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As President Donald Trump has sought to secure rights to Ukraine’s minerals as compensation for U.S. aid to fight the Russian invasion, he has repeatedly overstated the amount of aid provided by the U.S. compared with Europe and exaggerated the extent to which European assistance – unlike U.S. aid — is in the form of guaranteed loans.

“Europe has given $100 billion. The United States has given $350 billion,” Trump said at the Conservative Political Action Conference on Feb. 22. “But here’s worse — Europe gave it in the form of a loan, they get their money back. We gave it in the form of nothing, so I want them to give us something for all of the money we put up.”

Trump made similar claims throughout February — during the swearing in for Tulsi Gabbard as the director of National Intelligence, at a joint press conference with U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer and in an Oval Office appearance with French President Emmanuel Macron.

He also made the claim in a heated Feb. 28 meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who had come to the U.S. to sign the minerals deal.

“Europe, as you know, gave much less money, but they had security, it was in the form of a loan. They get their money back and we didn’t,” Trump told Zelenskyy near the start of the roughly 45-minute meeting, which ended acrimoniously.

Zelenskyy left the U.S. without signing the deal, and on March 3, the Trump administration suspended all military aid to Ukraine.

We’ll lay out the facts about how U.S. aid to Ukraine compares with aid supplied by the European Union and European countries.

Amount of Aid

Mark Cancian, senior adviser at the Center for Strategic & International Studies, told us in an email that “Trump’s citation of $350 billion is double what Congress has appropriated.”

Since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Congress has passed five spending bills to provide support to Ukraine, totaling about $174.2 billion, as we’ve explained before in fact-checking this and other claims Trump has made about Ukraine and Zelenskky. Each of those five measures passed with bipartisan support.

And, according to a report from the special inspector general who is overseeing the U.S. support for Ukraine, a total of $182.75 billion has been made available for the broader response.

Not all of that money has been distributed, though. And, as we’ve written before, a chunk of it used for purchasing weapons and providing military training has stayed in the U.S.

“Notably, military aid funds [about $66 billion] remain in the U.S. and are invested in U.S. military production,” Marianna Fakhurdinova, a fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis, told us in an email. She said that about half of that amount “goes to US companies to replenish weapons sent to Ukraine from existing stocks,” and half goes to companies in the U.S. that manufacture weapons for Ukraine.

Contrary to Trump’s claims, Europe has provided more in aid than the U.S. According to the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, a German research organization that tracks funding for Ukraine, the U.S. has so far allocated about $121 billion compared with about $140 billion from Europe.

The Kiel Institute’s figures are lower than what the U.S. Congress has appropriated because the institute only includes direct, bilateral aid. It also shows figures for what additional amounts have been committed, but not yet allocated. There’s not much more that the U.S. has committed, but Europe has committed another $122 billion.

A February fact sheet from the European Union said the EU and its member states had provided about $145 billion since the start of the war, and then in February, the EU committed up to $54 billion for recovery and reconstruction.

Loans

As for Trump’s claim that Europe provided its aid to Ukraine in the “form of a loan, they get their money back,” that’s an exaggeration. Only a portion of European aid is in the form of loans.

It’s true that most of the bipartisan U.S. spending agreements for Ukraine aid were given in the form of grants, according to the Congressional Research Service, except for the most recent appropriation.

In the 2024 emergency supplemental appropriations bill, about $9 billion of the assistance was provided as loans.

Fakhurdinova pointed out that “the first half of this loan [$4.7 billion] was forgiven by President Biden in November, so President Trump has power over the other half of these funds.”

Also, as we noted above, some of the U.S. military aid never left the U.S., since it was provided to U.S. companies to produce or replenish weapons.

As for the EU, about 35% of the $145 billion it had appropriated from the start of the war through January was provided as “highly concessional loans,” according to the EU fact sheet.

“The ‘highly concessional’ nature of these loans refers to their long maturities and subsidized interest rate costs through the EU budget,” Cancian told us, citing a November paper from the Vienna Institute for International Economic Studies. Aid packages from the EU have included, for example, a 10-year grace period and a 35-year repayment period.

It’s also notable that the Vienna Institute’s paper said, “The emerging consensus is that Ukraine’s debt is not likely to be sustainable and, consequently, that significant debt relief will have to be negotiated.”

Separate from any of the other aid provided by the U.S. or Europe, the G7 — which includes the United States, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the U.K. — agreed in 2024 to provide $50 billion in loans to support Ukraine.

The loans are to be paid back with the profits from frozen Russian assets, according to the Treasury Department, and the U.S. has the same terms as the rest of the G7 countries.

The U.S. portion of the loan is $20 billion, which was disbursed in December.

Trump has a point that a larger percentage of European aid has been in the form of loans, compared with the U.S., but most of the aid from Europe hasn’t been structured as loans.

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President Donald Trump incorrectly interpreted data shared by Elon Musk when he falsely claimed on Feb. 18 that “millions and millions of people over 100 years old” receive improper benefits from Social Security. In fact, only about 89,000 people aged 99 or older received benefits from Social Security last year.

Improper payments are a legitimate concern for the Social Security Administration. Internal audits found that some deceased individuals were still listed as living, resulting in hundreds of millions of dollars in Social Security benefits being wrongly disbursed in the past. However, the number of dead recipients still being sent benefits is likely in the thousands, not the millions. 

The Trump administration’s public scrutiny of improper Social Security payments began on Feb. 11, when Musk spoke during the signing of an executive order, “The President’s ‘Department of Government Efficiency’ Workforce Optimization Initiative.” During his remarks, Musk claimed that a “cursory examination of Social Security” data conducted by the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, identified “people in there that are 150 years old.”

“Now, do you know anyone who’s 150? I don’t, OK. They should be in the Guinness Book of World Records, they’re missing out. So, that’s a case where I think they’re probably dead, is my guess, or they should be very famous — one of the two. And then there’s a whole bunch of Social Security payments where there’s no identifying information,” said Musk, whom the White House has identified as a senior adviser to the president.

Musk followed these remarks with a series of posts on X, his social media platform. In one post on Feb. 16, he shared a screenshot of a spreadsheet that he said listed “the numbers of people in each age bucket with the death field set to FALSE!” The spreadsheet denotes that the Social Security database categorizes nearly 21 million people over the age of 99 as alive. 

At a Feb. 18 press briefing, Trump claimed that “we have millions and millions of people over 100 years old” receiving Social Security benefits. “If you take all those numbers off, because they’re obviously fraudulent or incompetent, but if you take all of those millions of people off of Social Security, all of a sudden we have a very powerful Social Security with people that are 80 and 70 and 90 but not 200.” 

To evaluate Musk’s and Trump’s claims, we reviewed a series of reports published by the Office of Audit in the Social Security Administration’s Office of the Inspector General. Overall, while Musk is correct that tens of millions of dead Americans are still listed as alive in Social Security databases, only a tiny fraction of these mislabeled individuals still receive benefits. While inaccurate data maintenance and incorrect payments to dead individuals are problems for the SSA, Trump and Musk have vastly exaggerated the scale of improper benefit payouts.

Outdated Records in SSA Database

A July 2023 report published by the Office of Audit found that there were 18.9 million people with Social Security numbers born in 1920 or earlier with no record of their deaths. Of these, 13.3 million were born in 1906 or earlier. The vast majority of these records are clearly outdated.

The Pew Research Center estimated that there were 101,000 Americans who were 100 and older in 2024. (As of Jan. 5, the world’s oldest living person was believed to be a 117-year-old Brazilian nun.)

To explain the large-scale inaccuracy in the Social Security database, also known as the Numident, the Office of Audit report says, “We believe it likely SSA did not receive or record most of the 18.9 million individuals’ death information primarily because the individuals died decades ago — before the use of electronic death reporting.”

According to the SSA’s website, the agency receives “death reports from many sources, including family members, funeral homes, financial institutions, postal authorities, States and other Federal agencies.” The website also says, “It is important to note our records are not a comprehensive record of all deaths in the country.”

However, very few of these dead individuals incorrectly labeled as alive still receive Social Security benefits. The internal audit report finds that of the 18.9 million people with Social Security numbers, “approximately 18.4 million (98 percent) numberholders are not currently receiving SSA payments and have not had earnings reported to SSA in the past 50 years.”

Among this group of 18.9 million, the report found that only 44,000, or 0.2%, were still receiving Social Security benefits. The report did not specify how many of these benefit payments were believed to be improper. A portion of the 44,000 recipients were likely living Americans over the age of 103 who continued to receive payments in July 2023. (It’s worth noting that the U.S. Census doesn’t track population data for individual age cohorts over the age of 100, so we’re not sure how many living Americans are age 103 and older.) 

The Office of Audit provided a more specific estimate of improper payments to deceased individuals in a November 2021 report. That report concluded that the “SSA issued approximately $298 million in payments to about 24,000 deceased beneficiaries in suspended payment status.” The report also noted that while the SSA did recover some of the funds, $214 million of the improper payments remained unaccounted for. 

