Category: Washington Post

The Smithsonian Institution announced Monday that it will put its National Museum of the American Latino in a 145-year-old building on the National Mall instead of constructing a new one.

The Smithsonian’s Board of Regents voted Monday to house the American Latino museum, which Congress created in 2020 but which has lacked a permanent home, in the Arts and Industries Building, a 258,000-square-foot redbrick Victorian structure next to the institution’s headquarters.

Jorge Zamanillo, the museum’s director, called the decision “a major milestone in a dream and effort of decades in the making.”

“Designating the Smithsonian’s Arts & Industries Building as the home of the National Museum of the American Latino places the U.S. Latino story at the heart of the National Mall and the American story,” Zamanillo said in a statement. “We could not be more excited to build on the rich legacy of this historic building and transform it into a next generation museum that celebrates the history, culture, and contributions of Latinos in the United States.”

The decision revives a plan the Smithsonian considered but discarded years ago, a major shift for a project whose supporters have spent decades pushing for a new building on the National Mall designed specifically for the museum. It also gives the Smithsonian a path forward that does not depend on Congress approving construction on one of the undeveloped sites the institution previously selected.

The Smithsonian had chosen two sites near the Washington Monument for its two new museums — one across from the National Museum of African American History and Culture and another between the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Tidal Basin. Both are controlled by the National Park Service and sit within the Reserve, an area of the Mall where Congress has restricted new construction.

Because the Smithsonian owns the Arts and Industries Building, the institution can decide how to use it without additional legislation.

That distinction could prove important. Building a Smithsonian museum from scratch can take a decade or longer, even after Congress authorizes it. The National Museum of African American History and Culture took more than a decade to build after its 5-acre site was chosen.

In a statement Monday, the regents noted that Congress directed them to consider the Arts and Industries Building when it authorized the Latino museum in 2020 and said their selection of a site is now complete.

The decision also separates the Latino museum’s path from that of its counterpart, the Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum. The two museums were created together in 2020 and had been pursuing potential sites in lockstep, but legislation needed to move the women’s museum forward ran into a congressional roadblock this spring.

The House rejected that legislation after Republicans added provisions restricting how the museum could present transgender women and giving President Donald Trump greater control over its site. The Smithsonian has said a new building for the women’s museum would still be roughly a decade or more away.

The regents’ decision Monday returns to an idea almost as old as the campaign for the Latino museum itself.

Latino advocates began pressing for a national museum after a Smithsonian-commissioned report in 1994, titled “Willful Neglect,” sharply criticized the institution’s treatment and representation of Latino Americans. The Smithsonian created what became the Smithsonian Latino Center in 1997, but supporters continued pushing for a full-fledged museum.

Then-Rep. Xavier Becerra (D., Calif.) began sponsoring legislation in 2003 to create a commission to study the idea. Congress approved the commission five years later, and in 2011 it recommended creating a Smithsonian museum devoted to Latino history and culture, estimating that the project would cost $600 million. Among the locations under consideration was the Arts and Industries Building.

The building resurfaced as a proposed home in 2016, when Becerra and then-Sen. Bob Menendez (D., N.J.) introduced legislation that would have placed the museum there and added an underground annex. The historic building presented challenges for a modern museum: Its soaring ceilings and skylights were not designed for conventional exhibitions.

Congress finally authorized the museum in December 2020, during the final weeks of Trump’s first term, as part of a massive spending and pandemic-relief package that also created the women’s history museum. Arts and Industries was among four finalist locations for the two museums in 2022, but the regents ultimately chose the two undeveloped sites on the Mall instead.

That same year, the Latino museum opened its first physical exhibition space, the 4,500-square-foot Molina Family Latino Gallery inside the National Museum of American History.

The project has also become entangled in the second Trump administration’s broader campaign to reshape the Smithsonian.

Trump’s proposed 2026 budget sought to eliminate separate funding for the stand-alone museum and instead integrate Latino programming across the Smithsonian. The proposal drew objections from Democrats as well as Republican members of the Congressional Hispanic Conference, who called eliminating the museum’s funding a “disservice to the American public.” A White House official said at the time there was no reason to provide construction funding because Congress had not approved a site.

The museum’s programming has also drawn criticism from conservatives. It’s first exhibition, “¡Presente! A Latino History of the United States,” addressed immigration, LGBTQ rights, and criminal justice reform alongside figures including Celia Cruz and Roberto Clemente. Republican lawmakers criticized the exhibition’s portrayal of Latinos, and a planned follow-up exhibition on Latino youth movements was later scrapped.

