The executive order will focus on several key reforms, including streamlining the process for states, pharmacies, and wholesalers to import lower-cost medications from countries like Canada.

By Jewish Breaking News

In a bold new policy move, President Donald J. Trump announced that on Monday, he will be signing an executive order designed to slash prescription drug prices in the United States by as much as 80%.

The order is aimed at expanding drug importation, increasing competition, and pressuring pharmaceutical companies to lower costs for American consumers.

Before unveiling the executive order, Trump teased the move on Truth Social with a dramatic post:

“My next TRUTH will be one of the most important and impactful I have ever issued. ENJOY!”

The executive order will focus on several key reforms, including streamlining the process for states, pharmacies, and wholesalers to import lower-cost medications from countries like Canada.

It also directs agencies to increase transparency in drug pricing and expedite approvals for generic alternatives.

“This is a historic step toward putting American patients before Big Pharma profits,” Trump said in a statement. “For too long, other countries have paid far less for the exact same medications. That ends today.”

Trump has repeatedly made lowering drug prices a centerpiece of his platform, especially as he eyes a return to the White House.

During his first term, he introduced similar policies—including a “Most Favored Nation” rule—though many were tied up in legal battles or rescinded by the Biden administration.

With the new order, Trump is signaling that drug pricing reform will once again be front and center in his policy agenda. The move has already sparked strong reactions from both supporters and critics.

Industry advocates warn that slashing prices could lead to shortages or reduced innovation, while patient groups and populist allies have praised the measure as long overdue.

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President Trump criticized the Department for its failure to combat antisemitism and the overall decline in educational standards and student grades nationwide, despite receiving over $3 trillion in funding.

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South Africa is “undermining” US foreign policy and thus “poses national security threats” to America and its allies, said the executive order.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Friday cutting American aid to South Africa, citing, among other reasons, the country’s legal case against Israel in the Hague and South Africa’s ties to Iran.

“South Africa has taken aggressive positions towards the United States and its allies, including accusing Israel, not Hamas, of genocide in the ICJ, and reinvigorating its relations with Iran to develop commercial, military, and nuclear arrangements,” the order noted.

Pretoria, a harsh critic of Israel for many years, led the charge last year to accuse the Jewish state in the ICJ of committing genocide in the Gaza Strip in its defensive war against Hamas after the terror organization massacred 1,200 people in shootings, beheadings, burnings, and mass rapes during its October 7th, 2023 invasion.

Israel has robustly defended its actions in the Strip to the Court, including by citing its low ratio of two noncombatants’ deaths to every terrorist killed, which is unheard-of in military conflicts. Much of its success in limiting civilian casualties was due to warning civilians out of battle zones ahead of time and forming humanitarian corridors so they could leave safely, although this lost the IDF the element of surprise.

Trump’s order also sharply criticized the South African government of “disregard of its citizens’ rights” in enacting an Expropriation Act that would make it easy to confiscate land from white Afrikaners without compensation, maintaining “countless” policies that would reduce equal rights, and engaging in actions “fueling disproportionate violence against racially disfavored landowners.”

White Afrikaners own some 75% of the freehold farmland in the country.

“The United States cannot support the government of South Africa’s commission of rights violations in its country or its undermining United States foreign policy,” the order declared, “which poses national security threats to our Nation, our allies, our African partners, and our interests.”

All American agencies, including the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), were ordered to halt their assistance to Pretoria.

A back door was left open by the caveat that an agency head could permit provision of aid if the head deems it “necessary or appropriate.”

The order also introduced a policy of “promot[ing] the resettlement of Afrikaner refugees escaping government-sponsored, race-based discrimination.”

South African President Cyril Ramaphosa responded by saying that his country “will not be bullied” by the United States.

The government’s Department of International Relations and Cooperation put out a statement charging that the “foundational premise” of the order “lacks factual accuracy” and was the seeming result of a “campaign of misinformation and propaganda.”

It ignored the foreign policy aspect of the order, only calling it “ironic” that it “makes provision for refugee status in the US for a group in South Africa that remains among the most economically privileged, while vulnerable people in the US from other parts of the world are being deported and denied asylum despite real hardship.”

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The three high-profile assassinations have sparked decades of conspiracy theories and investigative discrepancies, leaving many Americans skeptical of the verdicts.

President Trump has now signed an order to declassify the JFK, RFK, and MLK Jr. assassination files. pic.twitter.com/5BCvF0AWcR

— Open Source Intel (@Osint613) January 23, 2025

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Former president Joe Biden had removed the Iran-backed group’s Foreign Terrorist Organization designation right after assuming office.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order Wednesday that will put the Iran-backed Houthis in Yemen back onto the government’s Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) blacklist.