A report published by the Office of Audit in July 2024 identified that the total rate of improper Social Security payments was 0.84%, constituting $71.8 billion between fiscal years 2015 and 2022. However, the report noted that the vast majority of these improper payments were overpayments to living people, not fraudulent payments to dead individuals.

Across all age groups, there were about 54 million total recipients of Social Security retirement benefits in 2024. Among those aged 99 and older, the SSA distributed payments to 89,106 individuals in December 2024. In total, that group of centenarians received more than $158 million in benefits in December 2024. As these internal audit reports show, a small portion of these payments were likely disbursed to dead Americans wrongly recorded as alive in the database.

In a statement published on Feb. 19, Lee Dudek, the newly appointed acting commissioner of the SSA, explained that the data reported by Musk does not reveal millions of dead individuals who continue to receive benefits.

“I also want to acknowledge recent reporting about the number of people older than age 100 who may be receiving benefits from Social Security,” he said. “The reported data are people in our records with a Social Security number who do not have a date of death associated with their record. These individuals are not necessarily receiving benefits.”

Richard J. Pierce Jr., a law professor at George Washington University, told us that while Musk pointed out a legitimate concern, such issues aren’t as vast as Musk’s comments on Feb. 11 suggested. “I don’t have a doubt that there are dead people who are getting Social Security payments,” Pierce said. “When you’ve got an agency with such a massive task, with scores of millions of people that they’re sending money to all the time, they’re going to make mistakes. … So, it’s not like these circumstances are nonexistent. It’s just that they don’t add up to a trillion dollars.”

Addressing Problems in the System

In the 2021 report, the Office of Audit said that dead individuals continued to receive improper benefits either “because SSA (1) technicians did not follow existing policy; (2) had inadequate controls; and (3) policy does not consistently instruct technicians to search for, or recognize, all available sources of death information.” 

The Office of Audit has also cautioned that improper death records in the Social Security database could expose the agency to fraud. In the 2023 report, the office cited the example of “a man [who] opened several bank accounts using SSNs belonging to numberholders born in the 1800s who had no death information on the Numident.”

To address these concerns, the Office of Audit’s 2021 report offered a series of recommendations to “develop additional enhancements to reduce the number and time deceased beneficiaries remain in suspended payment status.” 

In response to the Office of Audit’s recommendations, the 2023 report noted that the “SSA determined the estimated $5.5 to $9.7 million in expenditures to correct these errors was too costly to implement and that the effort would have limited benefit to the administration of SSA programs.” 

The federal government already possesses other countermeasures to inhibit improper Social Security payments to dead individuals.

As of September 2015, the Social Security database automatically designates individuals aged 115 and older as deceased. Additionally, a pilot program launched by the Treasury Department in 2023 has recovered $31 million in improper federal payments to deceased individuals, both from Social Security and from other government agencies. The program projects to recoup $215 million by December 2026. 

Determining the Cause of Data Inaccuracies

In response to Musk’s claims, numerous media organizations speculated that the millions of individuals born in the 19th century but listed as alive in the Numident resulted from a coding error. This theory, first reported by WIRED, is based on the quirks of the decades-old coding language COBOL. As of 2016, the SSA’s database relied on millions of lines of code written in COBOL. Musk himself complained in a Feb. 12 post on X that “the government is literally still running COBOL code that was written before DOS 1.0.”

WIRED reporter David Gilbert said, “Because COBOL does not have a date type, some implementations rely instead on a system whereby all dates are coded to a reference point. The most commonly used is May 20, 1875, as this was the date of an international standards-setting conference held in Paris, known as the Convention du Mètre. These systems default to the reference point when a birth date is missing or incomplete, meaning all of those entries in 2025 would show an age of 150.” Gilbert concluded that Musk’s findings were “very likely just a quirk of the decades-old coding language that underpins the government payment systems.”

Without access to the SSA database, we have no way of verifying whether the cause of the inaccurate data is a quirk in COBOL. However, from what we can gather from public data, it seems unlikely that this explanation accounts for most of the inaccuracies in the Numident. The Office of Audit’s 2023 report identifying nearly 19 million individuals born in 1920 or earlier mislabeled as alive does not mention coding errors or COBOL. Instead, the report concluded that the inaccuracies resulted from the SSA’s failure to “annotate death information on the Numident records of numberholders who exceeded maximum reasonable life expectancies.”

Furthermore, if COBOL coding quirks were the primary reason why DOGE’s audit identified millions of dead individuals incorrectly listed as alive, one would expect that Musk’s findings would report a large concentration of individuals with ages reported as 149 or 150 to reflect the 1875 reference date. However, in the data shared by Musk, only about 6.5% of the individuals listed as alive aged 100 and older belonged to the 150-159 age category, and only 17% belonged to the 140-149 age category. 

The far more likely explanation for the inaccuracies in the Numident is the one offered by the Office of Audit, in which the SSA possessed inadequate controls to update the database with new deaths, and the agency determined that the benefits of fixing the error were not worth the costs. 

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President Donald Trump and billionaire Elon Musk have suggested without evidence that officials at the U.S. Agency for International Development may have siphoned off taxpayer money for themselves, echoing false social media claims about the former administrator’s net worth.

The Trump administration — largely through the new Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE — has targeted USAID for closure, and we’ve written about several false or misleading claims from the administration aimed at discrediting the agency or foreign aid.

On Feb. 11, Musk, who has publicly taken on the role of leading DOGE, appeared in the Oval Office with the president to provide updates to the press on the department’s progress.

There, Trump asked Musk, “Could you mention some of the things that your team has found? Some of the crazy numbers, including the woman that walked away with about $30 million?”

“Right,” Musk said, “we do find it rather odd that there are quite a few people in the bureaucracy who have, ostensibly, a salary of a few hundred thousand dollars, but somehow manage to accrue tens of millions of dollars of net worth while they are in that position, which is, you know, what happened at USAID. … I think the reality is that they’re getting wealthy at the taxpayer expense.”

But Musk didn’t provide anything to back up that statement. The White House didn’t respond when we asked which government employees Musk was citing.

He and the president appear to be referring to the former USAID administrator Samantha Power, who had recently been the subject of social media claims that her net worth had increased from about $7 million when former President Joe Biden appointed her to the position in 2021 to $30 million when she left the agency in 2025.

Musk reposted a version of the claim on his social media platform, X, the day before the press conference. “Sounds very fishy,” he wrote.

But no one making the claim has provided evidence that Power’s net worth increased by $23 million during her four years at USAID.

The claim that Musk reposted referenced a website called Inside Biden’s Basement, which has been posting details from the financial disclosures of Biden administration officials since 2022. It has a page on Power.

Two things are important here:

First, the financial disclosures required of federal officials aren’t meant to calculate a person’s net worth. Rather, they are intended to identify potential conflicts of interest among high-level government employees, as the Congressional Research Service explains in a 2023 report. Disclosures require officials to list gifts, property interests, and income from interest and capital gains, among other things, as well as liabilities. Most of these assets and liabilities are listed in ranges — sometimes wide ranges — rather than in specific figures. One investment fund listed on Power’s 2024 disclosure, for example, has a reported value of $1 million to $5 million.

Second, the disclosures filed by Power show that the range for her wealth stayed pretty much the same from the time she entered office to the time she left.

Power, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author who has written several books and served on the National Security Council and as the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations during the Obama administration, listed the royalties from those books and the value of retirement and investment accounts, for example. Officials are also required to disclose the assets for their spouses. Power is married to Cass Sunstein, a well-known author and scholar who has reported income from royalties, academic positions and speaking engagements.

On the form she filed before becoming administrator of USAID in January 2021, which covered the previous year, Power reported between $8.8 million and $29 million in shared wealth with her husband. On the most recent form, which was filed in 2024 and covers the previous year, Power reported between $12 million and $30.5 million.

So, it appears that the social media posts Musk echoed had taken the low end of the range for her reported wealth from when she took the position and compared it with the high end of the range from her final disclosure form to make the distorted claim that her net worth increased by tens of millions.

You can see here the forms she filed in 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024.

We don’t know exactly how Power’s and her husband’s net worth changed while she was head of USAID — the financial disclosure forms don’t tell us that. But we know the range for her wealth stayed about the same, and the forms don’t support the claims on social media. 

And, as Forbes pointed out in a recent article, many government officials come to Washington already wealthy.

Accusing a political opponent of suspiciously increasing their wealth while in office is a common tactic, and we’ve written about similar claims many times before.

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President Donald Trump this month issued an executive order prohibiting discretionary federal funds from going to schools and colleges or universities that require students to get a COVID-19 vaccine. But there currently are no states that require the vaccines for students, and only a few colleges or universities continue to have such a mandate.

“The order is expected to have little national impact because COVID-19 vaccine mandates have mostly been dropped at schools and colleges across the United States, and many states have passed legislation forbidding such mandates,” the Associated Press reported in a story about the order that Trump signed.

Yet during the 2024 presidential campaign, Trump often promised that if elected he would “not give one penny to any school that has a vaccine mandate.” His Feb. 14 order — titled “Keeping Education Accessible and Ending COVID-19 Vaccine Mandates in Schools” — targets COVID-19 vaccines exclusively.

