges’ ability to issue orders blocking Trump policies nationwide. The Safeguarding American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act by Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, is aimed at requiring proof of citizenship in the voting registration process.

The former legislation is a response to Trump’s ongoing standoff with judges paralyzing his agenda, while the latter is a bill that the president and his allies have long pushed for.

Issa’s bill is slated to get a vote on Tuesday afternoon, while Roy’s is expected on the House floor Thursday morning.

That’s provided they pass a procedural hurdle known as a ‘rule vote.’ A simple majority of House lawmakers is needed to pass a ‘rule’ to allow for debate and eventual House-wide votes on legislation.

The House Rules Committee, the final gatekeeper before most legislation reaches the entire chamber, advanced a ‘rule’ combining Issa and Roy’s bills with two financial regulatory measures that are also due for a vote this week if the rule passes.

Both pieces of legislation were slated to get House votes last week, but a showdown over an unrelated measure on proxy voting for new parents in Congress wound up paralyzing the chamber floor on Tuesday afternoon, less than 24 hours after the House’s first votes of the week.

‘The Committee on Rules made efforts to protect this body from a take-it-or-leave-it, all-or-nothing proposal to impose proxy voting, which, while limited, would take us down the slippery slope and return us to the rampant abuse of unlimited proxy voting for members on both sides of the aisle that we witnessed when the Democrats imposed the practice during the COVID era, yet the body felt otherwise,’ House Rules Committee Chair Virginia Foxx, R-N.C., said at the outset of Monday’s meeting.

Rep. Jim McGovern, D-Mass., the top Democrat on the committee, said during his opening statement, ‘A supposedly pro-family party worked to block a simple, commonsense policy that supports working moms in Congress. It was a move that was unprecedented, and thankfully, a majority of members in our chamber pushed back.’

‘When he lost the vote, Speaker Johnson sent everyone home, blaming the few Republicans who had the guts to take a stand for family values,’ McGovern said.

With the matter resolved, both the rule vote and both measures themselves are expected to pass with little drama.

It’s likely a different matter in the Senate, however, where both bills would need help from at least some Democrats to meet the body’s 60-vote threshold for advancement.

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The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and the State Department called out practices under the Biden administration that required diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) efforts to account for 20% of performance evaluations for foreign service officers.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio called the reforms of the Biden administration’s DEI policies ‘important and historic.’

‘Now our incredible Foreign Service Officers will be evaluated on true merit, not on arbitrary immutable characteristics,’ he wrote on X.

Rubio shared a post from DOGE, which noted that under the policy, diplomats were assessed on whether they avoided ‘gendered adjectives’ or ‘faint praise.’

The department shared PowerPoint slides providing examples of phrases to avoid.

One of the slides gave descriptive phrases that can unintentionally influence a reader. It then gave examples of gendered adjectives like, ‘Dr. Sarah Gray is a caring compassionate physician’ vs. ‘Dr. Joel Gray has been very successful with his patients.’

Faint praise was also discouraged. One example the slide provided was, ‘S/he worked hard on projects that s/he was assigned’ or ‘S/he has never had temper tantrums.’

The slides discouraged using first names for women or minorities and titles for men, as well.

Additionally, as DOGE pointed out in its post, the slides asked local organizations to promote diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility (DEIA) programs, training and lectures as well as annual DEIA awards ceremonies.

The foreign service officers were also encouraged to set race and gender quotas on embassy speaking panels and other diplomatic events.

‘Working with DOGE, [Secretary Rubio] has ended this discrimination and restored merit to the foreign service,’ DOGE wrote.

The elimination of the DEIA requirement on performance evaluations for foreign service officers comes a week after the Trump administration slashed $15 million from the Institute of Museum and Library Services in the form of DEI grants to align with DOGE and President Donald Trump’s executive orders aimed at eliminating DEI from the federal government.

The grants include $6.7 million to the California State Library to enhance equitable library programs and $4 million to the Washington State Library for diverse staff development and incarcerated support. 