Mike Gonzalez, a senior fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation and a longtime critic of the Latino museum, has argued that the problem goes deeper than individual exhibitions. He contends that the museum was conceived to portray Latinos primarily as victims of discrimination rather than as part of a shared American story.

The Smithsonian ”could never win a vote in Congress to house the Latino Museum anywhere else,” Gonzalez wrote Monday on X. He first wrote about the Smithsonian’s change in plans in the Washington Examiner this month.

The building the regents selected Monday carries its own unusually rich Smithsonian history.

Arts and Industries opened in 1881 as the institution’s second building and the first Smithsonian facility designed as a public museum. Over the decades, it served as an incubator for collections that eventually moved into the National Museum of Natural History, the National Museum of American History, and the National Air and Space Museum.

The building closed in 2004 because of structural problems. A renovation that took nearly 12 years and cost $55 million stabilized the structure, although it has been used only intermittently since. The Smithsonian temporarily reopened it in mid-June to celebrate America’s 250th anniversary but plans to close it again at the start of next week.

A Haitian immigrant who had grown increasingly distraught after losing his protection from deportation and being outfitted with an ankle monitor was run over and killed Monday in what his family believes was a suicide.

Pierre Damas Bel, 20, parked on the shoulder of Interstate 70 in Springfield, Ohio, some time before 8:45 a.m., got out of his vehicle and walked into westbound traffic, the Ohio State Highway Patrol said. He was hit by a tractor-trailer and pronounced dead at the scene.

Like an estimated 350,000 Haitian immigrants, Bel had recently lost temporary protected status, which is given to people fleeing nations experiencing disaster. He had a pending asylum claim but had been summoned to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement office after the Supreme Court allowed the Trump administration to proceed with canceling the status for Haitian recipients. Federal immigration agents placed an electronic monitoring device on his ankle, which is one way the agency tracks immigrants it is seeking to remove from the country.

“He felt like he was treated like an animal,” his father, Pierres Ronal Bel, 40, recounted in a handwritten statement.

Ohio authorities said they are investigating the crash.

The Department of Homeland Security declined to comment on the circumstances of Bel’s death while the investigation is ongoing. The Trump administration has been calling Haitian immigrants into ICE offices to be equipped with ankle monitors and has sent two deportation flights to Haiti since temporary protected status was canceled for people from the troubled Caribbean nation. Advocates for the immigrants say the U.S. government is sending people back to a country where criminal gangs are responsible for massacres, kidnappings, and extortion.

Haitian leaders in Springfield and beyond said Bel’s death is symptomatic of the extreme stress many immigrants are under as they fear being detained and sent back.

“These policies are what caused his untimely death,” said Guerline Jozef of the Haitian Bridge Alliance, a nonprofit that provides legal and humanitarian aid to migrants.

Bel came to the U.S. in 2024 to reunite with his parents, who had fled Haiti three years before. ICE said its records show he entered through CBP One, the mobile app the Biden administration established for immigrants to enter the country at a port of entry and request asylum.

The family was granted temporary protected status, purchased a home in Springfield and settled into life in the U.S. Bel dreamed of studying medicine and graduated from high school in May with honors and as a proud member of the Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps (JROTC), his father said. He was the eldest of three siblings, and his family described him as smart and responsible.

The young man’s Instagram account is full of photos of himself smiling in his JROTC uniform and displaying his diploma and various academic awards.

Bel wanted to continue life as a cadet in the program but was distressed by what transpired after temporary protected status was canceled for Haitians. His father said he couldn’t play soccer as he had for years because of the weight of the tracker. Classmates bullied him and made cruel remarks. He begged federal immigration officers to remove the bracelet, his father said, but they refused.

“I came to this country to pursue my education. I didn’t come here to commit a crime or hurt anyone,” he wrote on Instagram in late July. “Yet now I’m walking through the streets of the United States with a GPS monitor on my leg, carrying a feeling of shame and humiliation that I never imagined I would experience.”

Then on Friday, his JROTC class instructor handed students their uniforms, which resemble those of the U.S. armed forces, but did not give one to Bel. His father said the college student concluded it was because of the device strapped around his ankle.

“He came home that day feeling very bad,” Pierres Ronal Bel said through an interpreter.

The younger Bel’s next asylum court hearing was scheduled for October. He did not want to return to his home country because he was afraid of the rampant violence, according to Vilés Dorsainvil, executive director of the Haitian Support Center in Springfield, which is supporting the family.

On Monday morning, he left his family’s home and placed a video call to his father at 8:03 a.m.

“‘I’m not feeling OK,’” Pierres Ronal Bel recalled his son stating. “I told him to come so that we can talk.”