“Some school districts and universities continue to coerce children and young adults into taking the COVID-19 vaccine by conditioning their education on it, and others may re-implement such mandates,” the order said. “Parents and young adults should be empowered with accurate data regarding the remote risks of serious illness associated with COVID-19 for children and young adults, as well as how those risks can be mitigated through various measures, and left free to make their own decisions accordingly.”

The order went on to say that “discretionary Federal funds should not be used to directly or indirectly support or subsidize an educational service agency, State educational agency, local educational agency, elementary school, secondary school, or institution of higher education that requires students to have received a COVID-19 vaccination to attend any in-person education program.” And it directs the secretary of the Department of Education to work with the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services to come up with a plan to end any mandates and deliver to the president a list of federal grants and contracts going to noncompliant institutions.

Since a White House fact sheet about Trump’s order also said “[s]ome schools and universities have recently enforced or continue to enforce COVID-19 vaccine mandates,” we asked the White House to identify those schools and universities. We received no response.

Broadly, no states have a requirement for students in kindergarten through 12th grade to get a COVID-19 vaccine, according to the National Academy for State Health Policy. NASHP has published a U.S. map that tracks state policies, and it was last updated in January 2024. It also shows that at least 21 states have banned schools from requiring COVID-19 shots for students.

The nonpartisan research organization is working on an update to its tracker, but a spokesperson confirmed to us in an email that no U.S. states currently have COVID-19 vaccine mandates for K-12 schools.

NASHP said that many states began “winding down” prior mandates after the federal COVID-19 public health emergency expired in May 2023, about three years after a pandemic was declared by the World Health Organization in March 2020.

In addition, in an interview with CBS News, which called Trump’s order “largely symbolic,” Dr. Amesh Adalja, an infectious disease physician and senior scholar at the John Hopkins Center for Health Security, emphasized that at the local level “zero” public school districts across the U.S. “have a [COVID-19] vaccine requirement for entry.”

In contrast, all 50 states and Washington, D.C., require students to be vaccinated against some other diseases or infections, such as measles, polio and chickenpox. All states allow exemptions for medical reasons, and some allow them for religious or personal reasons.

As for institutions of higher education, No College Mandates, an advocacy group against mandatory vaccines for students, recently identified just 15 U.S. colleges or universities that it said accept federal funding and still require at least some students to be vaccinated against COVID-19.

But even that list is out of date because it includes Morehouse College, Spelman College and Clark Atlanta University. Those three private institutions are part of the Atlanta University Center Consortium and its policy for the 2024-2025 school year says that the COVID-19 vaccine is “strongly recommend[ed]” but “not mandated for faculty, staff, and students.” An AUC Consortium spokesperson told us that policy went into effect in August.

Meanwhile, at a minimum, 34 states and D.C. “require some type of [other] vaccination for students who are attending college or university classes,” according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

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President Donald Trump made the exaggerated claim that federal office space is “occupied by 4%” of federal workers to bolster his argument for dramatically downsizing the federal workforce and demanding that most workers return to the office full time.

In fact, more than half of the nearly 2.3 million federal workers are not even eligible to work from home at all, according to an Office of Management and Budget report released in August 2024. As of May of that year, among those eligible to telework for a portion of their hours, 61% of their working hours were spent in-person at assigned job sites. Only 228,000 — about 10% of the federal workforce — were entirely remote.

Since taking office, Trump has taken a hard line on the need for federal workers to return full time to the office, and he has criticized former President Joe Biden’s post-pandemic efforts to push federal workers back to the office. As with the private sector, many employees began working from home during the COVID-19 pandemic.

In his 2022 State of the Union address, Biden vowed, “The vast majority of federal workers will once again work in person.” A year later, the OMB issued new guidance that called on agencies to “substantially increase meaningful in-person work at Federal offices, particularly at headquarters and equivalents, while still using flexible operational policies as an important tool in talent recruitment and retention.”

There was a modest decrease in the percentage of federal employees who worked remotely on a “routine or situational” basis between the fiscal years of 2022 and 2023 (from 46% to 43%), according to the Office of Personnel Management. Biden’s chief of staff, Jeffrey Zients, acknowledged in an April 2024 speech at the Economic Club of Washington, D.C., “We don’t yet have the return-to-work levels that we should have across the federal government. We’re headed in the right direction, but that’s an – that’s an area we need to continue to focus on.”

Meanwhile, a 2023 review by the Government Accountability Office of 24 federal agency headquarters buildings in and around Washington, D.C., found that from January to March of 2023, 17 of them were at 25% capacity or less earlier that year. (The vast majority of federal workers don’t work in the Washington, D.C., area.)

In November, Biden’s then-Social Security Administration commissioner, Martin O’Malley, reached a deal with the American Federation of Government Employees that would permit 42,000 Social Security Administration employees to continue to work a hybrid schedule that allows them to work at least some time from home until 2029.

Trump referred to that deal in his remarks to the press while signing executive orders on Feb. 11.

“What we’re trying to do is reduce government,” Trump said. “We have too many people. We have office space, it’s occupied by 4%. Nobody’s showing up to work because they were told not to. And then Biden gave them a five-year pass, some of them, 48,000 of them gave them a five-year pass, that for five years, you don’t have to show up to work.”

It’s not true that all of those workers in the bargaining agreement “don’t have to show up to work,” if Trump meant they don’t have to show up at the office at all. The deal was for hybrid work schedules.

On his first day in office, Trump issued a memo instructing the heads of all federal departments and agencies to “take all necessary steps to terminate remote work arrangements and require employees to return to work in-person at their respective duty stations on a full-time basis, provided that the department and agency heads shall make exemptions they deem necessary.”

White House Cites Nonscientific Survey 

We reached out to the White House for clarification and backup for Trump’s claim that federal buildings were only occupied by 4% of federal workers, but we did not get a response. However, a White House fact sheet on Trump’s efforts to “Remake America’s Federal Workforce,” states, “According to a recent congressional report, only 6% of federal workers report to work in-person on a full-time basis.”

That refers to a nonscientific, opt-in survey by the Federal News Network of federal employees in April 2024 that found that among the 6,338 respondents to the survey, “about 30% said they work entirely remotely, 6% work entirely in-person and 64% were working on a hybrid schedule — a mix of in-person work and telework.”

Sen. Joni Ernst, chair of the Senate caucus of the Department of Government Efficiency, used the survey when accusing federal workers of abusing telework. Senate Majority Leader John Thune also cited the statistic on Fox News on Feb. 14, saying, “There is an enormous amount of room for reduction in force and the fact borne out by a study that was done not all that long ago, it was actually reported on by the New York Times that only 6% of the federal workforce is back in the office full time. I mean, think about that.”

But the survey, it turns out, was not reflective of the actual situation. An editor’s note was added to the Federal News Network story on Dec. 6 “to clarify that the survey was a non-scientific survey of respondents who self-reported that they are current federal employees, and who were self-selected.”

The story was also updated to include data from the OMB that contradicts the findings of the survey.

The August OMB report noted that 1.2 million of the 2.3 million civilian federal employees — 54% — “worked fully on-site, as their jobs require them to be physically present during all working hours.” About 10% of federal workers (228,000) worked fully from home.

According to OMB, “Among all federal employees, excluding remote workers that do not have a work-site to report to, 79.4% of regular, working hours were spent in-person.”

“Among the subset of federal workers that are telework-eligible, excluding remote workers, 61.2% of regular, working hours were spent in-person,” the report states. Going into the office three out of five days of the workweek would be 60%.

A Congressional Budget Office report published in April 2024 found that “[f]ederal employees and their private-sector counterparts teleworked at roughly similar rates in 2022.”

In November, the Government Accountability Office released a report on the effect of teleworking at four federal agencies and agency officials told them that limiting work-from-home opportunities hurt recruitment and retention of employees. An OPM report issued in December 2023 also concluded that when “[i]mplemented intentionally and balanced with meaningful in-person work” telework can lead to “increased productivity” and “lower employee attrition.”

But encouraging some of those resistant to full-time in-person work to quit is part of the Trump administration’s goal.

“Requiring federal employees to come to the office five days a week would result in a wave of voluntary terminations that we welcome,” Elon Musk, head of the new Department of Government Efficiency, wrote in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal in November, along with Vivek Ramaswamy, who is no longer with DOGE.

Whether to downsize the federal workforce is a matter of opinion, and we take no position on that. But it is grossly exaggerated to say that only 4% of federal workers occupy federal office spaces.

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This week, New York City officials said the city had received two payments from the federal government as reimbursement for expenses the city incurred while providing services to migrants who arrived in New York, including $19 million for hotel expenses. But Elon Musk, head of the Department of Government Efficiency, claimed, without evidence, that $59 million “meant for American disaster relief” was sent to “luxury hotels.”

Musk’s claims, posted on X, the social media platform he owns, echoed false claims made by President Donald Trump and others last year that Federal Emergency Management Agency money for hurricane relief had been used to house people in the country illegally. As we reported then, Congress had appropriated money for the Department of Homeland Security’s Shelter and Services Program, which awards money to nonfederal entities to provide housing and other services for migrants awaiting an immigration hearing. FEMA’s Disaster Relief Fund is funded by Congress separately.