A $1.5M DEI grant to the Connecticut State Library system to ‘integrate social justice, diversity, equity, and inclusion’ into their daily operations is also being cut along with $700,000 for a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit to study ‘post-pandemic DEI practices’ in American children’s museums that would formulate ‘enhanced equity-focused strategies.’

Trump’s DOGE efforts have saved the American taxpayer $140 billion, according to its website, which represents about $870 saved per taxpayer.

The Trump administration says it has slashed hundreds of millions of dollars in DEI contracts, including at least $100 million at the Department of Education.

Fox News Digital’s Andrew Mark Miller contributed to this report.

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Hamish McKenzie, the co-founder of Substack, is suddenly speaking out.

‘We are living through the most significant media disruption since the printing press, and it explains everything from why you can’t stand your neighbor to our current political tumult.’

Today, he says on his site, ‘we live in a more chaotic environment, where the narrative frenzy of social media has given rise to political movements that gain power through exploiting attention of any kind, positive or negative, from moral panics to fulminating podium-thumpers. We’ve gone from ‘Ask not what your country can do for you’ to dunk tweets and death-by-emoji.’

Obviously, it’s in McKenzie’s interest to portray a media revolution with him as the chief rebel. When Substack launched in 2017, it was viewed as an intriguing experiment, an outlet largely for those who didn’t have one.

But in the Trump era, with his constant cable appearances and Truth Social posts, there’s little question that we’re submerged in a toxic environment. The president gets this, which is why he’s done a number of podcast interviews. 

He went on Joe Rogan and Kamala, uh, did not. 

Now, with big-name journalists giving up prime television gigs in favor of the site’s independence, we are living in the Substack Era. What was once viewed as the Holy Grail – an anchoring or hosting job on a major network – is now dismissed as old-school legacy media with too many corporate constraints.

Take my former Fox colleague Chris Wallace. He left for CNN (actually CNN-plus, which was euthanized in three weeks) and then launched a Saturday talk show. But Chris recently announced he’s leaving the network to go independent, which undoubtedly includes Substack.

Another ex-Fox colleague, Megyn Kelly, had a similar experience. Having been dropped by NBC after a bad experience there, she started a daily show and video podcast on Sirius XM, and now has 3.2 million subscribers on YouTube.

Chuck Todd, having been eased out of his ‘Meet the Press’ job, was given an online streaming show. But not long ago he announced he was leaving NBC to go independent. 

When Dan Abrams gave up his NewsNation show after three years, he said: ‘As much as I love this show and the mission of this network, I just can’t continue to give this show the attention it needs and deserves with all of my other professional commitments.’ The Mediaite founder later announced that he is concentrating on creating a YouTube channel for the site, working with other media folks.

McKenzie’s great insight is that he could connect writers and podcasters directly to their audience, with Substack taking a cut. They can opt for a revenue-sharing agreement. Now you might ask, what if you’re not a famous former anchor or commentator?

Turns out that niche sites do really well. They can work at other jobs at the same time. Many users report a six-figure income. 

This is especially striking in that most Substack people let you read their sites for free, or a shortened version, with the full column and special features available only for paying subscribers. The hope is that some of the freeloaders will become subscribers over time.

Not everyone winds up at Substack voluntarily. Chris Cillizza, the former Washington Post columnist, is quite candid in saying he came to Substack after being laid off at CNN. He found himself with little to do after dropping the kids at school.

‘I started this Substack — selfishly — to help me grapple with my changed life. To give me a platform where I could express myself — hopefully to an audience — about the world of politics, yes, but also how I was navigating a new reality.’

He has slowly built a following and chats with Todd once a week, which is something that Substackers do.

Casandra Campbell of Really Good Business Ideas analyzed the 29 most popular Substacks.

The first two are Letters from an American (hundreds of thousands of paid subscribers for political history) and Broken Palate. Michael Moore was No. 3, and the only other names I recognized were former candidate Allen West, the Bulwark, and ex-Labor Secretary Robert Reich.

The others had names like Dr. Mercola’s Censored Library, DeLa Soul, The Pragmatic Engineer and The Cryptonite Weekly Rap.