Hours later, he said police officers arrived at his door to report that his son “threw himself under a truck.”

Community leaders consoled Bel’s parents at their home Monday evening. His solemn father gave interviews with reporters, and his mother wailed from an upstairs room. Residents have been banding together to support Haitian neighbors and call for an end to ICE’s enforcement campaign against them.

Carl Ruby, a pastor who leads a Springfield congregation and advocates for Haitian immigrants, said he was struggling to make sense of the younger Bel’s untimely death.

“I know that I’m a pastor and I’m supposed to be forgiving,” he said. “But right now as I sit with a broken family, I’m crying out to God for righteous judgment in those who made this happen.”

If you or someone you know needs help, visit 988lifeline.org or call or text the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline at 988.

ASHEVILLE, N.C. — The appearance of Russia’s finance minister at a G20 meeting, his first in person since Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, sparked protests Monday from European participants.

Anton Siluanov and leaders of the Russian central bank were invited to the meeting of the G20 finance ministers and central bankers by the Trump administration.

Moscow targeted civilian infrastructure in Ukrainian cities with ballistic missiles and drones on Monday for the fifth day in a row. European governments, opposed to Russia’s attempt to redraw the continent’s borders by force, have given Kyiv more than $250 billion in financial and military support since the February 2022 invasion.

“I find the signal sent ​by ​receiving the ⁠Russian finance minister here quite troubling,” German Finance Minister Lars Klingbeil ​told reporters in Asheville. “I ​would ⁠have wanted greater clarity from the American side that he ⁠should ​not be received ​here as a normal guest.”

President Donald Trump defended the invitation Monday.

“We’re going to see what happens, but we like getting along with everybody,” Trump said told reporters in the Oval Office. “One of the reasons that I’m so successful, I get along with everybody.”

Erin Browne, the Treasury undersecretary for international affairs, said the delegation was invited because Russia is a member of the G20.

“It’s important to have dialogue even during times of conflict,” she told the Washington Post. Asked about the Europeans’ concerns, she said: “We’ve had constructive dialogue around the table in the plenary session.”

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said he would reemphasize Trump’s peace plan for Ukraine during his meeting with Siluanov.

Siluanov’s most recent previous appearance at a G20 meeting, by video link in April 2022, prompted several Western finance ministers to walk out in protest.

Russia was expelled from the Group of Eight of most industrialized nations — subsequently, the G7 — after it illegally annexed Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula in 2014, but it remains a member of the G20.

European officials demanded Monday that Siluanov be excluded from the family photo, the traditional group picture of the leaders. It was taken without him.

Siluanov’s appearance comes less than a week after CIA Director John Ratcliffe made a rare unannounced trip to Moscow. He warned Russia against ramping up its war against Ukraine, according to a person familiar with the matter.

A Russian drone attack on a munitions depot in the Bucha district of Ukraine on Friday, three days after Ratcliffe’s visit to Moscow, triggered an explosion that killed 38 people.

“People are dying every ​day,” Klingbeil said. “We have just seen another ​escalation in the attacks. … You cannot simply return to normality.”

Russian drone incursions into neighboring European Union and NATO countries and sabotage attacks have rattled security on the continent. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said Sunday his government was preparing a response to an attempted armed drone attack on Leipzig/Halle Airport this month that analysts and some governments say appears to have been the work of Russia.

Former senior German security officials say the attack appeared to be part of a significant uptick in hybrid warfare by Moscow that has targeted weapons plants and other facilities in Europe supplying Ukraine as it seeks to sap Western support.

Bessent planned to rally his foreign counterparts to focus on economic growth to beat back rising global debt and to encourage countries to sever economic ties with Iran as part of the administration’s Operation Economic Outcast.

In sessions on Monday, participants discussed the global economic landscape, trade imbalances, and opportunities for growth, Browne told reporters. Several noted the risks to the global economy posed by Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz, a major chokepoint for the world’s oil supply, in response to U.S.-Israeli attacks.

“It remains our ultimate objective to ensure that Iran never acquires a nuclear weapon,” she said. “Doing so will reduce long-term economic and market volatility.”

The administration also invited several American CEOs, including Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon and JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon, to the meeting to connect public officials with private sector leaders.

An anonymous federal official warned in a disclosure to Congress that a rushed and insufficiently tested U.S. Postal Service system could prevent large numbers of Americans from receiving mail ballots this fall if courts approve President Donald Trump’s plans for the midterm elections.