But in an early morning post on Feb. 10, Musk wrote, “The @DOGE team just discovered that FEMA sent $59M LAST WEEK to luxury hotels in New York City to house illegal migrants.” His post went on to say, “That money is meant for American disaster relief and instead is being spent on high end hotels for illegals!”

The White House has not provided evidence that the funds were originally “meant for American disaster relief,” as Musk said. The White House press office did not respond to our inquiry about this.

The Associated Press and the New York Times reported that the money that FEMA paid to the city — not directly to hotels — came from the Shelter and Services Program. The money for that program comes from the budget for U.S. Customs and Border Protection, and FEMA and CBP, both DHS agencies, coordinate to administer the grants.

However, a DHS official previously told reporters that the money is “completely separate” from funding that Congress allocates to FEMA to help U.S. residents affected by natural disasters.

In addition, a city spokesperson, Liz Garcia, told the AP that only some of the $59 million was for hotel costs.

She said that the mayor’s office recently received two payments from the federal government totaling about $81 million for immigration-related services. One of the payments was for roughly $59 million, of which $19 million was for hotel stays, as the city has had to accommodate more than 200,000 migrants who arrived there since the spring of 2022.

“The payments of $81 million, Garcia said, covered reimbursements for November 2023 to October 2024, including hotel, security, food, and other costs,” the AP reported. “She said the city applied in April, the money was appropriated last year by Congress, and FEMA allocated it last year.”

Garcia also told the AP that the city did not pay “luxury” rates for the hotels.

A July report from the New York City Comptroller’s Office said that during fiscal year 2024, the city spent an average of $156 per night on hotel rooms for migrants. That average rate, negotiated with the Hotel Association of New York City, was “$1.50 more expensive than the market economy rate, and $27 less expensive than the upscale rate,” the report said. Most of the hotels were in city boroughs outside of Manhattan.

We contacted the city about the payments, but have not received a response. FEMA also did not answer our specific questions about the funds, but a DHS spokesperson emailed us a statement saying that DHS has “clawed back the full payment” from the city and fired four FEMA employees responsible for making the payments.

In a statement posted on Feb. 12, New York City Comptroller Brad Lander called the revocation of over $80 million in congressionally appropriated funds illegal, and advised Eric Adams, the city’s mayor, to pursue legal action.

“This is money that the federal government previously disbursed for shelter and services and is now missing,” he said. “This highway robbery of our funds directly out of our bank account is a betrayal of everyone who calls New York City home.”

Adams said in a Feb. 12 post on X that his office had already been in contact with the White House about recouping the money.

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Days before he ordered, and then paused, new tariffs on U.S. imports from Canada and Mexico, President Donald Trump argued that the U.S. does not need imported products such as crude oil and lumber from those countries.

Experts told us that, in theory, if the U.S. stopped importing crude oil and lumber from Canada and Mexico, it still would be able to meet domestic demand using natural resources available in the U.S. But, in reality, they said, the transition would be costly and take some time to implement, among other complications.

On Jan. 30, while talking with reporters about the tariffs he would announce two days later, Trump said: “Look, Mexico and Canada have never been good to us on trade. They’ve treated us very unfairly on trade and we will be able to make that up very quickly because we don’t need the products that they have. We have all the oil you need. We have all the trees you need, meaning the lumber. We have more than almost anybody in those two categories, and oil we have more than anybody and we don’t need anybody’s trees.”

A week earlier, while delivering virtual remarks to the World Economic Forum on Jan. 23, Trump singled out Canada specifically.

“Canada has been very tough to deal with over the years, and it’s not fair that we should have a $200 billion or $250 billion deficit,” Trump said. “We don’t need their lumber because we have our own forests, et cetera, et cetera. We don’t need their oil and gas. We have our — we have more than anybody.”

In fact, the U.S. had a roughly $41 billion trade deficit in goods and services with Canada in 2023, according to the most recent annual data published by the Bureau of Economic Analysis. If Trump was only referring to the deficit in goods with Canada, it was about $72 billion in 2023, still significantly lower than what Trump said.

And while the U.S. is producing the most crude oil in its history – and more than any country ever – there are several reasons why the U.S. currently needs crude oil imports from Canada, Mexico and other countries. Without those imports, refiners that rely on them to make gasoline and other refined products would have to make infrastructure changes that experts said would take time and significant financial investments.

Rejecting imports of lumber would pose other issues, such as higher prices and environmental concerns, experts said.

Trump announced new 25% tariffs on imported products from Canada and Mexico via executive order on Feb. 1, with a lower 10% tariff on Canadian oil. But a few days later, on Feb. 3, the president agreed to pause the tariffs for 30 days.

Crude Oil

On paper, it may appear that the U.S. does not need imports of oil from Canada or Mexico. But the imports are of heavier crude oil than what the U.S. mostly extracts.

In 2023, the U.S. produced a record of more than 12.9 million barrels of crude oil per day, which increased to a new high of more than 13.2 million barrels per day in 2024, according to estimates from the Energy Information Administration. The country also has tens of billions of barrels of proven oil reserves that are likely recoverable, according to the EIA, and Trump has said he wants American companies to “drill, baby, drill” to boost production further.

Carey W. King, a research scientist at the University of Texas at Austin and assistant director of its Energy Institute, also told us in an email that the U.S. “extracts more ‘crude oil’ and natural gas liquids than it consumes as refined oil products.” And he noted that the U.S. also exports crude oil — almost 4.1 million barrels per day in 2023, according to the most recent annual EIA data.

“So it seems the U.S. doesn’t need oil from other countries,” King said.

But in a report updated this month, the Congressional Research Service explained that, generally, U.S. oil trade with Canada and Mexico “is motivated by factors including geographic proximity, refinery configurations, crude oil quality, and an integrated pipeline network.” Not all crude oil is the same, the CRS noted, nor are the refineries that process the crude into consumable products such as transportation fuels and heating oil.

That’s why eliminating imports from those countries may be easier said than done.

The U.S. got about 3.9 million barrels per day from Canada in 2023, while Mexico was the source of about 733,000 barrels per day. Combined, they accounted for more than 70% of all U.S. imports of crude oil that year.

“The U.S. could, if necessary, become self-sufficient,” David Gantz, a fellow in trade and international economics at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy, told us in an interview. However, he said “it would require significant and expensive modifications” to U.S. refineries.

Changes would be required because, as the EIA has written, the U.S. mostly produces lighter, or less dense, forms of crude oil. In contrast, many refineries in the U.S. have been configured to process the heavier crude oils, which the EIA says are generally cheaper and are produced in Canada, Mexico and other countries. Most American refineries were built decades ago, before the U.S. “shale boom” in the 2000s led to greater production of more light crude. 

That makes imports vital to the U.S. refining industry.

“From a practical standpoint, oil refiners have made capital investments that have tuned their refineries to take a certain mix (within a range) of crude oil inputs as feedstocks,” King said in his email to us. “If this crude oil mix changes, their refinery is not as well configured for that new crude oil mix.”

He said this is also one of the reasons why U.S. companies export crude oil, because oil refiners in other countries are better configured to use the lighter crude oils extracted from drilling in the U.S. Meanwhile, “more than 70% of U.S. refining capacity runs most efficiently with heavier crude,” according to the American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers, a trade group that represents fuel makers.

Retooling American refineries to use more U.S.-sourced oil, in addition to potentially taking years to complete, “would cost billions,” the AFPM said in an explainer on the issue, posted to its site on Jan. 24. Also, transporting oil products across the U.S. would be an issue, the AFPM said, because “[w]e lack the infrastructure (like pipelines) needed to cost effectively supply U.S crude oil and refined products to every region” of the country.

For example, in an August post about Canadian crude oil’s “increasingly significant role in U.S. refineries,” the EIA said: “Geographic proximity allows Canada’s pipelines to transport crude oil from the western provinces, mainly from Alberta’s large crude oil production region, to refineries in the United States. Inland regions of the United States, particularly the Midwest … and Rocky Mountains …, are closely connected to Canada’s oil markets via pipeline and rail networks.”

Still, “theoretically,” Gantz said, Trump’s claim that the U.S. could do without oil imports from Canada and Mexico is “true” – if refineries are retrofitted and companies come up with a transportation plan.

On the other hand, “in a practical matter, it’s not true at all,” he said of Trump’s claim.

“In the short and medium term, the refineries are set up to use a particular grade of crude oil, and they can’t easily or quickly switch,” Gantz explained.

He said the fact that Trump initially ordered a lower 10% tariff on imports of crude oil from Canada – compared with a 25% tariff on all other products – “suggested somebody in the Trump administration understands that this is not a product which can be easily replaced.”

Lumber

The situation with lumber is similar, experts said.

“Sure: we could probably meet most of our lumber needs domestically,” Marc McDill, an associate professor of forest management at Penn State University, told us in an email. “The reasons why we don’t basically boil down to two things: 1) sometimes imports are cheaper than our own suppliers, and 2) we value our forests for a lot of other things besides producing lumber.”

