Riviera of the Middle East

Plus: Federal buyouts, puberty blockers at the Supreme Court, and more...

President Donald Trump's strange Gaza proposal: Look, every journalist gets a choice in terms of how they choose to cover the Trump years. He says some absolutely crazy stuff, over and over again, and it's frequently unclear how much is rooted in reality, what he's actually pursuing, what he's even capable of pursuing, or if he's just spitballing or staking out a negotiating position, recognizing that the actual resolution will be far from the initial offer. I'll let you know right off the bat that I think some of his weird wish casting is unlikely to happen and that choosing to be maximally apoplectic about it—like many journalists were for the duration of his first term—feels like a waste of time. Your mileage may vary, and you may feel like I'm improperly calibrated on this front (I welcome feedback). But my aim is to inform, and getting too incensed about something that's unlikely to happen runs counter to that goal.

Anyway, last night Trump said that the United States should take over the Gaza Strip, forcing all Palestinians to leave. He was hosting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House when he made these remarks, suggesting that Gazans be moved to places like Egypt and Jordan to escape the devastation in the strip rained down by Israel in response to Hamas' October 7 attack.

"The U.S. will take over the Gaza Strip, and we will do a job with it too," said Trump, sounding like a real estate developer, saying that under the United States' watchful eye, it could someday become "the Riviera of the Middle East" (after all unexploded munitions are dealt with).

This is sort of the opposite of Trump's first-term commitment to extract the U.S. from entanglements abroad and seemingly also in conflict with his attempts to roll back America's role in doling out humanitarian aid via the dismantling of USAID.

Of course, Trump's concept does not stand up to scrutiny or seem likely to happen. Jordan, Egypt, and other nations in the region wrote last week that the "transfer or uprooting of Palestinians from their land" would "undermine the chances of peace and coexistence among its people" while threatening regional stability. There's no actual mechanism by which Trump's strange resettlement plan could actually happen. He said he's open to putting U.S. boots on the ground there to help with rebuilding, but he appears to have very little support in Congress, from the American public, or in the region.

One thing many apoplectic pundits are ignoring that will be worth paying attention to in the coming months is that Hamas is reestablishing power in the Gaza Strip. "The morning the cease-fire in Gaza went into effect, masked members of Hamas's military wing drove through the streets of Gaza in clean, white pickups, carrying Hamas flags and automatic rifles," reported The New York Times last month. Israel's military campaign in the Strip—which attempted to root out the terrorist group and resulted in many civilian fatalities along the way—was not wholly successful, and Palestinians who can return to their homes may now be free of bombs exploding overhead but not the horror of terrorist rule. It's a tragic situation with no easy answers; the "riviera" doesn't look likely to rebound any time soon.

One beautiful silver lining: Lindsey Graham is a dove now! "We'll see what our Arab friends say about that," the South Carolina Republican senator said in response to Trump's comments. "And I think most South Carolinians are probably not excited about sending Americans to take over Gaza." You truly love to see it.

So how are those buyouts going? There's still a day to go before the deadline presented by Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency, but so far about 20,000 federal employees (of the two million–strong work force) have accepted the buyout offer, per administration sources talking to Axios. "The federal workforce's normal attrition rate is about 6% a year, meaning some of those who've taken the buyout may have been planning to leave government service anyway," adds Axios. (The split has historically been half retiring, half quitting.)

Employees who hand in their resignation this week will be paid through September 30, though many have alleged they have no assurance that this will actually happen. The union that represents federal government employees is suing, claiming the buyouts are "arbitrary and capricious" in violation of federal law. They're seeking a temporary restraining order to delay the February 6 deadline. The union, in its press release, characterizes this government-efficiency move as a "dangerous" scheme to "remove career public service workers and replace them with partisan loyalists."

USAID update: Meanwhile, USAID websites have gone back online—with employees receiving a message that they've been placed on administrative leave as of 11:59 p.m. Friday. There will allegedly be exceptions made for workers "responsible for mission-critical functions, core leadership and specially designated programs"; agency leadership will notify those who are expected to stay by Thursday afternoon.

