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(WASHINGTON) — Congressional Republicans on Friday were nearly unanimous in their praise of President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance after they and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy had a fiery exchange before live cameras in the Oval Office.

Speaking to reporters in the White House driveway right afterward, South Carolina Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham predicted that the shouting match could end U.S. support for Zelenskyy, calling the meeting a “complete, utter disaster.”

“Somebody asked me, am I embarrassed about Trump. I have never been more proud of the president. I was very proud of JD Vance standing up for our country. We want to be helpful. What I saw in the Oval Office was disrespectful, and I don’t know if we can ever do business with Zelenskyy again,” Graham, the Senate Budget Committee Chairman, said. “The way he handled the meeting, the way he confronted the president, was just over the top.”

He suggested Zelenskyy might need to consider resigning.

“He either needs to resign and send somebody over that we can do business with, or he needs to change,” Graham said.

“Thanks to President Trump – the days of America being taken advantage of and disrespected are OVER,” Speaker Mike Johnson posted on X.

“Zelenskyy could have left the White House today with a peace deal for his country, ending this conflict. Instead, he chose to disrespect our President and nation,” Rep. Diane Harshbarger, R-Tenn., posted on X. “Thank you, President Trump and Vice President Vance, for standing up for our country!”

Rep. Victoria Spartz, an Indiana Republican who is Ukrainian-born, said Zelenskyy is doing the Ukrainian people a “serious disservice” by insulting the American president.

“This is not a theater act but a real war!” she posted on X. “Zelensky is doing a serious disservice to the Ukrainian people insulting the American President and the American people – just to appease Europeans and increase his low polling in Ukraine after he failed miserably to defend his country.”

“No funding to Ukraine. This gross disrespect will not stand,” GOP Rep. Anna Paulina Luna of Florida posted on X. “Time for everyone in Congress to drop their Ukraine pins.”

“America First in action,” freshman Texas Republican Brandon Gill posted on X. “Thank you, @realDonaldTrump and @JDVance for prioritizing our people first and for promoting peace!”

Democrats, on the other hand, were dismayed by the jarring, if not unprecedented, diplomatic performance.

“Trump and Vance are doing Putin’s dirty work,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said. “Senate Democrats will never stop fighting for freedom and democracy.”

“A hero and a coward are meeting in the Oval Office today. And when the meeting is over, the hero will return home to Ukraine,” Sen. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., posted on X.

“What we saw in the Oval Office today was beyond disgraceful,” Rep. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., posted on X. “Trump and Vance berating Zelenskyy — putting on a show of lies and misinformation that would make Putin blush — is an embarrassment for America and a betrayal of our allies.They’re popping champagne in the Kremlin.”

Sen. Chris Coons, a Delaware Democrat, said, “Every time I’ve met with President Zelenskyy, he’s thanked the American people for our strong support. We owe him our thanks for leading a nation fighting on the front lines of democracy – not the public berating he received at the White House.”

Sen. Tina Smith of Minnesota said, “That press conference was choreographed for an audience of one and he sits in Moscow. Once, we fought tyrants. Today Trump and Vance are bending America’s knee. And that weakens us.”

“President Trump and his administration continue to embarrass America on the world stage,” House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries said in a statement. “Today’s White House meeting with the President of Ukraine was appalling and will only serve to further embolden Vladimir Putin, a brutal dictator.”

One moderate House Republican, Rep. Don Bacon of Nebraska, a major Ukraine ally on Capitol Hill, joined Democrats in defending Ukraine — though he stopped short of criticizing the president or vice president.

“Some want to whitewash the truth, but we cannot ignore the truth. Russia is at fault for this war,” Bacon posted on X.

Later, in an updated statement, he said, “A bad day for America’s foreign policy. Ukraine wants independence, free markets and rule of law. It wants to be part of the West. Russia hates us and our Western values. We should be clear that we stand for freedom.”

Democratic Rep. Mike Quigley, co-chair of the Congressional Ukraine Caucus and member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, said Trump “chose the side of dictators.”

“What just happened in the Oval Office was one of the most embarrassing moments in American history,” Quigley, from Illinois, exclaimed. “The world order that was established after the Second World War is dead.”

Pennsylvania Republican Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick said, “It was heartbreaking to witness the turn of events that transpired in today’s meeting regarding Ukraine’s future. It is time to put understandable emotions aside and come back to the negotiation table. This can and will be fixed. A strong, sovereign Ukraine is essential for global stability in the face of Putin’s ongoing aggression.”

ABC News’ Oren Oppenheim contributed to this report.

