Trump Administration Live Updates: U.S. Pulls Out of UNESCO Again

David Oscar Markus, Ghislaine Maxwell’s lawyer, said the two sides had already been conferring about setting up an interview. “I can confirm that we are in discussions with the government and that Ghislaine will always testify truthfully,” Markus wrote on X. “We are grateful to President Trump for his commitment to uncovering the truth in this case.”

“Continued involvement in UNESCO is not in the national interest of the United States,” Tammy Bruce, a State Department spokeswoman, said in a statement.

Ms. Bruce accused the organization of promoting “divisive social and cultural causes” and of maintaining an “outsized focus on the U.N.’s Sustainable Development Goals, a globalist, ideological agenda for international development at odds with our America First foreign policy.”

The decision came after years of rocky relations between successive American administrations and UNESCO, which is headquartered in Paris. The United States had pulled out during Mr. Trump’s first term and then rejoined under the Biden administration.

In February, Mr. Trump signed an executive order calling for a general review of U.S. funding and involvement in the United Nations, including UNESCO. At the time, Will Scharf, the White House staff secretary, accused UNESCO of “anti-American bias.”

UNESCO is best known for designating World Heritage sites, more than 1,200 of them since 1972, including the ruins of Palmyra in Syria, the Minaret of Jam in Afghanistan, Petra’s Treasury building in Jordan and a series of national parks in the United States. It also keeps an “intangible cultural heritage” list of humanity’s most worthy creations — like the French baguette or opera singing in Italy.

The organization is also known for its educational programs, and it works extensively to promote sex education, literacy, clean water and equality for women. It also helps to set standards on a range of issues including ocean protection and the ethics of artificial intelligence.

In 2011, the United States stopped funding UNESCO after it voted to include Palestine as a full member. The move was because of U.S. legislation requiring a complete cutoff of American financing to any United Nations agency that accepted Palestine on such terms. The lack of money deprived UNESCO of nearly a fifth of its budget, forcing it to slash programs.

Then, in 2017, the Trump administration went further and announced that it was withdrawing from the organization completely, citing anti-Israel bias. The United States remained a nonmember observer after that.

In 2023, the Biden administration reversed that decision and decided to rejoin. U.S. officials had argued at the time that leaving an empty chair at UNESCO had created a vacuum that competing powers, most notably China, were filling.

Mr. Trump has threatened higher tariffs on dozens of countries as of Aug. 1, including the Philippines, which he said would receive a 20 percent tariff. Many global leaders have been negotiating with the Trump administration in an effort to lower those tariffs further.

Before leaving for the United States, Mr. Marcos said his primary goal was to make sure that trade between the two nations was strong.

“My top priority for this visit is to push for greater economic engagement, particularly through trade and investment between the Philippines and the United States,” he said. “I intend to convey to President Trump and his cabinet officials that the Philippines is ready to negotiate a bilateral trade deal that will ensure strong, mutually beneficial and future-oriented collaborations that only the United States and the Philippines will be able to take advantage of.”

A statement from the White House said the meeting between Mr. Trump and Mr. Marcos would focus on a “shared commitment to upholding a free, open, prosperous and secure Indo-Pacific and advancing shared economic prosperity.”

“The friendship between the United States and the Philippines is rooted in our long history, marked this year by the 80th anniversary of the shared sacrifice that led to victory in World War II,” the statement said.

The Philippines is the United States’ oldest ally in the Pacific. The United States took over the Philippines as a colony from Spain in 1898 and battled Filipino combatants for control of the country. After Japan invaded the islands during World War II, Americans and Filipinos fought together to end that occupation. The Philippines gained its independence from the United States in 1946, and in 1951 entered into a mutual defense treaty with the United States that remains in effect.

The United States runs a trade deficit with the Philippines, but it is a fraction of other Southeast Asian countries’. That is why Mr. Trump, who views the trade deficit as evidence of an unfair trading relationship, decided on a lower tariff rate for the Philippines than for many of its neighbors.

The United States continues to have an interest in maintaining freedom of navigation in the South China Sea, which is one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes.

Mr. Marcos has embraced the United States, reversing a pivot to China by his predecessor, and has expanded U.S. access to military bases.

The United States has deployed a missile system called Typhon to the Philippines as part of joint military drills. The ground-based launcher can fire cruise missiles that can reach the Chinese mainland from the Philippines.

Mr. Marcos arrived in Washington on Sunday and met with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth at the Pentagon on Monday.

“I believe that our alliance, the United States and the Philippines, have formed a great part in terms of preserving the peace, in terms of preserving the stability of the South China Sea,” Mr. Marcos told Mr. Hegseth.

He has also met with U.S. business leaders about investment in the Philippines.