The disclosure, made public Tuesday morning by Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D., Conn.), says the Postal Service has adopted an internal “zero-percent failure policy” under which an entire batch of ballots would be rejected if a single barcode sampled by a postal employee could not be scanned or matched with information submitted through a new online portal. A batch could contain tens of thousands of ballots, according to the disclosure.

“The Postal Service has designed a system to disenfranchise millions of Americans,” Blumenthal said in a call with reporters.

Postal officials and the White House did not immediately provide comment.

In public statements, the Postal Service has previously said information submitted through the portal will be updated immediately. It has said postal employees will not determine voter eligibility or check names and addresses for accuracy. The rule does not disclose the sampling formula or zero-failure policy described in the whistleblower disclosure.

The fight over the Postal Service’s plans is rooted in an executive order from Trump that seeks to overhaul mail voting. A judge has blocked those plans for now, but the administration is seeking to reinstate them ahead of this fall’s midterm elections.

If the administration gets its way, state and local election officials would have to upload lists of voters to an online portal the Postal Service is designing. Postal employees would refuse to deliver to anyone who is not on those lists.

The unnamed official alleged that the portal was assembled under constantly changing requirements and with as few as four working days available for customer testing before a planned launch.

If the Postal Service’s plans go into effect, election officials will confront new challenges when they mail ballots in large batches. Postal workers plan to scan barcodes on a sample of envelopes to ensure the voters appear on the state’s list, according to the whistleblower. If they find even one mismatch, they will refuse to accept the entire batch, the whistleblower said. That means a single mismatch in a batch of 10,000 ballots would prevent the 9,999 other ballots from being mailed until discrepancies were resolved.

“As designed, the process is entirely unforgiving,” the disclosure said. “It could delay ballots by the thousands in repeated verification cycles — and thus prevent states from mailing enormous numbers of ballots.”

State and local officials often mail ballots in large batches to manage them as effectively as possible. Some states send ballots to all registered voters, and they must place millions of ballots in the mail in a short period.

Many election officials have expressed alarm about the Postal Service’s overall plans under Trump’s executive order because they don’t believe they have been adequately thought through for a fast-approaching election.

Among the issues they worry about are potential mismatches for mundane reasons. States constantly update their voter rolls, and the lists they send to the Postal Service could be out of date within minutes as new voters register and existing ones update their registrations because they’ve moved.

The Postal Service has said states can update their voter lists, but election officials have expressed concerns that the new online portal won’t be able to handle a steady stream of updates.

The whistleblower disclosure could add to those concerns and bolster legal challenges to the executive order and postal rules.

The disclosure, dated Sunday, was submitted to Blumenthal by Whistleblower Aid on behalf of an anonymous federal official it represents.

The organization described the unnamed whistleblower as a “federal official with direct knowledge of potentially catastrophic problems in the development” of the Postal Service’s plans and said the official feared reprisal by administration officials if identified.

Blumenthal sent the disclosure late Monday to Postmaster General David Steiner and asked him to provide documents about the Postal Service’s plans.

Blumenthal is the ranking Democrat on the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations for the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs.

States and voting rights groups sued over the executive order soon after Trump signed it in March. The Supreme Court last week allowed work on the executive order to proceed for the moment, but days later a lower court blocked it.

The administration is seeking to get it reinstated but faces timing challenges. Officials in North Carolina are preparing to start mailing ballots on Friday under a state law requiring them to send them to those who ask for them starting 60 days before an election. Other states are set to start mailing their ballots in the following days and weeks.

The whistleblower said the Postal Service stopped working on the portal around June 25 after a federal judge blocked implementation of Trump’s directive, then resumed work around July 29 while that order remained in effect.

The disclosure said work continued after the judge issued a new order on Thursday barring the Postal Service for 14 days from taking further preparatory steps that would apply to all states for the November election. In a brief ruling Monday, the judge said the Postal Service could work on the portal for states that want to voluntarily use it.

Postal officials planned to launch the portal on Tuesday, according to the whistleblower. One of the whistleblower’s attorneys, David Kligerman, said work on the portal had continued in recent days but didn’t know whether the Postal Service was sticking with its plan to make it available on Tuesday.

The Trump administration is working to cut global health funding to developing nations by tens of billions of dollars by 2030, according to a new analysis of the secretive agreements U.S. officials have pursued with more than a dozen governments to date.

The planned cuts — targeting programs that combat the spread of HIV/AIDS, Ebola, and tuberculosis, among other deadly diseases — appear to reduce U.S. spending on global health initiatives to less than half of Washington’s output in 2024, the analysis found.

The research was conducted by two nonprofits, Public Citizen and Partners in Health, organizations that have taken a deeply skeptical view of President Donald Trump’s “America First” approach to global health policy.