USAID was established in 1961 by President John F. Kennedy via executive order—authority granted to him by the Foreign Assistance Act. "In 1998 Congress enacted a law establishing USAID as a distinct entity within the executive branch and distinguishing between its functions and those of the State Department," reports The Wall Street Journal. "The law granted President Bill Clinton a few months to modify the plan, after which his authority to do so would lapse." Clinton decided to "continue [it] as an independent establishment in the Executive Branch." Then, last year, the 2024 Foreign Operations Appropriations Act (section 7063 of H.R. 2882) "explicitly prohibited a reorganization, redesign or elimination of USAID without congressional participation," notes the Journal.

"In 2017, when the first Trump Administration was reported to be contemplating moving USAID into State," notes Brookings, "multiple organizations and experts reviewed alternatives of how to best organize the government to carry out foreign assistance and came up with innovative and thoughtful proposals—see here and here—which concluded that it was best to maintain a strong and independent American global development agency." Clearly, Trump on his second round no longer feels the same way.

"USAID exists pursuant to law, its functions are defined by law, and it would take an act of Congress to alter it significantly or abolish it," concludes the Journal. But there's an asterisk!

That 1998 law says the agency's administrator "shall report to and be under the direct authority and foreign policy guidance of the Secretary of State." In other words: USAID isn't quite an independent agency, and is in fact supposed to be under the authority of Secretary of State Marco Rubio…who has just called USAID "a completely unresponsive agency" that is "supposed to respond to policy directives with the State Department" but "refuses to do so."

Nobody has total clarity as to what Trump can empower Musk to do with regard to USAID, or what Rubio's role in all this must be. The best practice would have been for Trump to receive congressional authorization to do such a massive restructuring and/or elimination of the agency. But Trump has never been a man especially concerned with best practices, and procedure seems to bore him.

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Scenes from New York: "Louisiana is attempting to prosecute a New York doctor for providing reproductive health care," said Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, on January 31. "After Roe was overturned, I signed laws to protect patients & doctors from exactly this type of action. We will not comply with an extradition request. We will remain a safe harbor."

The actual facts of the case make this look a lot less clear-cut, and Hochul like less of a champion for the cause of choice: "A West Baton Rouge Parish grand jury indicted a New York doctor Friday for allegedly prescribing an abortion pill online to a minor teenage girl in Port Allen and the girl's mother for coercing her to take the medicine to end her pregnancy," reports The Advocate. It's a very sad case in which the minor reportedly wanted to keep her baby but was allegedly forced to take abortion pills by her mother, who got them from an abortion doctor in the Hudson Valley. Apparently, the upstate doctor provides abortion pills to those who fill out an online questionnaire, no exam or interview required. The teenager took the abortion pills alone, then experienced a medical emergency and was stabilized at the hospital.

"It is illegal to send abortion pills into this state and it's illegal to coerce another into having an abortion," said Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill in response to Hochul.

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QUICK HITS

• "When the Supreme Court heard oral arguments [in December] in United States v. Skrmetti, what began as a case about youth transition quickly revealed a deeper question: what constitutes a healthy body? If a doctor and a patient disagree about what health and wholeness looks like, how can their claims about the human person be assessed?" writes Leah Libresco Sargeant in Fairer Disputations. "The questions the justices posed revealed a notable split between two models of medicine in our time. In one model, which seems to be gaining more purchase today, the doctor is a purveyor of goods and services, providing medical aids to facilitate the patient's self-expression. In the other, more traditional framework, the doctor is a practitioner of the art and science of medicine, working to maintain and restore the healthy functioning of the human body." Full thing is worth reading.
• On J.D. Vance vs. the Catholic bishops

• Unsure what exactly is happening here:

I want Iran to be a great and successful Country, but one that cannot have a Nuclear Weapon. Reports that the United States, working in conjunction with Israel, is going to blow Iran into smithereens," ARE GREATLY EXAGGERATED. I would much prefer a Verified Nuclear Peace…

— Donald J. Trump Posts From His Truth Social (@TrumpDailyPosts) February 5, 2025

• As tariffs on Chinese imports hit, goods from Shein, Temu, and Amazon will likely get a bit pricier. More from Reuters.
• Truly:

'Oh no! Twenty year old nerds have access to classified government tax records!' say people who will joyfully tell you how much money Peter Thiel has in his Roth IRA because it was leaked by Treasury officials to Pro Publica.

— John Carney (@carney) February 5, 2025