Ana Swanson contributed reporting.

The newly confirmed director, Scott Kupor, told reporters on Monday that he expected staffing to drop to 2,000, by the end of the year.

Mr. Kupor said the agency was cutting its contractors by half as well, going from about 1,200 at the beginning of the year to 600 by the end of December.

The personnel office has been issuing guidance to agencies for months about how to cut staff and consolidate or eliminate programs. Agencies offered incentives for people to resign voluntarily, which has shifted the calculation of how many employees the government would have to lay off to achieve President Trump’s goal of shrinking the size of the federal work force.

Some 788 employees at the personnel office took advantage of the incentives to retire early or resign and get paid through Sept. 30, while 152 others resigned without participating in any of the incentive programs. The agency laid off an additional 129 employees.

The personnel office did not say what other agencies have planned, but the threat of layoffs has been looming since the earliest days of the administration. The Department of Health and Human Services laid off 10,000 employees this spring. And on July 11, the State Department laid off more than 1,000 employees after the Supreme Court lifted a lower court’s block on mass government firings.

Most agencies have not announced layoff plans, and the projected number of reductions has changed with thousands of employees leaving the government voluntarily. The Department of Veterans Affairs recently said it would not have to make layoffs because so many people decided to leave.

Mr. Trump has used tariffs aggressively to shape trade policy. In justifying the tariff on Brazil, he cited factors including what he called an unfair trade relationship and a “witch hunt” trial against Brazil’s former right-wing president, Jair Bolsonaro, a close ally.

Johanna Foods’ complaint argues that such factors do not meet the legal threshold for invoking the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977, which gives the president broad authority to regulate international economic transactions during a declared national emergency.

“There is no unusual or extraordinary threat,” the company said in the complaint, pointing to the lack of a formal executive order or declaration of national emergency. The complaint also said that the letter to Mr. Lula did not constitute an executive order.

The complaint said the tariffs would increase Johanna Foods’ annual import costs by $68 million and lead to retail price hikes of up to 25 percent. Johanna Beverage Co., a related company based in Washington State, is also listed as a plaintiff.

Orange juice prices are already high. In June, the price of frozen orange juice concentrate was 5.5 percent higher than in June 2024, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Brazil, the world’s largest exporter of orange juice, supplies well over half of the fresh orange juice consumed in the United States, according to Agriculture Department figures. Brazil is also a major exporter of coffee to the United States.

The threatened tariff comes amid an extraordinary pressure campaign against Brazil as it prosecutes Mr. Bolsonaro on charges of attempting a coup to overturn his loss in the 2022 election.

Mr. Lula said in a recent statement that Brazil would not be “tutored” by anyone and would retaliate against tariffs on Brazilian imports, which will take effect on Aug. 1 unless a trade deal is reached.

A federal appeals court is set to hear arguments later this month on a case challenging Mr. Trump’s use of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act to impose tariffs, but has allowed the administration to enforce global tariffs for now.

“We should put everything out there and let the people decide,” Mr. Johnson had said on “The Benny Show” when asked about the Justice Department’s investigation into Mr. Epstein. “I agree with the sentiment that we need to — we need to put it out there.”

The Rules Committee, a powerful panel controlled by the speaker, had even approved a measure that would bring to the floor a resolution calling for the disclosures, though Republicans gave no timetable for voting on it.

Less than a week later, the speaker reverted to his more familiar posture of deferring to the president.

“We need the administration to have the space to do what it is doing,” Mr. Johnson told reporters at the Capitol on Monday when asked about holding a House vote on releasing the investigative files.

“If further congressional action is necessary or appropriate, then we’ll look at that,” Mr. Johnson said. But he added that there would be no vote on the Epstein files before the House departs on Thursday for a six-week summer break, saying, “I don’t think we’re at that point yet, because we agree with the president.”

Mr. Johnson was able to obtain his gavel and has been able to keep it because of his unshakable loyalty to Mr. Trump. His initial call for the release of the Epstein files when Mr. Trump was asking for the opposite underscored how the case had created an unusual and deep split between the president and his supporters.

But the speaker’s reversal suggests that Mr. Trump’s efforts to quell the unrest in his political base over the matter may be succeeding.

Mr. Johnson implied that his concerns about transparency had been alleviated, for now, by Mr. Trump’s move to authorize Attorney General Pam Bondi to seek the public release of grand jury testimony from the prosecution of Mr. Epstein. That is a far cry from the breadth of information the president’s supporters have demanded, yet it appeared to be enough to persuade the speaker.

“There is no daylight between the House Republicans, the House and the president on maximum transparency,” Mr. Johnson said on Monday. “He has asked the attorney general to request the grand jury files of the court; all of that is in process.”

