The House is expected to approve President Donald Trump’s request to claw back about $9 billion in already appropriated funding for public broadcasting and foreign aid Thursday evening.
The White House had described the rescissions package as a test case and said that if Congress went along, more would come. The House’s approval would mark the first time in decades that a president has successfully submitted a rescissions request to Congress.
Opponents voiced concerns not only about the programs targeted, but about Congress ceding its spending powers to the executive branch as investments approved on a bipartisan basis are being subsequently cancelled on a party-line basis. No Democrats supported the measure when it passed the Senate in the early morning hours Thursday, 51-48, and two Republicans also voted no.
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Columbia University and White House are negotiating
University officials met with administration officials to discuss ways to restore federal funding that has been withheld from the school. That’s according to a person familiar with the meeting who requested anonymity to disclose a private conversation.
Columbia is one of the universities that has been targeted by Trump.
More sanctions against Tren de Aragua leaders
New measures announced by the Treasury and State departments on Thursday designate the gang’s chief, Hector Rusthenford Guerrero, and five other top leaders as members of a transnational criminal organization, blocking their property and assets.
A reward of $5 million for information leading to Guerrero’s arrest or conviction was offered more than a year ago. Tren de Aragua has already been designated a “foreign terrorist organization” by the State Department for its involvement in the illicit drug trade, extortion, money laundering, human smuggling and trafficking, and the sexual exploitation of women and children.
Some alleged gang members who had been imprisoned in the U.S. have been deported to a high-security prison in El Salvador.
Former Fox News host advanced as top federal prosecutor in DC
The Senate Judiciary Committee has advanced former Fox News host Jeanine Pirro to be the top federal prosecutor for the nation’s capital.
The committee’s Republican members voted unanimously Thursday to send Pirro’s nomination to the Senate floor after Democrats walked out to protest Emil Bove’s nomination to become a federal appeals court judge.
Pirro has served as acting U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia since May. Trump withdrew his first pick, Ed Martin Jr., after a key Republican senator said he could not support him, given Martin’s outspoken support for rioters who stormed the U.S. Capitol.
Before she replaced Martin, Pirro cohosted the Fox News show “The Five” on weekday evenings. She was elected as a judge in New York’s Westchester County Court in 1990 before serving three terms as the county’s elected district attorney.
A previous Border Patrol hiring spree offers lessons as ICE expands
As Immigration and Customs Enforcement prepares to add 10,000 employees in five years to enable Trump’s mass deportations, the Border Patrol’s torrid expansion in the early 2000s serves as a cautionary tale. Hiring and training standards were loosened, arrests for employee misconduct rose and attrition spiked.
“If they don’t uphold pretty rigorous standards and background checks, you can end up hiring the wrong people, and then you pay a huge price in how the public perceives them,” said Gil Kerlikowske, who ran Customs and Border Protection from 2014 to 2017.
ICE is set to get $76.5 billion, nearly 10 times its annual budget, under the bill Trump signed. “The unprecedented funding for ICE will enable my hard-working officers and agents to continue making America safe again by identifying, arresting and removing criminal aliens from our communities,” acting ICE director Todd Lyons said.
▶ Read more about what happened the last time ICE tried rapid expansion
More than a million US children could be displaced. HUD secretary says helping them is wasteful
Amid a worsening national affordable housing and homelessness crisis, Trump’s administration is determined to reshape HUD’s expansive role providing stable housing for low-income people, which has been at the heart of its mission for generations.
At a June congressional budget hearing, HUD Secretary Scott Turner argued that imposing a two-year limit on rental assistance will fix waste and fraud in public housing and Section 8 voucher programs.
“It’s broken and deviated from its original purpose, which is to temporarily help Americans in need,” Turner said. “HUD assistance is not supposed to be permanent.”
▶ Read more from the AP’s examination of proposed limits on rental assistance
Trump’s proposed HUD time limit could evict 1.4 million of nation’s poorest renters
More than 1 million low-income households — most of them working families with children — who depend on the nation’s public housing and Section 8 voucher programs could lose government-subsidized homes under the Trump administration’s proposal to impose a two-year time limit on rental assistance.
New research from New York University obtained exclusively by The Associated Press the limit could affect as many as 1.4 million households helped by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
The NYU report published Thursday predicts “enormous disruption and large administrative costs,” for public housing authorities that “would have to evict all of these households and identify new households to replace them.”
Democrats walk out as Republicans advance judicial nomination of Emil Bove
The uproar started when Republican Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley moved to vote on the nomination of Bove, a top Justice Department official, to the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
Democratic Sen. Cory Booker expressed frustration that not all voices had been heard yet, prompting the rest of the Democrats on the committee to walk out before Republicans advanced his nomination to the floor.