He added that without lumber from Canada, which is the largest source of U.S. imports of forest products, “we would adjust in three ways: 1) prices would go up (which would increase housing costs), 2) we would harvest more of our own trees (which might have negative environmental consequences), and 3) we would import more from countries other than Canada.”

As for Mexico, it’s “our fourth largest trading partner when it comes to lumber or wood products, in general, including paper,” McDill said in an interview. “So, they’re important, but considerably smaller” in terms of imports than Canada.

In 2023, the U.S. imported $51.5 billion worth of forest products, 40.5% of which came from Canada and 6% came from Mexico, according to data from the U.S. International Trade Commission.

JensPeter Barynin, an economist and a former executive at the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources, had a take similar to McDill’s.

“In theory,” what Trump said “is true,” Barynin wrote in a Jan. 27 opinion piece published by the Financial Post. “U.S. forests could meet domestic demand. In 2024, the southeastern U.S. harvested nearly twice as much timber as Canada, primarily due to the region’s productive Southern Yellow Pine plantation forests. Add in the untapped state-owned forests of Washington, Oregon and Idaho, and self-sufficiency becomes a plausible goal.

“However, ramping up harvesting from publicly owned forests, most of which are currently protected, would provoke fierce public backlash, conflict with the Environmental Protection Act and clash with the interests of both large and small private timberland owners,” he said. “Even if Trump were to push for increased harvesting, the U.S. lacks the logging and mill capacity to process the trees into lumber.”

In addition, C. Rhett Jackson, a professor of water resources at the Warnell School of Forestry and Natural Resources at the University of Georgia, told us that differences in the lumber produced in the U.S. and Canada may be problematic.

“US lumber is comprised largely of loblolly pine, slash pine, and Douglas Fir,” he said in an email. “Canadian softwoods come from different species with different properties. Depending on what you are building, you might prefer the Canadian softwood lumber choices. Also, depending on where you are in the country, the haul distances for Canadian lumber can be much shorter.”

Putting tariffs on imports from Canada would be troublesome for U.S. businesses and consumers, Jackson said, adding that prices on all lumber would increase and the selection of available lumber would decrease.

“So, the President’s statement is not wrong but still misleading,” he wrote. “All lumber is not created equally.”

The White House did not address our questions about how Trump planned to supplement any lost imports from Canada and Mexico.

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As President Donald Trump’s administration targets the U.S. Agency for International Development for closure or major downsizing, the White House and social media posts have highlighted four projects as examples of the agency’s “waste and abuse.” But only one was funded by USAID.

We’ll explain the programs and provide context on USAID’s total budget.

Trump’s newly formed Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE — led by billionaire Elon Musk — swung its focus to USAID in late January. The agency was created in 1961 and charged with carrying out foreign social and economic development projects. It “provides assistance to strategically important countries and countries in conflict; leads U.S. efforts to alleviate poverty, disease, and humanitarian need; and assists U.S. commercial interests by supporting developing countries’ economic growth and building countries’ capacity to participate in world trade,” according to the Congressional Research Service.

“USAID is a criminal organization,” Musk wrote on his social media platform, X, on Feb. 2. “Time for it to die.”

The following day, Secretary of State Marco Rubio was appointed the acting administrator of USAID. The agency’s website was taken down, and on Feb. 7, it showed a notice that said: “On Friday, February 7, 2025, at 11:59 pm (EST) all USAID direct hire personnel will be placed on administrative leave globally, with the exception of designated personnel responsible for mission-critical functions, core leadership and specially designated programs.”

In response to a lawsuit filed by organizations representing USAID workers, a federal judge on Feb. 7 temporarily blocked the Trump administration from immediately placing more than 2,000 workers on administrative leave. As of Feb. 8, the website was blank.

It is unclear what the future of USAID will be. The Congressional Research Service wrote in a Feb. 3 memo that the agency was created as an independent establishment within the executive branch and “the President does not have the authority to abolish it.”

More than 100 House Democrats signed a letter dated Feb. 4 raising the same point to Rubio. “By law, USAID is an independent entity separate from the State Department, and any changes to that structure would require legislative approval from Congress,” it said.

The White House has publicized claims about the agency to justify its action. In a statement issued on Feb. 3, it listed several programs it claimed were funded by USAID and said, “For decades, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) has been unaccountable to taxpayers as it funnels massive sums of money to the ridiculous — and, in many cases, malicious — pet projects of entrenched bureaucrats, with next-to-no oversight.”

Later that day, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt highlighted four that she said were emblematic of “the waste and abuse that has run through USAID over the past several years”: “$1.5 million to advance DEI in Serbia’s workplaces, $70,000 for production of a DEI musical in Ireland, $47,000 for a transgender opera in Colombia, $32,000 for a transgender comic book in Peru.”

“I don’t know about you, but as an American taxpayer, I don’t want my dollars going toward this crap,” Leavitt said. “And I know the American people don’t either. That’s exactly what Elon Musk has been tasked by President Trump to do, to get the fraud, waste, and abuse out of our federal government.”

A clip of that portion of her comments was shared widely on social media — the version shared by the White House’s “Rapid Response 47” account on X garnered more than a million views, alone. Other posts shared lists of projects that included the four highlighted by Leavitt.

But some of those projects weren’t described accurately. And only the first was funded by USAID; the rest were funded by the State Department. Each of the projects highlighted represents a relatively small amount of money — the entire amount managed by USAID was about $40 billion in fiscal year 2023 (the most recent year with complete data), according to a Congressional Research Service report. That amount is less than 1% of the total federal budget.

Whether or not these programs demonstrate “waste and abuse,” as described by the Trump administration, is a matter of opinion. We’ll lay out what we know about each one.

Serbian ‘DEI’ Project

An LGBTQ advocacy organization in Serbia — a country that fares poorly compared with other European countries on measures of LGBTQ rights, according to data from the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights — hosted a three-year program aimed at improving the inclusion of LGBTQ people in the workplace.

From February 2023 to October 2024, USAID committed to spending about $1.5 million — in three roughly $500,000 installments — to support the program.

At a program conference in September 2023, mission director for USAID in Serbia, Brooke Isham, said, “At USAID, we know that inclusive development is important for driving economic growth and also for creating a healthier democracy.”

A ‘DEI Musical’ in Ireland

The State Department committed to provide $70,844 in September 2022 to an Irish organization called Ceiliuradh, which is part of the Irish South Wind Blows production company. The money wasn’t for a “musical,” but rather a musical event.

That company’s musical component, called Other Voices, put together a program called “Other Voices: Dignity – Towards a More Equitable Future” for the U.S. Embassy in Dublin on Sept. 15, 2022.

The announcement for the event said it “will showcase the very best of American and Irish talent with a diverse programme which aims to fulfil the U.S. Embassy Dublin’s mission to promote diversity, inclusion, and equality.”

The event was streamed live on YouTube and featured several Irish and American artists.

USAID isn’t listed as providing any money for the event.

A ‘Transgender Opera’ in Colombia

On April 28, 2022, the University of the Andes in Bogotá, Colombia, put on a performance of the opera “As One.” The show, which was written in the U.S. and debuted in 2014, features a transgender protagonist.

A program for the university’s production of the opera said the show had the support of the university, the Bogotá Philharmonic Orchestra and the “Small Grants Program of the Embassy of the United States in Colombia.”

The Department of State committed $25,000 to fund the project, and the website USAspending.gov also noted that there was $22,020 of “non-federal funding” for the project, making a total of $47,020 listed on the site. The federal funding for this project also came from the State Department, not USAID.

A ‘Transgender Comic Book’ in Peru

In 2021, the U.S. Embassy in Peru introduced a comic book called “The Power of Education,” which it used to promote education and exchange programs in the U.S.

The following year, the embassy commissioned a second volume.

“The Embassy asked us to introduce a gay student in #2 to show his personal struggle coming out to his parents, but that has zero to do with being transgender,” David Campiti, who owns the company that produced the comic book, told us in an email. “The comics were about scholarships and furthering education.”

The series ended up including three comic books, each one showing an aspect of cultural exchange and education. View them here, here and here.

The second one is what was highlighted by the Trump administration as a “transgender comic book.” But volume 2 of “The Power of Education” does not include a transgender character. Rather, as Campiti said, it featured a hero who was gay.

The writer of the comic, David Lawrence, said the same thing in a post on his Facebook page on Feb. 4, explaining why the embassy had requested an LGBTQ character. “The US embassy in Peru requested that as a small response to anti gay prejudice in the country,” he wrote.

We reached out to the embassy for comment and were referred to the State Department, which did not respond to us.

Like the first volume, the second one was used to promote education and exchange programs. And, incidentally, it won two awards in 2023, including comic of the year, from a Peruvian organization called Chronicles of Diversity.

The funding for this project didn’t come from USAID, either, but, again, from the State Department.

So, funding for three of the four projects highlighted by the White House came from the State Department for funding cultural activities on behalf of various embassies.

