Subterms
The House voted 217 to 215 to approve a budget resolution, a key step toward passing much of President Trump’s legislative agenda. All but one Republican voted “yes.” Tuesday’s vote Total 217 0 217 215 214 1 Did not vote 1 1 0 The resolution, which will also need to pass the Senate to move […] More
The budget plan that Republicans pushed through the Senate early Friday was a necessary first step toward enacting President Trump’s ambitious domestic goals, but it punted the most difficult and divisive questions about how Congress will do so.On a largely party-line vote, 52-48, Senate Republicans won adoption of a blueprint that calls for a $150 billion increase in military spending and $175 billion more for border security over the next decade.How will they pay for it? That’s a question for another day. What about the huge tax cuts they and Mr. Trump have promised? We’ll figure that out later, senators say.Over in the House, Republicans have been agonizing to come up with at least $2 trillion in spending cuts to pay for Mr. Trump’s fiscal agenda and placate their most conservative members. Their plan, which G.O.P. leaders hope to put to a vote as early as next week, loads vast tax cuts and policy changes into one huge package and calls for slashing government programs deeply to finance it all. But it faces a perilous road through the closely divided House, where Republicans hold a razor-thin majority.Republicans in the Senate have essentially delayed any decision on those thorny details, focusing instead on delivering an early win to Mr. Trump in the form of money for his hard-line anti-immigration agenda. They said they would address questions of spending and tax cuts later in a separate bill.“We’ve decided to front-end load security,” said Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, the chairman of the Budget Committee. “We want to make the tax cuts permanent. We’re going to work with our House colleagues to do that. They expire at the end of the year, but we have time to do that. It is the view of the Republican Senate that when it comes to border security, we need not fail. We should have the money now to keep that momentum going.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More
For at least another week, a judge will keep a hold on a directive placing more than 2,000 employees on administrative leave and forcing the return of overseas workers.A federal judge on Thursday moved to extend by one week a temporary restraining order preventing the Trump administration from carrying out plans that would all but dismantle the U.S. Agency for International Development.The order, which Judge Carl Nichols of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia said he would file later Thursday, continues to stall a directive that would put a quarter of its employees on administrative leave while forcing those posted overseas to return to the United States within 30 days.Judge Nichols said he would rule by the end of next week on whether to grant the plaintiffs’ request for a preliminary injunction that would indefinitely block key elements of the high-profile Trump administration effort.The plan was driven in large part by Elon Musk, the billionaire tech entrepreneur tasked with making cuts to the federal budget, to shutter an agency he and Mr. Trump have vilified. The temporary restraining order applies to about 2,700 direct hires of U.S.A.I.D., including hundreds of Foreign Service officers, who would have been put on administrative leave under the directive, which also warned that contractors’ jobs could be terminated.The lawsuit was filed by two unions representing the affected U.S.A.I.D. employees: the American Foreign Service Association, to which aid workers in global missions belong, and the American Federation of Government Employees, which represents other direct hires. They have argued that President Trump’s executive order freezing foreign aid for 90 days and subsequent directives to dismantle certain U.S.A.I.D. operations and reduce staff were unconstitutional, and have asked the court to overturn them.Democratic lawmakers, U.S.A.I.D. workers, and the aid organizations that depend on U.S. foreign assistance have decried any moves to unilaterally shut down the agency as unlawful, as its role in the federal government was established by law and Congress funded it, like the rest of the government, through March 14.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More
Tesla’s name was removed from a State Department document that listed planned vehicle purchases after the existence of the list was reported late Wednesday. The potential award raised questions about why the government was giving a lucrative contract to the company, which is led by Elon Musk, one of President Trump’s most important advisers.A department procurement forecast for 2025 detailed purchases the agency expected to make, including $400 million for armored Tesla vehicles. The document did not specify which Tesla model, but the electric Cybertruck, which has a body of high-strength stainless steel, would be the most suitable.Later on Wednesday, a different version of the procurement document appeared online. It referred to “armored electric vehicles,” omitting any mention of Tesla.Mr. Musk spent more than $250 million to help elect Mr. Trump, who then appointed him as the leader of a cost-cutting initiative that’s been called the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.Plans to spend $400 million on Tesla pickups raised eyebrows given that Mr. Musk has been posting almost hourly on X, the social media site he owns, about wasteful government spending.Tesla and the State Department did not respond to requests for comment. On X, Mr. Musk shared a post from a supporter that said a report on the topic by Rachel Maddow of MSNBC was a “hit piece.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More
For days, Speaker Mike Johnson had called and texted Senator Lindsey Graham, imploring him to wait for the House to take the lead in the legislative drive to enact President Trump’s sweeping tax, budget and immigration agenda.When the three men converged in New Orleans on Sunday in the president’s suite at the Super Bowl, Mr. Graham shut him down in person.“I’m a huge fan, and nothing would please me more than one big, beautiful bill passing the House,” Mr. Graham recounted telling the speaker, a Louisiana Republican. But, he said, the Senate would press ahead with its own bill, adding, “We are living on borrowed time.”Senate Republicans have waited for weeks for their House colleagues to resolve their differences and agree to a budget blueprint that could unlock the party’s push to pass a vast fiscal package with only a simple majority vote. But House Republicans have remained divided over major issues, including how deeply to cut federal programs to pay for the bill, and have blown past several self-imposed deadlines.Enter Mr. Graham, the fast-talking fourth-term Republican senator from South Carolina and the chairman of the Senate Budget Committee.A loyal Trump ally who has long relished the opportunity to be in the middle of the action, Mr. Graham has made it clear in recent days that he has no intention of waiting for the House. Instead, Mr. Graham has advanced a budget plan that his committee is set to take up on Wednesday that would increase spending for the military and border security measures. He has promised that another bill extending the 2017 tax cuts will come later.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More