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(WASHINGTON) — Transgender service members are fighting back against the Pentagon’s recent announcement requiring the separation of transgender people from the military.

Lt. Cmdr. Geirid Morgan has served in the Navy for 14 years as part of the medical service corps. She told ABC News that as an openly transgender woman, seeing the ban in “black and white” was “jarring.”

“I just want everyone to know that [transgender military members] have been serving honorably and effectively for a decade now,” Morgan said. “We serve in almost every job role you can imagine in the military. We have doctors, lawyers, fighter pilots, special operations personnel.

“This is a calling, this is a this is a life of sacrifice, a life of service. This isn’t just a job, this isn’t just a career,” Morgan added. “We’re all over the place. We’re doing the jobs. We’re doing it effectively, and that’s it.”

Morgan is part of a lawsuit filed earlier this month by the Human Rights Campaign and Lambda Legal against President Donald Trump following his executive order banning transgender service members from the military.

On Wednesday night, the Pentagon’s new transgender policy, as approved by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, was disclosed in a memo filed as an exhibit file by the Defense Department in another court case challenging Trump’s order.

The memo requires the Pentagon to form a procedure to identify transgender troops by March 26 and separate them from the military by June 25, unless they receive an exemption. This would include service members receiving some form of treatment or hormones for that diagnosis of gender dysphoria, as well as those who have gone through a gender-affirming surgery.

“I’m going to put my uniform on every day, go to work, do my job with the best of my abilities for as long as I’m able to,” Morgan added.

Sasha Buchert, an attorney for Lambda Legal who served in the military while openly transgender, told ABC News that the recent Pentagon memorandum does not come as a surprise.

“This is exactly what we anticipated, and it’s exactly how we framed up our complaint and our motion for preliminary injunction,” Buchert said on Thursday. “The executive order, frankly, is dripping with animus, and we expected nothing less than exactly what we got today. So there is absolutely no surprises, and it’s absolutely shameful.”

When asked what else could be expected of the Trump administration regarding transgender service members, Buchert said there is “no bottom” to how extreme the administration may take things.

“Of all of the national security priorities that we have and all of the domestic priorities we have as a country, they’ve chosen transgender people as a top priority of things to work on,” Buchert said. “I think it’s shameful and disgraceful and has caused great harm to both transgender military service members and their families, but also to the military at large.”

“This is just plain wrong,” Buchert added. “This is the opposite of a meritocracy.”

The lawsuit, Shilling v. Trump, claims the ban on transgender service members is unconstitutional and violates fairness principles. Plaintiffs include transgender service members from a range of military branches affected by the Trump administration.

Buchert added that removing thousands of transgender service members will negatively affect the military financially given the U.S. military investment in each troop’s training and development. A 2020 Palm Center study found the removal of these troops would cost nearly $1 billion.

There are currently 4,240 active-duty, National Guard and Reserve service members who have been diagnosed with gender dysphoria, a defense official previously told ABC News.

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(WASHINGTON) — After a month of fits and starts, a final hammer came down on the U.S. Agency for International Development on Wednesday night when the State Department, which had previously said it was going to review all foreign aid, announced that review was over and it had decided to terminate nearly 10,000 government contracts worth about $60 billion in humanitarian work abroad.

The cancellations left aid organizations reeling Thursday.

Many, for weeks, had been advocating behind closed doors for their projects to continue and applying for waivers in order to deliver immediate, lifesaving aid while the review process was underway. Several organizations on Thursday decided to start to speak out as they face a future with almost all U.S. foreign aid cut off.

“Any type of communicable disease, I think we will see rage rampant. I think we will see increased conflict in the world. I think we will see increased terrorism in the world. And so, I think, the implications are going to be really dire in terms of the instability that this creates in already very unstable regions of the world,” said Jocelyn Wyatt, CEO of Alight, an international organization that provides food, medicine and services for refugees in 20 countries around the world.

Like all international aid organizations, four days after President Donald Trump’s inauguration, Alight was told to suspend all programming funded through U.S. grants and contracts.

Wyatt described scrambling to keep her organization’s health care clinics afloat. They had to shutter programs in Uganda and Myanmar but were able to secure waivers from the State Department for lifesaving humanitarian aid to keep their operations going in Somalia, Sudan and South Sudan.

But as of Thursday, all of Alight’s U.S. contracts have been canceled going forward, even contracts related to those programs that had received waivers to continue in the last few weeks.

Now, Wyatt said Alight is closing 33 health care clinics in Sudan, many in areas where they were the only health care provider, as well as water and sanitization services in three refugees camps in the country and another 13 clinics in Somalia.

