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The Environmental Protection Agency on Wednesday said it would "formally reconsider" a landmark 2009 finding by the agency that greenhouse gases are a danger to public health. Specifically, the agency in 2009 found that six greenhouse gases in the earth's atmosphere — carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, hydrofluorocarbons, perfluorocarbons and sulfur hexafluoride — posed a health risk to current and future generations. The EPA also said that motor vehicle emissions endangered public health. (Gibson, 3/12)

The Trump administration last week moved to cut more than $1 billion in programs that helped schools and food banks buy fresh food and meat, leaving farmers and educators across the country worried about wide-ranging impacts. Some local and state leaders said the loss of funding will make it more difficult to feed hungry people in their areas. Farmers and those who work in food security said the cuts could shutter farms and ranches that depended on those federal dollars. (Brasch, Somasundaram and Blaskey, 3/13)

Massive layoffs initiated this week at the Education Department could hamstring the federal government’s efforts to assist students with disabilities, former officials and education experts said, citing blows to the agency’s civil rights and research divisions. The Office for Civil Rights lost at least 243 union-eligible staff members, according to the American Federation of Government Employees, and an unknown number of supervisors. The office historically had around 600 attorneys handling complaints alleging discrimination based on race, gender, disability and sexual orientation, and most already had caseloads of 50 or more. (Kingkade and Edelman, 3/12)

The Social Security Administration late Wednesday abandoned plans it was considering to end phone service for millions of Americans filing retirement and disability claims after The Washington Post reported that Elon Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service team was weighing the change to root out alleged fraud. The shift would have directed elderly and disabled people to rely on the internet and in-person field offices to process their claims, curtailing a service that 73 million Americans have relied on for decades to access earned government benefits. (Natanson, Rein, Dwoskin and Siddiqui, 3/12)

Cuts to foreign aid and humanitarian assistance by donors across the board, but especially by the United States, have been “a seismic shock,” the United Nations’ chief humanitarian official said Wednesday. “Many will die because that aid is drying up.” As the United Nations and other aid agencies try to regroup and find new efficiencies, the goal is to help at least 100 million priority cases out of an estimate of about 300 million people in desperate need of humanitarian aid this year, said Tom Fletcher, the U.N. undersecretary of humanitarian affairs and emergency relief coordinator. (DeYoung, 3/13)

One was the person behind the welcome desk at a Massachusetts Veterans Affairs outreach center, the first face struggling veterans saw when they came for help. Another was the Energy Department employee responsible for knowing the thousand-page permit required for the disposal of hazardous waste. Another, the U.S. Forest Service employee responsible for hiring local teenagers each summer to keep national park trails clean. Doctors and scientific researchers. Data analysts looking for spending efficiencies at the Education Department. Building managers responsible for finding the best air filters for a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention campus in Georgia. All these people, along with tens of thousands of other federal workers, lost their jobs in recent weeks as the Trump administration has rapidly shrunk the federal workforce in the name of cutting “fraud, waste and abuse.” (Swenson, Roubein and Ajasa, 3/12)

A family that was deported to Mexico hopes they can find a way to return to the U.S. and ensure their 10-year-old daughter, who is a U.S. citizen, can continue her brain cancer treatment. Immigration authorities removed the girl and four of her American siblings from Texas on Feb. 4, when they deported their undocumented parents. (Acevedo, 3/12)

Senate Democrats said on Wednesday that they would refuse to back a Republican-written stopgap bill to fund the government through Sept. 30, significantly raising the chances of a government shutdown at the end of the week. The announcement left congressional leaders without a clear path to avert a shutdown that would begin at 12:01 a.m. on Saturday should Congress fail to act by then to extend federal funding. Senate Republicans would need the support of at least eight Democrats to overcome procedural hurdles and bring a spending measure to a final vote. Just one, Senator John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, has so far declared he would vote to break any filibuster. (Hulse, 3/12)