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As justification for dismantling the federal Department of Education, President Donald Trump has repeatedly claimed that U.S. schools are “ranked 40 out of 40” in educational outcomes compared with other countries, while the U.S. “ranked No. 1 in cost per pupil.” Neither claim is accurate.

U.S. high school students performed above average in science and reading, and a bit below average in math, according to the latest data compiled by the intergovernmental Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. And in other international assessments, elementary students in the U.S. scored above average in math, science and reading.

During the campaign, Trump made no secret of his desire to dismantle the federal Department of Education. As president, Trump said that remains his goal.

Trump told reporters on Feb. 4 that he had said to Linda McMahon, his nominee to be Education secretary, “‘Linda I hope you do a great job and put yourself out of a job.’”

Trump said he wants to “let the states run schools,” and that he would funnel most of the funding for the Department of Education to states. As a technical matter, states and local communities already run the schools — setting the curriculum and teacher certification standards. As the Department of Education explains, “the Federal role in education [is] as a kind of ’emergency response system,’ a means of filling gaps in State and local support for education when critical national needs arise.” In practice, FindLaw explains, “the federal government focuses on providing supplementary support and coordination at the national level. For instance, it implements programs and provides crucial services to disadvantaged populations” and it recommends teaching strategies.

According to the Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics, federal government funding made up about 11% of the revenues for elementary and secondary public schools in the 2020-21 school year. The rest of the revenues come from state and local funding. Trump has said his plan is to effect a “virtual closure of Department of Education in Washington” and instead give federal education funds directly to states.

In response to a reporter’s question on Feb. 4 about whether he intended to shutter the Department of Education, Trump repeatedly came back to his false claims about the U.S. ranking in educational achievement and the country’s per pupil spending.

“We spend more money per pupil than any other nation in the world, and yet we’re rated No. 40,” Trump said. “The last rating just came out, you saw them. So they talk about 40 countries, we’re rated No. 40. … We have to tell the teachers union, we’re rated last in the world in education, of the Top 40. … The thing just came out. That’s under [former President Joe] Biden, remember that.”

We should note that Trump has been making these same claims for years, as far back as when he was running for president in 2016. As we wrote in May 2016, he was wrong on both counts, as he is now. His campaign at the time did not respond when we asked for a source for the claims, and neither did the White House press office when we made a similar request this week.

Educational Outcomes

We could find no international ranking of education outcomes that has the U.S. dead last, as Trump claimed.

When Trump mentions 40 peer countries, he appears to be talking about the 37 OECD countries that participate in the Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA, which the NCES conducts in coordination with the OECD every three years in reading, math and science for 15-year-old students. The latest results are from 2022.

In no PISA category, however, does the U.S. rank last. Rather, the U.S. scored above average among OECD countries in reading and science (subjects in which the U.S. ranked 6th and 12th, respectively). The average U.S. score in math was lower, but not significantly, than the OECD average. The U.S. ranking in math was 28th.

Here’s a more detailed breakdown of the PISA results:

• In reading, the U.S. average score of 504 was higher than the OECD average score of 476. Compared with the other 36 participating OECD members, the U.S. ranked 6th. Ireland and Japan were tied for the top ranking with an average score of 516, and Colombia was lowest with a score of 409. Looking at all of the 81 countries in the dataset, including non-OECD countries, the U.S. ranked 9th.
• In science, the U.S. score of 499 was higher than the OECD average of 485. Among the 37 participating OECD countries, the U.S. ranked 12th. Japan was highest with a score of 547, and Mexico was lowest with a score of 410. Looking at all 81 countries in the PISA study, the U.S. ranked 16th.
• In math, the U.S. average score of 465 ranked 28th out of 37 OECD countries. The U.S. score was lower than the OECD average of 472, though the difference was not statistically significant. The country with the highest average score was Japan (536), and the lowest was Colombia (383). Looking at all of the 81 countries in the PISA data, the U.S. math literacy score ranked 34th.

Notably, the situation was very similar in the 2018 PISA assessment during Trump’s first term in office. As in 2022, the U.S. performed above the OECD average in reading and science, and below the OECD average in math.

We should also note that U.S. scores in math, science and reading in 2022 were all lower than in 2018. But the U.S. ranking compared with other OECD countries was relatively the same or better, because scores around the world dipped post-pandemic.

From 2018 to 2022, the OECD average in PISA dropped by almost 15 points in math (it dropped by 13 points in the U.S.), by about 10 points in reading (though by just 1 point in the U.S.) and “remained stable” in science (though it dropped by 3 points in the U.S.). According to the OECD, “The unprecedented drops in mathematics and reading point to the shock effect of COVID-19 on most countries.”

A second international assessment of students is known as the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), which is given every four years to fourth- and eighth-grade students.

In 2023, with an average score of 517 in math, U.S. fourth graders scored 14 points above the international average, and ranked 28th out of 63 countries. In science, the U.S. average score of 532 was also above the international average, by 38 points, and the U.S. ranked 15th out of 63 countries.

For eighth graders in the TIMSS assessment, the U.S. average in 2023 in math (488) was 10 points above the international average and ranked 24th out of 45 countries. In science, U.S. eighth graders’ average score (513) was 47 points above the international average and ranked 16th out of 45 countries.

The third and final assessment we reviewed is the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study, which is administered every five years to fourth-grade students. In 2021, the latest data available, the U.S. had an average score of 548, which was 48 points above the median, and the U.S. ranked 6th out of 33 countries. Ireland (577) was tops, and South Africa (288) was lowest.

In short, the U.S. was not last by any of these measures.

Spending Per Pupil

Trump was also wrong to say that the U.S. spends the most per pupil.

The cost of higher education — college-level education — is very high in the U.S. According to the OECD, U.S. expenditures for tertiary education (post-high school, including college) were the highest among OECD countries in 2021. At $36,274 per pupil, that was 77% higher than the OECD average. According to the OECD, 39% of U.S. spending for higher education was public expenditure (compared with an OECD average of 68%).

But a handful of other countries spent more than the U.S. on primary and secondary schooling.

For example, while the total spending per pupil at the primary level — elementary school — in the U.S. ($15,270) was 28% higher than the OECD average ($11,902), the U.S. ranked 6th behind Luxembourg ($25,584), Norway ($18,037), Iceland ($16,786), Denmark ($15,598) and Austria ($15,415). According to the OECD, 93% of total expenditure on primary institutions comes from public sources in the U.S.

Looking at secondary education — high school — the U.S. per pupil expenditure ($16,301) was 22% higher than the OECD average but below Norway ($19,831), Austria ($19,049), South Korea ($19,299), the Netherlands ($17,909), Belgium ($17,525), Germany ($17,077) and Australia ($16,498).

Another way to look at education spending is as a percentage of gross domestic product. By that measure, according to OECD data, the U.S. again is nearly tops for postsecondary education. But at the primary and secondary school levels, U.S. per pupil spending in 2021 was below that of more than a dozen countries, including Israel, Iceland, Norway, the United Kingdom, Belgium and Costa Rica.

“The U.S. spends a lot on education if you include all the money spent on higher education,” Andrew Crook, press secretary for the American Federation of Teachers, told us via email. “If you only consider K-12 education, U.S. expenditures are very close to the OECD average.”

OECD data indicate that while the U.S. prioritizes higher education, “other countries invest more comprehensively across all levels of education,” Crook said.

Crook also warned that international spending comparisons “aren’t always straightforward.”

“Many services that American schools provide are not part of other countries’ educational expenditures,” Crook said. “For instance, many countries provide universal healthcare, which is funded separately from their education budgets, whereas in the U.S., healthcare costs for students and staff may be partially covered within school funding. Additionally, expenditures on services like student transportation, social programs, and other support systems vary widely across countries, further complicating a one-to-one comparison of education spending.”

Regardless, U.S. spending per pupil is not — as Trump repeatedly claims — higher than all other nations, nor does the U.S. rank last in educational outcomes.

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In his first term, President Donald Trump tried to force TikTok’s parent company to sell its popular app or cease operating in the U.S., citing the need to “take aggressive action … to protect our national security.”

But in his return to the Oval Office, Trump delayed enforcement of a law that would have forced TikTok to shut down in the U.S. on Jan. 19. And, in a Jan. 22 interview with Fox News host Sean Hannity, Trump downplayed concerns he once raised about TikTok as a national security risk, saying he is “starting to have a very warm spot” for TikTok because he did well with young voters. 

“You know, the interesting thing with TikTok though is you’re dealing with a lot of young people,” Trump told Hannity. “So, is it that important for China to be spying … on young kids watching crazy videos?”

The answer for some members of Congress and cybersecurity experts is a resounding yes. 

“Let’s be clear, TikTok is absolutely a national security threat,” Republican Rep. Mike Turner of Ohio said on CBS News’ “Face the Nation” on Jan. 26. Turner, a former chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, cited the vast amount of data that TikTok collects on U.S. users and Chinese laws that require TikTok to turn over that data to the Chinese Communist Party upon request. 

In the first of two executive orders he issued in August 2020 to address the alleged threat posed by TikTok, Trump explained how TikTok data could be used against the U.S. government, residents and companies.  