Bove, who along with Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche served as a criminal defense lawyer for Trump, has been behind some of the most scrutinized Justice Department actions since Trump returned to office, including the dismissal of New York City Mayor Eric Adams’ corruption case.
A former Justice Department lawyer accused Bove of suggesting the department might have to defy court orders. Bove denied that claim.
Blanche wrote in a piece published by Fox News Wednesday that Bove’s “legal acumen is extraordinary, and his moral clarity is above reproach.”
‘Hamilton’ 10th anniversary is a fundraiser for immigration services
Lin-Manuel Miranda plans to use the 10th anniversary Broadway performance of “Hamilton” to raise about $3 million for the Immigrants: We Get the Job Done Coalition, a group of 14 nonprofits including the National Immigration Law Center.
Miranda told The Associated Press that he remains surprised by the joyous audience reaction to the “Immigrants: We get the job done” line that’s shared in the show by Hamilton and French military officer Marquis de Lafayette. “It’s one of the things that just heartens me and gives me hope. In these dark times, it still gets a big cheer,” Miranda said.
“It’s the same reason why that No Kings protest vastly outnumbered the military parade happening on the same day: There are still a lot of people who believe in basic decency and treating people who come here — often from really tough situations — with humanity.”
OMB chief applauds rescissions package, says another will come ‘soon’
Russ Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, says the imminent passage of a new package of spending cuts shows “enthusiasm” for getting the nation’s fiscal situation under control.
“We’re happy to go to great lengths to get this thing done,” Vought said during a Thursday breakfast with reporters hosted by the Christian Science Monitor.
In response to questions about the relatively small size of the cuts — $9 billion — Vought said it’s because “I knew it would be hard” to pass in Congress, and that more are coming.
Another rescissions package is “likely to come soon,” Vought said. “But we’re not there yet.”
House tees up vote to claw back foreign aid, public broadcasting funds
The House is expected to take up Trump’s request to claw back about $9 billion for foreign aid and public broadcasting on Thursday evening.
“We can’t be spending taxpayer funds overseas, engaging in all sorts of nefarious activities. That’s what this rescissions package is about, to stop that,” Speaker Mike Johnson said. “We need to get back to fiscal sanity and this is an important step.”
The Senate approved the package in the early morning hours Thursday. If the House does the same, the bill would go to Trump’s desk for his signature. Supporters of the foreign aid spending say it’s miniscule for the amount of good it does in saving lives and enhancing the standing of the United States around the world.
Fired State Department employees say Americans aren’t being told the truth
They spoke with The Associated Press on condition of anonymity, fearing reprisals as they remain on the payroll until September.
“The American people aren’t getting all of the facts about what the department has done,” said one officer working in intelligence. This person said their team’s work had been transferred to office that lacks capacity to handle the sensitive material.
Others were tasked with maintaining U.S. energy dominance, “a centerpiece of our foreign policy,” Rubio said at his confirmation hearing. “The fact that they got rid of all the energy experts who would promote oil and gas sales overseas clearly undermines everything that they’re saying,” the official said.
The list also includes intelligence analysts who specialize in Russia and Ukraine, and experts with deep institutional and cultural knowledge of China, leaving the U.S. exposed to a country Rubio labeled “the most significant long-term risk to the United States.”
Trump’s State Department says it needs to be nimble
The dismissals are a major concern for staffers being tasked with additional duties to make up for losses in key areas like intelligence and research, consular affairs, diplomatic security, energy, and international and educational organizations. Deeply skeptical Democratic lawmakers predict a devastating impact on U.S. diplomacy.
But Michael Rigas, the State Department official who sent employees the layoff notices, tried Wednesday to allay such concerns, denying that the cuts were made in a haphazard and irresponsible manner to the detriment of national security.
Rigas told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Wednesday that the department had grown to more than 76,000 employees worldwide and a massive reorganization was needed to keep it relevant and nimble to respond to foreign crises and policy challenges.
The department “became large and began to lose its way,” becoming “ineffectual bureaucratically,” spokesperson Tammy Bruce told reporters Wednesday.
Where the State Department cuts are hitting
According to a list that current and former foreign service officers compiled and sent to Congress, the layoffs include:
1. more than 100 people whose work in the Bureau of Consular Affairs is self-funded from passport and visa fees. They investigated passport fraud and people who oversaw contracts to provide American citizen services including processing passport applications,
2. experts responsible for dealing with visa fraud and money laundering in Russia and Eastern Europe, transnational criminal organizations and migrant worker visa fraud in Mexico and Central America.
