Trump 2nd term updates: Trump excludes low-value shipments from looming tariffs

USAID officials decried the State Department's seemingly rushed review of foreign aid grants as a legal maneuver to avoid having to comply with a deadline to pay foreign aid groups that was in place until it was stayed by the Supreme Court.

"Instead of complying with a court order to reimburse USAID partners by midnight tonight for the nearly $2 billion owed for programming already provided prior to Trump's inauguration, and to resume USAID programs that had not been reviewed, Director of the Office of Foreign Assistance and acting USAID Deputy Administrator, Pete Marocco, chose to shut down thousands of programs by terminating the awards," the officials said in a circulated release on Wednesday.

"It appears this may have been done to make the case that the entire suit brought by the plaintiffs was moot because the review had been completed or as an excuse for not making the payments yet because the review consumed the majority of the administration's time so they were unable to make the payments," they continued.

-ABC News' Shannon Kingston

President Donald Trump will meet United Kingdom Prime Minister Keir Starmer at 12:15 ET at the White House.

The two leaders will hold a bilateral meeting in the Oval Office before a press conference in the East Room at 2 p.m. ET.

The meeting comes after Europe was boxed out of talks between Russia and the U.S. on how to end Vladimir Putin's invasion in Ukraine. Trump has since said Europe will have to bear primary responsibility for any security guarantees for Ukraine.

"Well, I'm not going to make security guarantees beyond very much," Trump said at his first Cabinet meeting on Wednesday. "We're going to have Europe do that because it's in you know, we're talking about Europe is the next-door neighbor, but we're going to make sure everything goes well."

Transgender U.S. service members will be separated from the military unless they receive an exemption, according to a new Pentagon policy.
According to the memo, the Pentagon must create a procedure to identify troops who are transgender within 30 days (March 26) and then separate them from the military no later than June 25.
The memo specifically describes these individuals as having gender dysphoria and who are receiving some form of treatment, hormones or have gone through a gender reassignment surgery.

The new policy was included as an exhibit in the case Talbott v. Trump, a federal lawsuit challenging President Donald Trump’s Jan. 27 executive order that lifted the previous policy allowing transgender service members to serve in the military.

Service members who will be separated will receive honorable discharges except where the service member's record warrants a lower discharge, according to the memo.

According to a defense official 4,240 active duty, Guard and Reserve service members have been diagnosed with gender dysphoria.

-ABC News' Luis Martinez

One day after the Department of Veterans Affairs celebrated an estimated $2 billion in savings on canceled contracts, the agency began reversing some of the cancellations that may have affected veterans' medical care and other benefits, according to multiple sources familiar with the contracts and agency records reviewed by ABC News.

The hundreds of contracts set for cancellation included some for legally required technical inspections of medical equipment that produce radiation at VA facilities, including CT scanners, MRI machines and dental X-ray units.

Without annual inspections, some of which are conducted by contractors in part to save the agency money, VA staffers are not permitted to use the equipment.

The VA has already gone through two rounds of layoffs: The first affected 1,000 workers, and the second, announced this week, affected 1,400 "non-mission critical positions," according to the agency's statement.

Some of those terminated employees were asked to return to work days later, workers told ABC News.

-ABC News' Ben Siegel, Soo Rin Kim and Nathan Luna