‘Our political culture now mirrors chaos media culture,’ McKenzie says. ‘Opponents are not just to be argued against, but humiliated.’ Good luck changing that.

Look, I subscribe to several Substack accounts. I’d like to subscribe to more but, with fees ranging from $5 to $40 a month, it gets expensive. So I read others for free and ponder whether to upgrade.

I don’t agree that this is the biggest deal since the Gutenberg press, around 1440, but it’s having an impact on the media and political culture. Substack is hot, and there are competitors, mainly because journalists and politicos crave a connection that goes beyond the craziness of the Trump age. 

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Pope Francis made a surprise public appearance on Sunday, the first time the leader of the Catholic Church has been seen in public since leaving hospital two week ago.

Francis greeted crowds at the Vatican and seemed to be in good spirits. He was seated in a wheelchair and wearing what appeared to be a nasal cannula aiding his breathing.

The 88-year-old pontiff spent five weeks in hospital with pneumonia in February and March. According to his medical team, the pope came close to death during the illness.

Francis appeared in better health than when he was last seen in public, which was two weeks shortly before he was released from Rome’s Gemelli Hospital. At that time, he struggled to speak and raise his arms, but managed to wave to people and gave a thumbs up from a balcony.

On Sunday, the pope appeared to move his arms around with more ease. His voice was still weak, but stronger than two weeks ago.

The pope’s appearance had not been previously announced.

Crowds of worshippers gathered at Vatican’s St. Peter’s Square on Sunday when the pope made his short appearance after a mass dedicated to the sick.

When the smiling pontiff was wheeled in, those there cheered wildly.

The Vatican said that the pope went to confession in St Peter’s Basilica on Sunday morning and gathered in before greeting the pilgrims and the faithful in the square.

Francis was admitted to Gemelli Hospital on February 14, initially suffering from a severe respiratory infection. He was subsequently diagnosed with a polymicrobial infection, which evolved to pneumonia in both lungs.

He was discharged on March 23 and was expected to convalesce at Casa Santa Marta, his residence in the Vatican. His doctors said in a news conference at the time that he would need to recuperate for at least two months to allow his body time to fully heal.

The prolonged hospital stay marked the biggest health crisis Francis has experienced since he was elected as pope in 2013.

His doctors told reporters that there were “two very critical episodes in which the Holy Father’s life was in danger” during the 38 days he was hospitalized.

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A 17-year-old Palestinian boy died following “likely prolonged malnutrition” in an Israeli prison, according to an autopsy carried out by an Israeli pathologist.

The teenager, Walid Khalid Ahmad, is the first minor to have died in Israeli custody since the conflict between Hamas and Israel started in October 2023, according to the Palestinian Prisoners’ Society (PPS).

He died in Israel’s Megiddo Prison on March 22, according to his family and a joint statement by the PPS and the Palestinian Commission of Detainees’ Affairs.

Ahmad was arrested on September 30 last year in his home in Silwad, a Palestinian town northeast of Ramallah in the occupied West Bank. His father Khalid said that he was detained based on alleged offenses between 2020 and 2023 that included throwing stones and Molotov cocktails.

The autopsy report described signs of severe weight and muscle loss, including loss of muscle mass at the temples, a sunken appearance at the abdomen and “almost absent muscle mass or subcutaneous fat on trunk and extremities.”

“Autopsy findings suggest that Walid suffered from extreme, likely prolonged malnutrition as observed by his deeply cachectic state and complaints of inadequate food intake since at least December 2024,” it said. “It needs to be noted that malnutrition increases the risk of infectious complications including severe sepsis,” it added.

At least 63 Palestinians from Gaza and the West Bank have so far died in Israeli detention since the start of the latest conflict, the PPS said, including at least 40 from Gaza.

“As in any case of the death of a prisoner, an investigative team was appointed to examine the incident. Upon completion of the investigation its findings will be forwarded to the authorized authorities,” it said.

‘The painful truth’

The family was allowed to attend several court hearings in the case, which were held remotely by video conference calls, he said.

The family was informed of his death on March 24, two days after he died, Khalid said, adding that days later, he received a phone call from the medical team that conducted the autopsy, who told him “the painful truth” behind his son’s death.