“TikTok automatically captures vast swaths of information from its users, including Internet and other network activity information such as location data and browsing and search histories,” an Aug. 6, 2020, executive order said. “This data collection threatens to allow the Chinese Communist Party access to Americans’ personal and proprietary information — potentially allowing China to track the locations of Federal employees and contractors, build dossiers of personal information for blackmail, and conduct corporate espionage.”

Others, however, say the U.S. has failed to provide evidence that TikTok poses an actual threat, as opposed to a theoretical threat. They also question how the forced sale of TikTok would protect U.S. user data if China can still purchase it from private data brokers that collect and sell such information.

“China is unquestionably a foreign adversary, and the threats posed by TikTok’s popularity and China’s theoretical ability to demand huge amounts of data about American citizens are real,” Kat Duffy, senior fellow for digital and cyberspace policy at the Council on Foreign Relations, wrote in a Jan. 17 blog post shortly before Trump delayed enforcement of the TikTok law for 75 days. 

But, she wrote, “[i]f Congress is going to force the sale of a platform used by more than 170 million Americans to share and receive information—which generates billions of dollars in revenue for U.S. small businesses and creators—Americans deserve more than, ‘Trust us!’ and generalized national security warnings.”

Here, we will summarize the facts about TikTok and the national security concerns that some have about a Chinese company operating the app in the U.S.

The Rise of TikTok and Concerns About National Security

ByteDance, which is headquartered in Beijing, China, first released the TikTok app in September 2016. But it wasn’t available in the United States until August 2018 – nine months after ByteDance acquired Musical.ly, a Shanghai-based video-sharing app that operated in the U.S. and had an office in California, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service.   

ByteDance merged Musical.ly and TikTok to form one very popular app known for its addictive short-form videos. It wasn’t long after the August 2018 merger that concerns about TikTok surfaced. 

“I and others were raising alarms in 2019 when we noticed that the popularity of TikTok was growing,” Lindsay Gorman, managing director and senior fellow of the German Marshall Fund’s Technology Program, told us in an interview. 

What concerned Gorman at that time was the curious absence of TikTok videos about the pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong. The protests, which started in the spring of 2019, were in response to a bill that would have allowed Hong Kong residents to be extradited to China.  

In September 2019, the Washington Post reported that the pro-democracy hashtag #hongkong was prevalent on social media platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter, but not on TikTok. That raised concerns, the Post wrote, that TikTok was censoring “sympathetic memes and imagery from the hundreds of thousands of pro-democracy marchers.”

Days after the Post article, the Guardian reported that TikTok’s content moderation policy “instructs its moderators to censor videos that mention Tiananmen Square, Tibetan independence, or the banned religious group Falun Gong,” citing internal company guidelines. 

The Guardian, Sept. 25, 2019: The guidelines divide banned material into two categories: some content is marked as a “violation”, which sees it deleted from the site entirely, and can lead to a user being banned from the service. But lesser infringements are marked as “visible to self”, which leaves the content up but limits its distribution through TikTok’s algorithmically-curated feed.

Two weeks later, then-Sen. Marco Rubio – who is now secretary of state in the Trump administration – asked the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, or CFIUS, to review “the national security implications” of ByteDance’s 2017 acquisition of Musical.ly.

“According to reports, TikTok acquired Musical.ly, a video-sharing platform, without any oversight and relaunched the service for Western markets,” Rubio wrote. “These Chinese-owned apps are increasingly being used to censor content and silence open discussion on topics deemed sensitive by the Chinese Government and Communist Party. These topics include Tiananmen Square, Tibet, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and other issues.”

TikTok denied allegations of censorship. “Let us be very clear: TikTok does not remove content based on sensitivities related to China,” the company said in a blog post, adding that it is “not influenced by any foreign government, including the Chinese government.”

CFIUS did the review that Rubio had requested. On Aug. 14, 2020, then-Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin announced that the committee unanimously recommended to Trump that he force ByteDance to divest from TikTok. On that same day, Trump issued an order requiring ByteDance to divest from TikTok and destroy data it had collected on TikTok users in the United States. It was the second time that month that Trump had issued an executive order calling for action against TikTok’s owners. 

However, as we have written, TikTok and TikTok users successfully challenged Trump’s order, stopping it from taking effect. “The courts ultimately sided with the plaintiffs and issued preliminary injunctions temporarily barring the United States from enforcing the restrictions,” CRS said in a September 2023 report.

After he assumed the presidency in 2021, Joe Biden withdrew Trump’s executive orders on TikTok, and the lawsuits were dismissed, CRS said in its report. But TikTok would continue to grow in popularity, and the effort to force the sale of TikTok would continue. 

In March, the House overwhelmingly passed the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act by a vote of 352 to 65. A month later, it became law as part of an emergency supplemental bill that Biden signed April 24. 

The new law gave ByteDance 270 days, or nine months, to sell TikTok, and an extension of no more than three months if it can show “significant progress” toward complying with the law.

Instead of initiating a sale, TikTok went to court to argue that the law violated the constitutional right to free speech. The U.S. Supreme Court unanimously upheld the law in a Jan. 17 decision.

If TikTok continued to operate beyond Jan. 19, U.S. companies that provide services to TikTok, such as those that host TikTok’s data and distribute its app, could be fined $5,000 for each TikTok user in the U.S. Although it briefly shut down its app on Jan. 19, TikTok was back online after gaining assurances from Trump that he would not enforce the law.

On Jan. 20, his first day in office, Trump issued an executive order that instructed the U.S. attorney general not to enforce the law for 75 days “to allow my Administration an opportunity to determine the appropriate course forward in an orderly way that protects national security while avoiding an abrupt shutdown of a communications platform used by millions of Americans.”

On Feb. 3, Trump signed an executive order directing the U.S. Treasury and Commerce Departments to create a sovereign wealth fund. At the signing, Trump said the government-owned investment fund might be used to purchase TikTok.

“We’re going to be doing something perhaps with TikTok, perhaps not,” Trump said. “If we make the right deal, we’ll do it. Otherwise, we won’t. … Or if we do a partnership with very wealthy people, a lot of options. But we could put that, as an example, in the fund.”

TikTok Data Collection

Asked if TikTok poses a national security threat, Gorman, the German Marshall Fund senior fellow, told us that the app poses “two key threats.”

The first, she said, is about data – a massive collection of information that has grown in size since Trump last held office. In 2020, TikTok had about 49 million U.S. users. Since then, TikTok says it has more than tripled its number of U.S. users to more than 150 million. 

“TikTok collects a range of user information, including location data and internet address, keystroke patterns, and the type of device being used to access the app,” CRS said in a June 2023 report. “The app also collects and stores a user’s browsing and search history within the app, as well as the content of any messages exchanged using the app.

“Additional information can be collected based on user permission: phone number, phone book, and social-network contacts; GPS data; user age; user-generated content (e.g., photos and videos); store payment information; and the videos ‘liked,’ shared, watched all the way through, and re-watched,” the CRS report said.

CRS said TikTok’s data collection “appears to be comparable to what other social media companies gather and use,” but it noted that the Cybersecurity Law of the People’s Republic of China “requires Chinese companies to cooperate with government intelligence operations if so requested.”

Gorman said the fact that TikTok must give China its user data upon request is a national security concern. 

“In the U.S.,” she said, “there has to be a court order,” backed by evidence and signed by a judge, before a company is forced to turn over such data to the government. 

In its June 2023 report, CRS said, “TikTok forcefully states that it does not share U.S. user data with the Chinese government.” But the report added that “TikTok did admit that employees in China had accessed the data of a few U.S. journalists in 2022.”

In that case, four ByteDance employees who were investigating internal leaks to the media improperly accessed TikTok data on reporters for BuzzFeed and Financial Times. After an internal investigation, ByteDance fired four employees, including two based in China, and imposed tougher restrictions on access to user data, CNN reported.

BuzzFeed said ByteDance’s targeting of its reporter “comes in the wake of a series of reports by BuzzFeed News that exposed major issues within its parent company, from employees accessing American users’ data from China to ByteDance’s attempts to push pro-China messaging to Americans.” The Financial Times said its reporter had written stories about a staff exodus at TikTok’s London office over working conditions. 

Is TikTok a Propaganda Threat? 

The second threat to U.S. national security, Gorman said, is the potential for the Chinese Communist Party to use TikTok data for covert or overt propaganda campaigns aimed at U.S. citizens.

Although Trump dismissed TikTok users as “kids watching crazy videos,” Gorman cited a rise in the percentage of U.S. residents who get their news from TikTok and an increase in politicians using the popular app to reach voters.

In two surveys taken in the last two years, Pew found that most younger adults in the U.S. use TikTok and a growing percentage of younger adults say they get their news from the app.

“TikTok use is especially prevalent among younger adults – 56% of all U.S. adults ages 18 to 34 say they use the platform,” according to a Pew Research Center survey taken in August 2023.

In a separate survey last year, Pew Research Center found that 17% of U.S. adults regularly get their news from TikTok, including 39% of young adults under 30 years old who cited TikTok as their news source. By comparison, Pew found that only 3% of all U.S. adults and 9% of adults under 30 years got their news from TikTok in 2020.

