Opening summary
Welcome to our coverage of events on Capitol Hill. Republicans narrowly passed a budget blueprint on Tuesday evening, barely scraping together the votes to advance Donald Trump’s tax-cut and immigration agenda.
The House approved the plan in a vote of 217-215, with the representative Thomas Massie, the lone Republican voting in opposition.
No Democrats supported the measure, describing it as a betrayal of middle and low-income voters on behalf of “billionaire donors” like Trump adviser Elon Musk. They warn the budget will result in cuts to Medicaid.
The fiscal year 2025 proposal includes approximately $4.5tn in tax cuts alongside increased spending for defence and border security. To offset these costs, the plan will ask congressional committees to find about $2tn in spending reductions over the next decade.
After Tuesday’s vote, Hakeem Jeffries, the Democratic minority leader, said: “Children will be devastated. Families, devastated. People with disabilities, devastated. Older Americans, devastated. Hospitals, devastated. Nursing homes, devastated,” and he said he would “make sure that every single one of these extreme Maga Republicans is held accountable for betraying the people they represent”.
Johnson told reporters after the vote: “We have a lot of hard work ahead of us, but we are going to deliver the America First agenda.”
In other developments:
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More than 20 staffers of Elon Musk’s so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) stepped down on Tuesday, saying in a joint letter they refused to use their expertise to “dismantle critical public services”.
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Donald Trump has stepped in to defend Elon Musk from a mounting backlash in his own administration after some cabinet members told US federal workers to ignore the billionaire entrepreneur’s demand that they write an email justifying their work. “What he’s doing is saying: ‘Are you actually working?’ Trump said. “And then, if you don’t answer, like, you’re sort of semi-fired or you’re fired, because a lot of people aren’t answering because they don’t even exist.
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It comes as Federal workers faced fresh uncertainty about their futures on Tuesday after Elon Musk gave them “another chance” to respond to his ultimatum that they justify their jobs or risk termination, contradicting guidance from some Trump administration officials that the request was voluntary.
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Cabinet officials will face Musk on Wednesday as the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said that the tech billionaire will join Trump’s first cabinet meeting despite not being a member of the cabinet. He will be “talking about all of Doge’s efforts and how all of the cabinet secretaries are identifying waste, fraud and abuse at their respective agencies.
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Elon Musk’s cost-cutting drive appears to be having less impact than he is claiming. The Associated Press found that almost 40% of the federal contracts scrapped so far will not save the American taxpayer a penny. The Associated Press looked at a list of 1,125 federal government contracts that Musk’s “department of government efficiency” (Doge) boasted it had torn up in the first month of the new Trump administration. The news agency found that of those, 417 were likely to produce no savings to the federal budget.
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Workers at the US Agency for International Development (USAid) have been invited back to its office “to retrieve their personal belongings” as the Trump administration continues its bid to shut down the foreign aid agency.
Key events
Reuters is reporting that defence secretary Pete Hegseth is considering making a visit to South Korea next month, according to the South Korean Yonhap news agency, citing defence sources.
Donald Trump has shared a bizarre AI-generated video of “Trump Gaza” on his Truth Social platform.
The US president posted the clip, which appears to have been published beforehand by accounts unaffiliated with the White House, on Wednesday.
It features Trump and the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, sunbathing in a Dubai-style resort while Elon Musk is showered with bank notes while walking on a beach.
The clip echoes Trump’s recent comment on Gaza when he said: “We have an opportunity to do something that could be phenomenal … the Riviera of the Middle East. This could be so magnificent.”
Trump may rue firing experts when environmental rollbacks land in court
Dharna Noor
Amid spending freezes and policy rollbacks from Donald Trump, environmental advocacy groups are gearing up for a long series of legal showdowns with the administration.
The experience of suing Trump during his first term has left the movement better prepared, but the court battles will still be daunting, with the administration appearing to test the nation’s legal boundaries in an effort to consolidate power under the executive branch.
Trump’s firing of experts might backfire by reducing his ability to defend weakening rules, advocates say, though there are also fears, stirred by Trump and Vice-President JD Vance, that the administration will not obey court rulings.
“The authoritarian statements that the president has made and his vice-president have made, the suggestion that the executive is in some way above the law and that they might ignore the decisions of federal courts, are deeply disturbing and highly antidemocratic,” said Jason Rylander, legal director for the Center for Biological Diversity’s Climate Law Institute.
Read more here:
Donald Trump has said the US is set to sell a “gold card” to wealthy foreigners giving them the right to live and work in the US as well as a route to citizenship in exchange for a $5 million fee, CNN reports.
Trump said from the Oval Office:
We’re going to be selling a gold card. You have a green card. This is a gold card. We’re going to be putting a price on that card of about $5 million and that’s going to give you green card privileges, plus it’s going to be a route to citizenship. And wealthy people will be coming into our country by buying this card.
