Politics

Elon Musk’s cost-cutting team debuted a website last month cataloging the contracts the group says it has canceled to save taxpayers money. Since then, the list has undergone dizzying changes. New contracts have been added, others deleted. Values have been altered, and altered again. The changes tell a story of how the Musk team, known…

In the 1980s and 1990s, boys still dominated American classrooms. They outscored girls in math and science, they raised their hands more often and they got more attention from teachers, data showed. That’s not the reality for today’s students. More than half of teenagers say that boys and girls are now mostly equal in school….

Republicans in government are hard at work refashioning federal spending through three major efforts, proceeding along parallel tracks. They may seem to be all the same story — and they do relate to each other — but they each have their own goals, deadlines and constraints. Here, a guide to all three. Effort 1: Avoiding…

Republican leaders in Congress have directed the committee that oversees Medicaid to cut $880 billion from the next budget. They say these cuts aren’t necessarily aimed at Medicaid, the insurance program for 72 million poor and disabled Americans. The cuts could come from Medicare, for instance. But Trump has vowed not to touch that very…

As Congressional Republicans weigh major cuts to Medicaid, most voters do not want to see the public health plan’s funding dialed back, according to a poll released Friday by KFF, a nonpartisan health research firm. Just 17 percent of respondents said they supported cuts to Medicaid, the government health insurance program that covers more than…

One month ago, President Trump agreed to delay tariffs on Canada and Mexico after the two countries agreed to help stem the flow of fentanyl into the United States. On Tuesday, the Trump administration imposed the tariffs anyway, saying that the countries had failed to do enough — and claiming that tariffs would be lifted…

Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency has deleted hundreds more claims from its mistake-plagued “wall of receipts,” erasing $4 billion in additional savings that the group said it had made for U.S. taxpayers. Late Sunday night, the group erased or altered more than 1,000 contracts it had claimed to cancel, representing more than 40 percent…

While George W. Bush was president, the U.S. Coast Guard signed a contract to get administrative help from a company in Northern Virginia. It paid $144,000, and the contract was completed by June 30, 2005. Twenty years passed. Presidents came and went. Last week, Elon Musk’s restructuring team, called the Department of Government Efficiency or…

President Trump’s re-election seemed to mark a cultural turning point on gender — a backlash to #MeToo and other progress for women’s rights, and a return to a time when men could be men. His campaign told men that they had lost their status in American society and that the Trump administration would restore it….

The House passed a budget resolution Tuesday night after the speaker, Mike Johnson, persuaded several Republican lawmakers, including those who have expressed reservations about possible Medicaid cuts, to support the bill. In theory, the budget, which kicks off the process of passing an extension of tax cuts passed in 2017 and up to $2 trillion…