The order “directs the Secretary of State, in consultation with others, to recommend the re-designation of the Houthis within 30 days.”

In explaining the reasoning for the re-designation, the White House said that “As a result of the Biden administration’s weak policy, the Houthis have fired at U.S. Navy warships dozens of times, launched numerous attacks on civilian infrastructure in partner nations, and attacked commercial vessels transiting Bab al-Mandeb more than 100 times.”

“It is now the policy of the United States to cooperate with its regional partners to eliminate the Houthis’ capabilities and operations, deprive them of resources, and thereby end their attacks on U.S. personnel and civilians, U.S. partners, and maritime shipping in the Red Sea,” the statement added.

Trump had put the organization, officially named Ansar Allah, on the list of the most seriously proscribed terrorists as one of his final acts in office in January 2021.

The new Biden administration immediately reversed the decision.

It did not take further action even as the Houthis began supporting Hamas in its war with Israel by firing over 300 drones and missiles at the Jewish state.

More important to the world at large, the Islamists also began launching missiles at cargo ships in international shipping lanes that were headed toward the Jewish state and the Suez Canal, as well as at Western military ships that started patrolling the lanes to protect them.

They also seized several ships and held their crews captive for months at a time.

These acts of war forced most companies to avoid the area and travel much further distances to get their products – mostly oil – to their customers in Europe, thus creating backlogs on production lines and raising prices.

While the U.S. and Great Britain bombed Houthi sites in Yemen several times over the past year, this did not deter the terrorists.

The Israeli air force has also struck military infrastructure sites, including power stations and ports held by the Shiite rebel group that is in control of large areas of the Muslim country.

Last week, outgoing president Joe Biden labeled the group a Specially Designated Global Terrorist (SDGT).

This is not as serious a designation, as, for example, individuals affiliated with an FTO are automatically barred from entering the U.S., whereas this does not apply to those on the SDGT list.

Trump’s order also “directs the Administrator of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the Secretary of State to jointly review United Nations partners, nongovernmental organizations, and contractors operating in Yemen.”

“Following this review, the President will direct USAID to end its relationship with entities that have made payments to the Houthis, or which have opposed international efforts to counter the Houthis while turning a blind eye towards the Houthis’ terrorism and abuses,” the White House statement concluded.

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Agencies must also cancel any DEI-related training and end any related contracts, and federal workers are being asked to report to Trump’s Office of Personnel Management if they suspect any DEI-related program has been renamed to obfuscate its purpose within 10 days or face “adverse consequences.”

By The Associated Press

President Donald Trump’s administration has moved to end affirmative action in federal contracting and directed that all federal diversity, equity and inclusion staff be put on paid leave and eventually be laid off.

The moves Tuesday follow an executive order Trump signed on his first day ordering a sweeping dismantling of the federal government’s diversity and inclusion programs that could touch on everything from anti-bias training to funding for minority farmers and homeowners.

Trump has called the programs “discrimination” and insisted on restoring strictly “merit-based” hiring.

The executive order on affirmative action revokes an order issued by President Lyndon Johnson, and curtails DEI programs by federal contractors and grant recipients.

It’s using one of the key tools utilized by the Biden administration to promote DEI programs across the private sector — pushing their use by federal contractors — to now eradicate them.

The Office of Personnel Management in a Tuesday memo directed agencies to place DEI office staffers on paid leave by 5 p.m. Wednesday, and take down all public DEI-focused webpages by the same deadline.

Several federal departments had removed the webpages even before the memorandum.

Agencies must also cancel any DEI-related training and end any related contracts, and federal workers are being asked to report to Trump’s Office of Personnel Management if they suspect any DEI-related program has been renamed to obfuscate its purpose within 10 days or face “adverse consequences.”

By Thursday, federal agencies are directed to compile a list of federal DEI offices and workers as of Election Day. By next Friday, they are expected to develop a plan to execute a “reduction-in-force action” against those federal workers.

The memo was first reported by CBS News.

The move comes after Monday’s executive order accused former President Joe Biden of forcing “discrimination” programs into “virtually all aspects of the federal government” through “diversity, equity and inclusion” programs, known as DEI.

That step is the first salvo in an aggressive campaign to upend DEI efforts nationwide, including leveraging the Justice Department and other agencies to investigate private companies pursuing training and hiring practices that conservative critics consider discriminatory against groups such as white men.

The executive order picks up where Trump’s first administration left off: One of Trump’s final acts during his first term was an executive order banning federal agency contractors and recipients of federal funding from conducting anti-bias training that addressed concepts like systemic racism.

Biden promptly rescinded that order on his first day in office and issued a pair of executive orders — now rescinded — outlining a plan to promote DEI throughout the federal government.

While many changes may take months or even years to implement, Trump’s new anti-DEI agenda is more aggressive than his first and comes amid far more amenable terrain in the corporate world.