An avid athlete, Ahmad did not suffer from any known illnesses before his detention, his father said, pointing to his treatment in custody as the cause of his son’s death.

“Walid was a young man with great values,” Khalid said. “What happened was unexpected.”

The Commission on Detainees’ Affairs and the PPS said Walid’s death was “proof of the horrific level of abuse faced by detainees inside Israeli occupation prisons, including hundreds of children.”

Israel has ramped up arrests in the occupied West Bank since the latest war began, PPS said, with some 15,700 arrests so far recorded by its count.

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Iran’s president has fired one of his deputies for taking what he described as a “lavish” recreational trip to Antarctica.

President Masoud Pezeshkian ordered the removal of Shahram Dabiri from his position as vice president of parliamentary affairs in a decree on Saturday, describing the trip as both extravagant and indefensible.

“In a government that seeks to follow the values of the first Shia Imam (Imam Ali), and amidst significant economic pressures on our people, the lavish travels of government officials, even when personally financed, are indefensible,” Pezeshkian wrote.

The president added that Dabiri’s long-standing work in government should not preclude him from committing to what he called “honesty, justice, and the promises we made to the people,” according to the state news agency IRNA.

Dabiri denied wrongdoing but said he accepted the president’s decision.

Pezeshkian also said Dabiri’s actions contradict the principles of “simple living” that he says all officials should adhere to, especially during economic challenges.

Iran’s economy has been strained for years in part by US sanctions imposed in response to Tehran’s nuclear program.

Last week, the Iranian currency dropped to a record low of 1,039,000 rial to the US dollar, according to Reuters, citing data from Bonbast.com.

Government spokesperson Fatemeh Mohajerani was quoted by IRNA as saying that the president’s decision to fire Dabiri shows that “he has no pact of brotherhood with anyone, and his only criteria are efficacy, justice, honesty, and public interest.”

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Editor’s Note: Join Fareed Zakaria on Sunday, April 6 at 8pmET/PT as he examines the long history of the conservative movement’s struggle to roll back government in “The War on Government: A Fareed Zakaria Special”.

When Donald Trump announced that he was creating the Department of Government Efficiency, I welcomed the initiative. Streamlining the federal government by having outsiders take a look was an excellent idea. And Elon Musk’s stated objective, to cut the budget by $2 trillion, while ambitious, would be a useful yardstick.

But DOGE began its work not by taking on the most logical targets if you were really looking for waste, fraud and abuse – places like Medicare and the Defense Department with their gigantic budgets. No, its first major target was a tiny agency most Americans had probably never heard of. The US Agency for International Development, whose total budget, around $40 billion, was less than 1% of federal spending. DOGE went after it with a brutality and glee that was stunning. Musk called it a “criminal organization.” Government officials who had spent years in foreign countries providing assistance to the poor were summarily fired and asked to return home. Medical and nutrition programs were cut off, with the likely consequence that, by some calculations, millions would get sick or starve.

What could explain this cruelty directed at people and programs that in budgetary terms were insignificant? DOGE seemed to understand the central challenge the right faces in its war on government. The real money is in the large programs that the public supports. So DOGE began its war by choosing a broadly unpopular item of government spending – on foreigners.

Musk and Trump delighted in listing all the fraud that they found, even though none of the projects they listed have shown any evidence of large-scale corruption. They were simply programs they knew many Americans would not want to fund – especially when they were mischaracterized.

DOGE did take on Social Security, but in a rather strange way. It claimed to find millions of dead people on its rolls. The implication was that these people were still getting payments. Actually,all they appear to have found were old personnel files in which dead people’s names had not been deleted – much like your rolodex or contact folder probably still has the names of people who are deceased. Almost none appear to be getting benefits. But again, it was a revealing strategy. Rather than talk seriously about changing Social Security – by means testing benefits or raising the retirement age – DOGE was promising that it could save billions by just cleaning up the personnel files.