The president said the sale of the cards will begin in about two weeks.
He suggested millions of them could be sold and when asked if he would sell the cards to Russian oligarchs, Trump responded:
Yeah, possibly. I know some Russian oligarchs that are very nice people.
The card will replace the government’s EB-5 immigrant investor visa programme, commerce secretary Howard Lutnick said, adding prospective recipients would to go through vetting “to make sure they’re wonderful world-class global citizens”.
Russian and US delegations will meet in Istanbul on Thursday to discuss how to restore their respective diplomatic missions, Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov said.
Moscow has had no ambassador in Washington since the previous envoy, Anatoly Antonov, left his post last October, Reuters reports.
US secretary of state Marco Rubio has said high-level teams would work to restoring the countries’ diplomatic missions in Washington and Moscow as part of negotiations towards ending the conflict in Ukraine.
The UK prime minister leaves for Washington today prior to his meeting with Donald Trump on Thursday in what will be Keir Starmer’s biggest diplomatic test to date.
On Tuesday Starmer announced the biggest increase in defence spending since the cold war, with the budget rising to 2.5% of GDP by 2027 – three years earlier than planned – and paid for by slashing the aid budget.
Following the announcement US secretary of defence Peter Hegseth, who said he had spoken to his UK counterpart John Healey, described the increase as “a strong step from an enduring partner”.
Meanwhile, Donald Trump has said that Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy is likely to visit the White House on Friday to sign a rare earth minerals deal to pay for US military aid to defend against Russia’s full-scale invasion.
A initiative by the United States to increase electricity supply in Africa has been dismantled by President Trump’s administration after more than a decade of work, Bloomberg News reported on Wednesday, citing people familiar with the matter.
Almost all of Power Africa’s programmes have been listed for termination and the majority of its staff fired, the report added, according to Reuters.
Opening summary
Welcome to our coverage of events on Capitol Hill. Republicans narrowly passed a budget blueprint on Tuesday evening, barely scraping together the votes to advance Donald Trump’s tax-cut and immigration agenda.
The House approved the plan in a vote of 217-215, with the representative Thomas Massie, the lone Republican voting in opposition.
No Democrats supported the measure, describing it as a betrayal of middle and low-income voters on behalf of “billionaire donors” like Trump adviser Elon Musk. They warn the budget will result in cuts to Medicaid.
The fiscal year 2025 proposal includes approximately $4.5tn in tax cuts alongside increased spending for defence and border security. To offset these costs, the plan will ask congressional committees to find about $2tn in spending reductions over the next decade.
After Tuesday’s vote, Hakeem Jeffries, the Democratic minority leader, said: “Children will be devastated. Families, devastated. People with disabilities, devastated. Older Americans, devastated. Hospitals, devastated. Nursing homes, devastated,” and he said he would “make sure that every single one of these extreme Maga Republicans is held accountable for betraying the people they represent”.
Johnson told reporters after the vote: “We have a lot of hard work ahead of us, but we are going to deliver the America First agenda.”
In other developments:
-
More than 20 staffers of Elon Musk’s so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) stepped down on Tuesday, saying in a joint letter they refused to use their expertise to “dismantle critical public services”.
-
Donald Trump has stepped in to defend Elon Musk from a mounting backlash in his own administration after some cabinet members told US federal workers to ignore the billionaire entrepreneur’s demand that they write an email justifying their work. “What he’s doing is saying: ‘Are you actually working?’ Trump said. “And then, if you don’t answer, like, you’re sort of semi-fired or you’re fired, because a lot of people aren’t answering because they don’t even exist.
-
It comes as Federal workers faced fresh uncertainty about their futures on Tuesday after Elon Musk gave them “another chance” to respond to his ultimatum that they justify their jobs or risk termination, contradicting guidance from some Trump administration officials that the request was voluntary.
-
Cabinet officials will face Musk on Wednesday as the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said that the tech billionaire will join Trump’s first cabinet meeting despite not being a member of the cabinet. He will be “talking about all of Doge’s efforts and how all of the cabinet secretaries are identifying waste, fraud and abuse at their respective agencies.
-
Elon Musk’s cost-cutting drive appears to be having less impact than he is claiming. The Associated Press found that almost 40% of the federal contracts scrapped so far will not save the American taxpayer a penny. The Associated Press looked at a list of 1,125 federal government contracts that Musk’s “department of government efficiency” (Doge) boasted it had torn up in the first month of the new Trump administration. The news agency found that of those, 417 were likely to produce no savings to the federal budget.
-
Workers at the US Agency for International Development (USAid) have been invited back to its office “to retrieve their personal belongings” as the Trump administration continues its bid to shut down the foreign aid agency.