3. A small team in the Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs that supported the Secretary of State’s trip to Malaysia last week and were fired as Marco Rubio was flying back to Washington.
“There’s no one left to do what we were doing,” said a laid-off employee with more than 30 years of experience.
State Department layoffs complicate key Trump priorities
U.S. experts who coordinated intelligence activities, promoted U.S. energy interests abroad and shaped America’s strategy for competing with China are among the more than 1,300 State Department employees whose firings eliminated hundreds of years of institutional knowledge and experience.
The move has America’s diplomatic workforce wondering who — if anyone — will do critical work to keep the U.S. safe and competitive on the world stage.
Many of the offices “abolished” Friday under Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s dramatic reorganization plan worked on Trump’s priorities such as combating visa fraud and countering China. Other cuts could delay the processing of of passport applications. Trump officials said the mass dismissals are overdue and necessary to make the department leaner and more efficient.
Wall Street steady again after Trump downplays threat to Fed Chair Jerome Powell’s job
Markets, as well as the dollar, took a quick dive Wednesday on reports that Trump was talking about terminating Powell, but calm was restored after Trump walked back his threats. Futures for the S&P 500, Dow Jones Industrial Average and Nasdaq were essentially flat in early trading Thursday.
Trump has harshly criticized Powell and his Fed colleagues for the decision to stand pat on interest rates at a time when the economy is broadly healthy and unemployment is low. Now Trump said the central bank chief could be fired over cost overruns on a $2.5 billion renovation project at the Fed’s headquarters.
Wall Street loves lower rates because they goose prices higher for stocks and other investments, but Powell has insisted on waiting to see how Trump’s tariffs affect the economy and inflation.
▶ Read more about today’s financial markets
Trump administration says civil rights groups are doing the discriminating
The administration has said many policies implemented by both Democratic and Republican administrations are discriminatory and unconstitutional, arguing that acknowledgments of race and federal and corporate policies that seek to address disparities between different demographics are themselves discriminatory. Trump has signed executive orders banning “illegal discrimination” and promoting “merit based opportunity.”
In response to the Urban League’s report, White House spokesman Harrison Fields said civil rights groups that oppose the administration “aren’t advancing anything but hate and division, while the president is focused on uniting our country.”
Urban League declares a ‘state of emergency’ for civil rights
One of the nation’s oldest civil rights organizations is calling for a “new resistance” to the administration’s agenda.
The National Urban League’s annual State of Black America report accuses the federal government of being “increasingly determined to sacrifice its founding principles,” according to a copy obtained by The Associated Press.
“For a long time, people saw white supremacist politics and white nationalism as on the fringe of American politics. It has now become the mainstream of the American right, whose central foundation is within the Republican Party,” said Marc Morial, president of the Urban League.
The report directly critiques Project 2025, condemns major corporations, universities and top law firms for reversing diversity, equity and inclusion policies and accuses social media companies of censoring Black voices while enabling “extremists” to spread “radicalizing” views.
▶ Read more about the State of Black America report
Nationwide protests planned against Trump’s immigration crackdown and health care cuts
Protests against the Trump administration’s mass deportations and cuts to the nation’s health and safety nets for poor people are planned Thursday at more than 1,600 locations around the country.
The “Good Trouble Lives On” national day of action honors the late congressman and civil rights leader John Lewis. Organizers are calling for the demonstrations to be peaceful, as Lewis would have wanted.
“We are navigating one of the most terrifying moments in our nation’s history,” Public Citizen co-president Lisa Gilbert said during an online news conference. “We are all grappling with a rise of authoritarianism and lawlessness within our administration ... the rights, freedoms and expectations of our very democracy are being challenged.”
Republican senators caution Trump against firing Fed chair Jerome Powell
Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell is gaining some key backing on Capitol Hill from GOP senators who fear the repercussions if Trump follows through with threats to try and remove the politically independent central banker.
As Trump seemingly waffled back and forth this week on trying to dismiss the Fed chair, some Republicans in Congress began to speak up and warn that such a move would be a mistake. Trump would potentially obliterate the Fed’s independence from political influence and inject uncertainty into the foundations of the U.S. economy if he fires Powell.
“If anybody thinks it would be a good idea for the Fed to become another agency in the government subject to the president, they’re making a huge mistake,” GOP North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis said in a floor speech.
The measure of support from GOP members of the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs showed how traditional Republicans are carefully navigating a presidency in which Trump often flirts with ideas — like steep tariffs or firing the Fed chair — that threaten to undermine confidence in the U.S. economy.
The Associated Press