Of course it’s possible to find savings in Washington. Former Vice President Al Gore’s Reinventing Government Commission saved the federal government around $140 billion dollars. But it worked in a manner that was almost the opposite of DOGE. It partnered with the agencies to identify redundancies, worked with Congress to change laws, and used a scalpel to trim fat. DOGE, on the other hand, has been doing mass firings without much consultation, so much so that its large-scale IRS firings could result in significantly lower tax revenues collected – which would raise the deficit.

DOGE has also been firing masses of workers. But the federal bureaucracy is small compared with other rich countries and is about the same size as it was 50 years ago.

It’s worth remembering where the money is. Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and other mandatory spending like veterans’ benefits – along with defense spending and interest payments – make up around 85% of the budget. Much of this is efficient check writing, which doesn’t require much bureaucracy. The Department of Defense could be massively reformed, as the Trump administration has begun to do a little bit. But why does it have four air forces – the Army’s, Navy’s, Marines’, and Air Force itself?

If DOGE approached the problem as one does in the private sector, it would recognize there are two components to any deficit – how much you spend and how much you take in, in this case through taxes. America’s bloated national debt has a great deal to do with a series of tax cuts that began in the Reagan administration. By one estimate from a progressive think tank, the Bush and Trump tax cuts alone have added $10 trillion to the debt and account for 57% of the increase in America’s debt-to-GDP ratio since 2001. Bear in mind, that compared to other rich countries, the United States still has close to the lowest tax revenues as a percent of its GDP.

In that context, the simplest way for DOGE to achieve maximum success would be to recommend that the Trump tax cuts be allowed to lapse as they will under law, which would then reduce the debt by about $4.5 trillion over the next 10 years, vastly more than any plan the GOP seems willing to go through with to cut spending. That would take America back to the tax rates under former President Barack Obama, when the stock market more than doubled, and America grew faster than almost every European country. And it would put the US on a much more stable debt trajectory.

But don’t hold your breath on that happening. Far more likely, DOGE will announce some new stunning finding, something like software duplication in the Environmental Protection Agency, which might save the federal government $100 million – or .001% of the 2025 budget.

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Israeli soldiers killed a Palestinian American teenager and wounded two others in the occupied West Bank on Sunday, according to Palestinian officials.

Ramallah Gov. Laila Ghannam said a 14-year-old Palestinian American boy was shot dead by Israeli troops in the village of Turmusaya. Two other Palestinian American boys, ages 14 and 15, were injured in the incident, according to Turmusaya Mayor Lafi Shalabi.

The Israeli military said its soldiers opened fire during a counterterrorism operation in Turmusaya when they saw three “terrorists who hurled rocks toward the highway, thus endangering civilians driving.”

The soldiers killed one and hit the other two, the military said.

The military shared a blurry video purportedly showing the incident, in which three barely visible figures appear. It said it would continue operating in the West Bank “to protect the residents in the area.”

The injured boys were shot in the abdomen, according to the Palestine Red Crescent Society.

One severely injured boy and another with minor wounds were taken to a hospital in Ramallah, the Palestinian Authority health ministry said.

The killing or detention of American citizens in occupied Palestinian territories by Israelis and concerns about a lack of accountability date back years. In 2003, American activist Rachel Corrie, 23, was crushed by an Israeli army bulldozer while trying to block it from razing Palestinian homes in Gaza. Nine years later, an Israeli civil court ruled her death an accident.

In February last year, Florida-born US citizen Mohammed Khdour, 17, was killed by Israeli forces who shot him in the head while he was in his car. The teenager was taking the car out during a study break, snacking on chocolate waffles, posing for Instagram.

Israeli military operations in the occupied West Bank have intensified since late January following the launch of an expanded military campaign there almost immediately after the Gaza ceasefire began. Since then, roughly 40,000 Palestinians have been displaced from their homes.

The Israeli military says it is targeting Palestinian militant groups who have mounted attacks on Israeli soldiers and civilians, but Palestinians and human rights groups say the expanded assault is increasingly indiscriminate – killing civilians and destroying civilian infrastructure in a manner consistent with collective punishment. In late February, Israel deployed tanks to the occupied West Bank for the first time in two decades.

This is a developing story and will be updated.

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