Prominent companies from Walmart to Facebook have already scaled back or ended some of their diversity practices in response to Trump’s election and conservative-backed lawsuits against them.

Here’s a look at some of the policies and programs that Trump will aim to dismantle:

Diversity offices, training and accountability

Trump’s order will immediately gut Biden’s wide-ranging effort to embed diversity and inclusion practices in the federal workforce, the nation’s largest at about 2.4 million people.

Biden had mandated all agencies to develop a diversity plan, issue yearly progress reports, and contribute data for a government-wide dashboard to track demographic trends in hiring and promotions.

The administration also set up a Chief Diversity Officers Council to oversee the implementation of the DEI plan.

The government released its first DEI progress report in 2022 that included demographic data for the federal workforce, which is about 60% white and 55% male overall, and more than 75% white and more than 60% male at the senior executive level.

Trump’s executive order will toss out equity plans developed by federal agencies and terminate any roles or offices dedicated to promoting diversity. It will include eliminating initiatives such as DEI-related training or diversity goals in performance reviews.

Federal grant and benefits programs

Trump’s order paves the way for an aggressive but bureaucratically complicated overhaul of billions of dollars in federal spending.

The order does not specify which programs it will target but mandates a government-wide review to ensure that contracts and grants are compliant with the Trump administration’s anti-DEI stance.

It also proposes that the federal government settle ongoing lawsuits against federal programs that benefit historically underserved communities, including some that date back decades.

Trump’s executive order is a “seismic shift and a complete change in the focus and direction of the federal government,” said Dan Lennington, deputy council for the conservative Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty, which has pursued several lawsuits against federal programs.

The institute recently released an influential report listing dozens of programs the Trump administration should consider dismantling, such as credits for minority farmers or emergency relief assistance for majority-Black neighborhoods.

He acknowledged that unwinding some entrenched programs may be difficult. For example, the Treasury Department implements housing and other assistance programs through block grants to states that have their own methods for implementing diversity criteria.

Pay equity and hiring practices

It’s not clear whether the Trump administration will target every initiative that stemmed from Biden’s DEI executive order.

For example, the Biden administration banned federal agencies from asking about an applicant’s salary history when setting compensation, a practice many civil rights activists say perpetuates pay disparities for women and people of color.

It took three years for the Biden administration to issue the final regulations, and Trump would have to embark on a similar rule-making process, including a notice and comment period, to rescind it, said Chiraag Bains, former deputy director of the White House Domestic Policy Council under Biden and now a nonresident senior fellow with Brookings Metro.

Noreen Farrell, executive director of gender rights group Equal Rights Advocates, said that she was hopeful that the Trump administration “will not go out of its way to undo the rule,” which she said has proved popular in some state and cities that have enacted similar policies.

And Biden’s DEI plan encompassed some initiatives with bipartisan support, said Bains. For example, he tasked the Chief Diversity Officers Executive Council with expanding federal employment opportunities for those with criminal records.

That initiative stems from the Fair Chance Act, which Trump signed into law in 2019 and bans federal agencies and contractors from asking about an applicant’s criminal history before a conditional job offer is made.

Bains said that’s what Biden’s DEI policies were about: ensuring that the federal government was structured to include historically marginalized communities, not institute “reverse discrimination against white men.”

Despite the sweeping language of Trump’s order, Farrell said, “the reality of implementing such massive structural changes is far more complex.”

“Federal agencies have deeply embedded policies and procedures that can’t simply be switched off overnight,” she added.

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The executive order is one of several expected to be signed by Trump during his first week back in office.

By Jewish Breaking News

Former President Donald Trump is expected to sign an executive order halting U.S. foreign assistance immediately upon assuming office for a second term, with UNRWA reportedly at the top of the list.

UNRWA, the United Nations agency responsible for distributing aid in Gaza, has faced repeated accusations of ties to Hamas.

The UN recently admitted that nine of its staff may have been involved in the October 7 attack on Israel.

“The United States and American citizens have been some of the most generous people in the entire world,” an incoming White House policy adviser stated.

“But at this point, we have to understand that foreign policy is domestic policy, and if this is not aligned with our interests, then Uncle Sam should not be opening up his pocketbook any longer.”

The executive order is one of several expected to be signed by Trump during his first week back in office. Other anticipated directives include:

Removing insubordinate government employees.

Reversing Joe Biden’s green energy projects.

Keeping TikTok operational.

Declaring a state of emergency at the U.S.-Mexico border.

Ending “catch and release” immigration policies.

Designating Mexican drug cartels as “foreign terrorist organizations.”

Trump’s administration has signaled an aggressive approach to fulfilling campaign promises and reshaping U.S. foreign and domestic priorities.

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