The confirmation of Russell T. Vought to lead the powerful White House budget office is likely to escalate the funding fights roiling Washington and the nation.Susan Collins was a Senate intern in 1974 when Congress, in response to President Richard M. Nixon’s refusal to spend on projects he opposed, passed a sweeping budget law to bar presidents from overriding lawmakers when it came to doling out dollars.The resulting law, the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act, is “very clear, and it re-emphasizes the power of the purse that Congress has under the Constitution,” Ms. Collins, now a 72-year-old Republican senator from Maine and the chairwoman of the Appropriations Committee, said in an interview this week.She and her fellow appropriators in both parties will have a fight on their hands if they hope to retain supremacy in federal spending. The question of who has the final word is emerging as a central point of contention between members of Congress and the White House, a clash that is likely to escalate after the confirmation on Thursday of Russell T. Vought as the director of President Trump’s Office of Management and Budget.Mr. Vought has flatly declared that he — and Mr. Trump — consider the budget act to be unconstitutional. They contend that the White House can choose what gets money and what doesn’t even if it conflicts with specific directions from Congress through appropriations measures signed into law. Others on Capitol Hill, including some Republicans, vehemently dispute that idea.The disagreement is spurring the uproar over Mr. Trump’s move to suspend trillions of dollars in federal spending while the executive branch reviews it to determine whether it complies with the his newly issued policy dictates, as well as the president’s efforts to gut the United States Agency for International Development.Senators Tim Kaine and Mark Warner, Democrats of Virginia, at a rally in support of U.S.A.I.D. at the Capitol on Wednesday. Haiyun Jiang for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More
The Senate voted along party lines on Thursday to confirm Russell T. Vought to lead the Office of Management and Budget, putting in place one of the most powerful architects of President Trump’s agenda to upend the federal bureaucracy and slash spending that the administration thinks is wasteful.The 53-to-47 vote returns Mr. Vought to the White House budget office that he also led during Mr. Trump’s first term. During his tenure, he took steps to expand the number of federal employees required to work during a government shutdown, froze military aid for Ukraine and railed against spending on foreign aid.Mr. Vought emerged as one of Mr. Trump’s most contentious nominees, drawing intense backlash from Senate Democrats who described him as a lawless ideologue. They used every legislative tool at their disposal to delay his confirmation vote, commandeering the Senate floor on Wednesday night and into Thursday morning to make the case against him.“We’re going to be speaking all night,” Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the minority leader, said as his colleagues prepared to burn through the clock. “We want Americans, every hour, whether it’s 8 p.m. or 3 a.m., to hear how bad Russell Vought is and the danger he poses to them in their daily lives.”After leaving the office, Mr. Vought founded the Center for Renewing America, a conservative think tank, and was an architect of Project 2025. That document was an effort by conservative groups to develop detailed ideas for policies and executive actions that Mr. Trump could pursue to tear down and rebuild executive government institutions in a way that would enhance presidential power.In speeches, Mr. Vought made clear that he relished the opportunity to overhaul the ranks of career federal workers that Mr. Trump views as part of the “deep state.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More
One way Donald Trump may try to differentiate his second term from his first is by slashing the federal work force and budget and consolidating and restructuring a host of government agencies.For people who care about weather and climate, one of the most concerning proposals on the table is to dismantle the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The authors of Project 2025, a blueprint for the administration crafted by conservative organizations, claim erroneously that NOAA is “one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry” and should be “broken down and downsized.” An arm of Mr. Trump’s team, the Department of Government Efficiency, to be led by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, wants to eliminate $500 billion in spending by cutting programs whose funding has expired. That could include NOAA.With the rising costs of and vulnerability to extreme weather in a changing climate for the United States, dismantling or defunding NOAA would be a catastrophic error. Rather, there is a golden opportunity to modernize the agency by expanding its capacity for research and innovation. This would not only help Americans better prepare for and survive extreme weather but also keep NOAA from falling further behind similar agencies in Europe. While the incoming administration may want to take a sledgehammer to the federal government, there is broad, bipartisan support for NOAA in Congress. It is the job of the incoming Republican-controlled Congress to invest in its future.NOAA was established via executive order in 1970 by President Richard Nixon as an agency within the Department of Commerce. Currently its mission is to understand and predict changes in the climate, weather, ocean and coasts. It conducts basic research; provides authoritative services like weather forecasts, climate monitoring and marine resource management; and supports industries like energy, agriculture, fishing, tourism and transportation.The best-known part of NOAA, touching all of our daily lives, is the National Weather Service. This is where daily forecasts and timely warning of severe storms, hurricanes and blizzards come from. Using satellites, balloon launches, ships, aircraft and weather stations, NOAA and its offices around the country provide vital services like clockwork, free of charge — services that cannot be adequately replaced by the private sector in part because they wouldn’t necessarily be profitable.For most of its history, NOAA has largely avoided politicization especially because weather forecasting has been seen as nonpartisan. Members of Congress from both parties are highly engaged in its work. Unfortunately, legislation introduced by Representative Frank Lucas, Republican of Oklahoma — a state with a lot of tornadoes — that would have helped NOAA to update its weather research and forecasting programs passed the House but languished in the Senate and is unlikely to move forward in this session of Congress. However, in 2025 there is another opportunity to improve the agency and its services to taxpayers and businesses.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More
