USAID website goes offline in Trump administration's 2-week-old...

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

57% : Trump placed an unprecedented 90-day freeze on foreign assistance on his first day in office Jan. 20.
43% : Billionaire Elon Musk, advising Trump in a campaign to whittle down the federal government in the name of efficiency, endorsed posts on his X site calling for dissolving USAID.
41% : Democrats say Trump has no legal authority to eliminate a congressionally funded independent agency, and that the work of USAID is vital to national security.
34% : Administration officials had no comment Saturday when asked about concerns expressed by lawmakers and others that Trump may be planning to end USAID as an independent agency.
31% : A version of that legal battle played out in Trump´s first term, when Trump tried to cut the budget for foreign operations by a third.
29% : The website of the U.S. Agency for International Development went offline without explanation Saturday as thousands of furloughs, layoffs and program shutdowns continued in President Donald Trump's freeze on U.S.-funded foreign aid and development worldwide.
24% : Congressional Democrats battled the Trump administration increasingly openly, expressing concern that Trump may be headed toward ending USAID as an independent agency and absorbing it into the State Department.
18% : In a post on X, Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy said presidents cannot eliminate congressionally appropriated federal agencies by executive order, and said Trump was poised to "double down on a constitutional crisis.

*Our bias meter rating uses data science including sentiment analysis, machine learning and our proprietary algorithm for determining biases in news articles. Bias scores are on a scale of -100% to 100% with higher negative scores being more liberal and higher positive scores being more conservative, and 0% being neutral. The rating is an independent analysis and is not affiliated nor sponsored by the news source or any other organization.