Their analysis offers the most detailed reading yet of the bilateral health agreements drawn up by the State Department with 34 countries after the Trump administration, upon taking office last year, paused all U.S. foreign assistance and dismantled the U.S. Agency for International Development.

Public scrutiny of the agreements has been limited, as the administration, citing a desire to protect what it says are “sensitive” negotiations, has refused to disclose the text outlining their terms. The State Department said earlier this year that it would release them only after all were signed, though it has not disclosed a timeline for that to happen.

The analysis by Public Citizen and Partners in Health relies on documents that the nonprofits recently obtained from the U.S. government after suing the Trump administration and other previously disclosed material detailing what is contained in many — though not all — of the agreements.

It questions, among other things, how the Trump administration’s plan to reduce global health spending in developing countries over the next several years accounts for billions of dollars in related funds already appropriated by U.S. lawmakers. Since Trump’s return to office, the Republican-led Congress has voted to keep the amount of U.S. global health funding relatively constant despite the administration’s push for greater self-sufficiency among recipient countries.

There’s a “big, yawning gap” between how much money lawmakers have apportioned and how much the United States intends to spend via the deals it is reaching with developing countries, said Vincent Lin of Partners in Health, noting that the administration, according to its own accounting, is far behind on spending money related to HIV/AIDS prevention.

The State Department said in response to questions about the analysis that it does intend to spend the money apportioned by Congress and that more global health money could go to religious aid organizations and what has been dubbed an “innovation fund” to support the use of new U.S. technology in fighting disease. The department did not address the slow pace of HIV/AIDS funding, which Congress approved separately under the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), a long-running global health effort.

A State Department spokesperson, Tommy Pigott, said in a statement that the Trump administration is defining the “next phase of U.S. global health foreign assistance in a way that prioritizes greater efficiency, transparency, country self-reliance, and American innovation.”

In most cases, the agreements specify that countries receiving diminished U.S. health funding must at the same time increase their own spending.

The State Department said that the deals reached so far amounted to $14.5 billion in new U.S. assistance, alongside more than $10.1 billion in “co-investment” from recipient countries.

The analysis by Public Citizen and Partners in Health shows that across 17 countries whose full agreements were reviewed, and an 18th where just the top-line figures have been revealed, the Trump administration is seeking to reduce global health funding by 59% from 2024 levels by 2030.

For decades, global health funding has enjoyed bipartisan support in the U.S., with lawmakers arguing that it is both morally correct and in the self-interest of wealthier nations to combat disease globally.

The Trump administration has sought to reshape this consensus, emphasizing “trade over aid” and criticizing global aid structures, but it has encountered resistance from Congress, which rejected a budget that sought to cut global health spending by $6.2 billion. (Lawmakers later approved a $615 million reduction compared with the previous year.)

The funding reductions pursued by the Trump administration are most pronounced in poorer African nations that have relied on tens of millions of dollars annually in U.S. foreign assistance to support their fight against HIV, the analysis by Public Citizen and Partners in Health shows.

Burundi, for example, among the poorest countries in Africa, will see its U.S. health funding fall to 22% of baseline levels, according to the nonprofits’ analysis. Rwanda sees the sharpest drop among the documents examined, with U.S. funding falling to just 3% of what it received before Trump reentered office, the analysis shows.

While recipient countries are expected to ramp up their own health spending to fill the gap, Public Citizen and Partners in Health have raised doubts about how feasible some of those targets are. They note, too, that the agreements include language detailing penalties for noncompliance, including further cutting U.S. funding.

“Sierra Leone is supposed to make up a 71% U.S. funding drop in less than five years,” said Peter Maybarduk of Public Citizen, referring to another poorer nation being asked to step up its health funding. “It’s going to be very difficult, and if a country like that falls behind, and then is punished for that, then of course the health problems compound.”

The State Department said in response to questions that the differing rates were based on a model that evaluated a range of factors, including the wealth of a country and its vulnerability to diseases, and analyses that looked at “the level of instability and conflict in a country.”

Beyond its planned cuts to bilateral health funding, the Trump administration is behind on spending money appropriated by Congress under PEPFAR, according to tracking by Lin and other analysts. It’s an enormous concern to advocates for disease prevention in developing countries.

PEPFAR funding must be spent within five years, Lin noted, meaning the administration has not breached the law by underspending it. Still, it could lead to a situation in which programs break down before the funds can be spent, he said.

“Right now, it looks like a dramatic underspend by billions of dollars … leading to preventable suffering and death,” said Maybarduk. “If that’s not the case, the burden is on the State Department to tell us how.”