“More and more people are getting their news on TikTok – 30% of Americans under a certain age get news from TikTok,” Gorman told us. “At the height of the Cold War, I don’t think we would have allowed the Soviet Union to own a social media site that delivers news to 30% of Americans.”

Gorman also said a report she co-authored last year found that 27% of all candidates in 2024 for Congress and two statewide races (gubernatorial and secretary of state) had TikTok accounts — an increase from 23% in the 2022 campaigns. “It’s no longer just this fun, viral thing,” she said of TikTok.

Then-FBI Director Christopher Wray told an audience at the University of Michigan’s Ford School in December 2022 that the Chinese government has the potential to control TikTok’s algorithm, “which allows them to manipulate content and, if they want to, to use it for influence operations [that] are a lot more worrisome in the hands of the Chinese Communist Party than whether or not you’re steering somebody as an influencer to one product or another.”

Gorman recalled how Russia’s Internet Research Agency carried out a covert propaganda campaign on Facebook to support Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. “Now, just imagine if Russia owned Facebook,” she said.

A more recent example may have occurred in Romania, but this time on TikTok. 

“Romania just set aside its entire presidential election because of concerns that TikTok has manipulated data and propaganda with respect to its presidential election,” Turner said on “Face the Nation.”

The Ohio congressman was referring to Calin Georgescu’s surprising victory on Nov. 24 in the first round of Romania’s presidential election, which has been tossed out by Romania’s Constitutional Court. Romanian officials claim that the far-right, pro-Russia candidate benefited “from a Russia-style booster campaign involving TikTok, according to declassified Romanian intelligence documents,” Politico reported. A new election will take place in May, Politico said.

Both TikTok and Russia have denied interfering in the election to help Georgescu.

Mark Scott, a senior resident fellow at the Democracy + Tech Initiative at the Atlantic Council, agreed with Gorman that “[d]ata that falls into the hands of an adversarial country may pose a direct national security threat, including via data brokers.”

“What we’ve seen, based on what information can be collected, including people’s geolocation, contacts, and data about their devices, is that such data can help adversarial countries garner an in-depth understanding of American citizens,” Scott told us in an email. “Such insight can then be fed into efforts, either via overt propaganda or covert influence campaigns, that target Americans.”

However, Scott wrote in a Jan. 9 post on the Atlantic Council website that forcing ByteDance to sell or shut down TikTok in the U.S. won’t “make Americans’ data more private and secure.”

“While US officials have raised concerns about how Americans’ data may be accessed by Chinese government officials via TikTok, such personal information—from people’s phone numbers and home addresses to internet activity to consumer purchasing history—is already available commercially, via so-called domestic data brokers,” he wrote. “The outgoing Biden administration tried to tackle that problem with the Protecting Americans’ Data from Foreign Adversaries Act and prohibitions placed on these data brokers from transferring such sensitive data to foreign adversaries like China.”

The House unanimously passed the Protecting Americans’ Data from Foreign Adversaries Act in March, but the bill did not come up for a vote in the Senate.

Gorman agreed that Congress should pass that legislation, “but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to solve what we can.” Forcing TikTok’s Chinese owners to sell the app is a good first step in protecting user data, she said.

“These are two separate problems. They are not at all the same,” Gorman said, referring to data brokers and a Chinese company owning TikTok. “The Chinese Communist Party doesn’t need a data broker if it has TikTok.” 

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After the deadly collision between a passenger plane and a U.S. Army helicopter in Washington, D.C., politicians and political commentators were quick to cast blame. President Donald Trump suggested diversity initiatives within the Federal Aviation Administration were at fault for the crash, and his critics pointed to a hiring freeze that Trump instituted on Jan. 20.

But neither side has evidence that those actions contributed to the crash.

The midair collision on Jan. 29 near Reagan Washington National Airport left no survivors. A total of 67 people reportedly died — 64 who were on the plane coming from Wichita, Kansas, and three soldiers who were in the helicopter.

The National Transportation Safety Board is leading the investigation into what caused the crash. In a press conference on Jan. 30, leaders stressed that the case was just beginning, and they had no answers yet.

Trump Blames His Predecessors

At a press conference on Jan. 30, Trump told reporters, “We do not know what led to this crash, but we have some very strong opinions.”

The president then went on to suggest that diversity hiring programs were to blame. He referred to a memo he signed on Jan. 21, eight days before the crash, titled “Keeping Americans Safe in Aviation.”

The memo incorrectly attributed a long-standing policy of the FAA only to former President Joe Biden’s administration, saying that “the prior administration sought to specifically recruit and hire individuals with serious infirmities that could impact the execution of their essential life-saving duties.”

At the press conference, Trump, again, made the same claim. He read aloud a headline that had been published by the New York Post and Fox News a year earlier. The headline said, “The FAA’s diversity push includes focus on hiring people with severe intellectual and psychiatric disabilities.” The president added, “They can be air traffic controllers — I don’t think so.”

That story was published in January 2024, following an incident in Oregon when an emergency exit door flew off of a Boeing 737 while it was in flight. Trump wrongly indicated that the story was published in January 2025, weeks before he took office.

The Fox News story had linked to a page on the FAA website about diversity and inclusion initiatives that had been active since at least 2013, according to the Internet Archive, and as Snopes discovered last year. Notably, that page had also been active — and carried the same language — through Trump’s first administration.

“The initiative is part of the FAA’s Diversity and Inclusion hiring plan, which says diversity is integral to achieving FAA’s mission of ensuring safe and efficient travel,” Trump read at the press conference, adding: “I don’t think so. I don’t think so. I think it’s just the opposite.”

Citing the FAA website, Trump said the federal government had identified certain disabilities “for special emphasis in recruitment and hiring,” saying they included “hearing, vision, missing extremities, partial paralysis” and more. All of that language was on the FAA’s website during Trump’s first term.

The Washington Post Fact Checker also noted that during Trump’s first administration, in 2019, the FAA announced a new program “to help prepare people with disabilities for careers in air traffic operations.”

In his Jan. 21 memo, however, the president said that “diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) hiring … penalizes hard-working Americans who want to serve in the FAA but are unable to do so, as they lack a requisite disability or skin color.”

At the press conference, when a reporter asked Trump why he thought the reason for the crash was diversity among air traffic controllers, the president said, “Because I have common sense.”

Later on Jan. 30, a reporter asked if Trump was saying that “race or gender played a role in this tragedy.” Trump said: “It may have. I don’t know. Incompetence might have played a role. We’ll let you know that, but we want the most competent people. We don’t care what race they are. We want the most competent people especially in those positions.”

Critics Blame Trump

Meanwhile, on social media, some critics of Trump are claiming or suggesting — also without proof — that he is the one responsible for the deadly crash.

An account belonging to Trill Clinton, whose bio says he worked for the Department of Housing and Urban and Development during the Obama administration, published a Jan. 30 post on X saying, “You dont get to: 1. Fire the head of the TSA, and the Aviation Security Advisory Committee. 2. Freeze hiring of all Air Traffic Controllers. 3. Fire 100 top FAA security officers. And then claim a plane crash a week later is ‘a tragic accident.’”

Sawyer Hackett, a democratic strategist and consultant, similarly wrote on X, “If a Democrat fired 100 FAA employees and put a freeze on hiring air traffic controllers 8 days before an airport plane crash, there would be a right-wing and media frenzy for weeks.” In another post, Hackett said, “The plane crash in DC was Trump’s fault.”

But there is no evidence that any recent executive actions taken by Trump played a role in the incident.

On his first day back in office as president, Trump did sign an executive order putting a temporary freeze on the hiring of federal civilian employees.

“As part of this freeze, no Federal civilian position that is vacant at noon on January 20, 2025, may be filled, and no new position may be created except as otherwise provided for in this memorandum or other applicable law,” the order said.

However, the order also said that the hiring freeze does not apply to “military personnel of the armed forces or to positions related to immigration enforcement, national security, or public safety.” The White House told us in an email that the freeze did not apply to air traffic control specialists because of the public safety exemption. A spokesperson also said that no air traffic controllers were fired.

On Jan. 30, the New York Times, citing an internal FAA report on safety, reported that staffing at Reagan National Airport’s air traffic control tower was “not normal for the time of day and volume of traffic.” But an Associated Press source later contradicted that FAA report, telling the AP that staffing was normal the night of Jan. 29.

But the Reagan airport tower “has been understaffed for years” and “was nearly a third below targeted staff levels,” as of September 2023, the Times said in its report.

It’s also true that after he took office, Trump removed the heads of the Transportation Security Administration and the Coast Guard and eliminated members of the Aviation Security Advisory Committee — although it’s not clear that those decisions had a direct connection to the Jan. 29 crash, either.

In a story addressing claims that Trump is at fault, PolitiFact quoted Jim Cardoso, a former U.S. Air Force colonel and pilot who directs the University of South Florida’s Global and National Security Institute, as saying that “the actions by President Trump would not have led to such an immediate impact.”

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