It remains to be seen whether the president will be able to appease his supporters by selectively releasing material. But Mr. Johnson’s quick turnaround indicated that he intends to slow walk, or stymie, a floor vote that could potentially damage Mr. Trump.

Still, Mr. Johnson cannot control all of his members, some of whom are still channeling the angry base and have joined a long-shot bipartisan push to force a vote on the matter within weeks.

“If you tell the base of people, who support you, of deep state treasonous crimes, election interference, blackmail, and rich powerful elite evil cabals, then you must take down every enemy of The People,” Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican of Georgia, wrote on social media on Monday. “If not. The base will turn and there’s no going back. Dangling bits of red meat no longer satisfies. They want the whole steak dinner and will accept nothing else.”

The release on Monday, with no prior notice, came at a time when Mr. Trump and White House officials have sought to divert attention from right-wing backlash demanding the release of files related to the death of the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein.

Trump administration officials said the King assassination documents include notes on the leads pursued by investigators, interviews with people who knew his killer, James Earl Ray, and previously unreleased details of interactions with foreign intelligence services during the manhunt for Mr. Ray.

A lone audio file released on Monday includes part of a law enforcement interview with Jerry Ray, one of James Earl Ray’s siblings. In a statement, officials said the published documents had “never been digitized and sat collecting dust in facilities across the federal government for decades.”

Many of the pages have been rendered almost illegible by time and the digitizing process. There were random and wide-ranging accounts of the investigation and manhunt, including hundreds of news clippings, tips from the public, accounts of Mr. Ray’s forays into dance classes and locksmith school, and his fondness for aliases drawn from James Bond novels.

David Garrow, the author of a Pulitzer Prize-winning King biography as well as a book about the F.B.I.’s spying campaign on him, said his initial review led him to conclude that there was little of public interest in the files, much of which had already been disclosed. “I saw nothing that struck me as new,” he said.

In 2019, Mr. Garrow published an article that recounted claims he had found in F.B.I. documents released in relation to the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Those claims include accounts of Dr. King witnessing an alleged rape in 1964 in a Washington hotel room where he had been staying.

It is unclear from the documents, which does not appear to be included in the current tranche, who is making those claims. Mr. Garrow was criticized by some historians for elevating incendiary assertions that were part of an F.B.I. smear campaign, without corroborating evidence.

The F.B.I. wiretaps and other surveillance were part of an effort to uncover damaging material on Dr. King, which the agency hoped to leverage in its campaign to derail the civil rights movement. Tapes and transcripts from that surveillance are part of what remains under seal, though summaries and other related material had been released previously. A federal judge last month denied a Justice Department request to unseal the surveillance records two years early.

Dr. King had a well-documented history of extramarital relationships. Still, some experts and Dr. King’s family have expressed doubts about the veracity of some of the contents of those previously released documents, particularly when it comes to the more provocative claims about aspects of Dr. King’s romantic and sexual life.

Those details, they said, could be more reflective of official efforts to undermine the civil rights leader’s reputation than of reality.

“You’ve got to read this carefully and don’t take it at face value,” said Larry J. Sabato, the director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, who was reviewing the new documents on Monday with his own team of researchers.

“I’m skeptical of anything I read from F.B.I. files about M.L.K.,” he said, adding that he suspected that agents inflated or manufactured material to please J. Edgar Hoover, the agency’s longtime director. “He wanted dirt on M.LK. and his movements and his associates.”

Dr. King’s surviving children, Martin III and Bernice, argued in a statement on Monday that their father had been “relentlessly targeted by an invasive, predatory, and deeply disturbing disinformation and surveillance campaign.” The children beseeched researchers and the general public to view all of the material from the government’s files in the context of their father’s contributions to American society.

“We ask those who engage with the release of these files to do so with empathy, restraint and respect for our family’s continuing grief,” they said. Trump administration officials have been in contact with Dr. King’s family, but it remains unclear if his relatives were given the right to request redactions of the newly released material.

In a news release announcing the document upload, the administration quoted Alveda King, Dr. King’s niece and a high-profile supporter of Mr. Trump, who praised the government for providing transparency. “The declassification and release of these documents are a historic step towards the truth that the American people deserve,” she said.

As a candidate last year, Mr. Trump vowed to release files related to President Kennedy’s 1963 assassination, and the 1968 murders of Robert F. Kennedy and Dr. King. The Kennedy documents, released in March, contained little new information about the assassination itself.

Talya Minsberg and Campbell Robertson contributed reporting. Research was contributed by Mitch Smith, Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs, Eduardo Medina, Audra D. S. Burch, Tim Arango, Kurt Streeter, Pooja Salhotra, Livia Albeck-Ripka and Daniel Victor.