According to Wyatt, their clinics see 1,200 people a day in Somalia alone, including about 700 malnourished children a day at designated feeding centers where the children get weighed and provided with supplemental food.

“We are unable to provide any services to those severely malnourished children, and so it’s really a matter of days or weeks before many of them will die,” she told ABC News during an interview Thursday. “The toll, the human lives that will be lost, is unfathomable.”

Thursday appeared to be a watershed moment for humanitarian leaders who, so far, had been reticent to speak put publicly out of concern that their organizations could face backlash or see grants and contracts suffer.

David Miliband, president and CEO of the International Rescue Committee, called the termination of contracts “a devastating blow.”

“These are people who depend on the U.S.-funded services for the basics of survival. These programs are not just numbers on a spreadsheet; they represent real lives and real futures,” he wrote in a statement, calling on the U.S. government to reconsider. “The countries affected by these cuts — including Sudan, Yemen, Syria — are home to millions of innocent civilians who are victims of war and disaster. We now face the starkest of stark choices about which services can be protected, and are calling on the American public, corporations and philanthropists to show that America’s generosity of spirit and commitment to the most vulnerable has not been lost.”

“We are no longer the shining city on a hill,” one humanitarian leader, who requested to speak anonymously out of fear of retribution for his organization, said to ABC News in an interview Thursday.

“It seems cruelty is the point. This is not about putting America first. This will kill people around the world,” the leader added.

While aid organizations expected a review of their work with the new administration, the scope and scale of the cuts have been shocking and will mean many aid organizations will be forced to dramatically cut their work or shutdown all together.

The termination notices were included in a court filing late Wednesday as leading aid organizations sued the federal government over nearly $2 billion in past payments they say they are owed for work already completed during the first part of this year.

The filing stated that almost 5,800 USAID awards for future work, and approximately 4,100 distributed through the State Department, will be terminated, while around 500 USAID awards and roughly 2,700 State Department awards will be retained.

Alight typically relies on U.S. foreign aid dollars for about 30% of their revenue and they have already had to lay off hundreds of staff members as they also wait for payments due from the U.S. federal government for work previously done.

Still, Wyatt said her organization will survive and worries about others that will not as well as the impact it will have on the people they serve.

Despite the turmoil of the last few weeks, she was reticent to speak publicly out of a concern that her organization and the clients they serve, could be impacted and retaliated against.

She said she understands the new administration’s push to evaluate taxpayer spending and foreign aid and that she was prepared to undergo an evaluation of their organization and make sure it aligned with Trump’s American First foreign policy.

But now that all of her contracts have been cancelled, Wyatt hopes to raise awareness and apply public pressure.

International Medical Corps, one of the largest first responder and disaster relief organizations in the world, wrote in a statement that they received cancellation notices for “the majority of our U.S. government-funded programs” late Wednesday night.

“As a result, we are in the process of closing affected programs. Though we receive funding from a variety of sources, this loss of funding will significantly impact our lifesaving global operations. To navigate this challenge, we will need to implement substantial changes across the organization in the coming days and weeks,” the statement read.

The IMC, which works in over 30 countries and last year alone said they provided direct health care services to over 16.5 million people, had received about half of its funding from the U.S. It is also currently runs two of the only field hospitals still operational in Gaza.

Global Refuge, formerly Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, wrote in a statement Thursday that the contract terminations did not amount to a “simple review of federal resources,” but instead, “seeks to end America’s longstanding religious tradition of helping the least among us.”

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(WASHINGTON) — President Donald Trump is expected to sign a historic executive order designating English as the United States’ official language, a White House official confirmed to ABC News.

The order marks the first time the country has ever had a national language.

The executive order rescinds a Clinton-era mandate that required agencies and recipients of federal funding to provide extensive language assistance to non-English speakers. Under the new order, agencies will have the flexibility to decide how and when to offer services in languages other than English.

It’s not yet clear when Trump is expected to sign the executive order.

The move comes amid Trump’s crusade to curb government support for programs promoting diversity, equity and inclusion. On his first day in office, the president signed an order directing federal agencies to terminate all “equity-related” grants or contracts and later signed a follow-up order requiring federal contractors to certify that they don’t promote DEI.

The White House is defending the action, saying that while hundreds of languages are spoken across the United States, English is the most widely used. Also, the White House maintains that establishing a national language unifies the country and its citizens.

“Establishing English as the official language promotes unity, establishes efficiency in government operations, and creates a pathway for civic engagement,” the White House wrote in a memo provided to ABC News.

This is a developing story. Please check back for updates

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