Closing summary
At this hour, as we wrap our live coverage for the day, Senate Democrats are engaged on a 30-hour effort to hold the floor through the night to oppose Russell Vought, a Project 2025 author, as the director of the Office of Management and Budget. In between long speeches, the senators are appearing on a Pod Save America livestream. The effort comes two days after Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez urged her senate colleagues “to stop playing nice in the Senate and block every damn thing”.
Protesters rallied outside the Capitol earlier today to decry Donald Trump’s move to dismantle USAid, which implements much of Washington’s foreign aid.
Meanwhile, Republican members of Congress and cabinet members spent a large part of their day dodging questions about whether the US really plans to invade, occupy and ethnically cleanse Gaza, as the president said the day before.
We will return on Thursday to chronicle the Trump administration’s first frantic weeks.
Here are some of the day’s developments:
Donald Trump made a show of signing an executive order aimed at preventing transgender women from competing in women’s sports, including, he said, the 2028 Olympic Games in Los Angeles.
On Capitol Hill, Republican House speaker Mike Johnson said he would support dismantling the department of education, while the president of the largest federal employees union warned that Trump has launched “the biggest assault” on the government workforce in its history.
Pam Bondi was sworn in as attorney general, and told Trump, “I will make you proud”.
Trump’s attempt to end birthright citizenship lost for the second time in federal court, with a judge issuing an indefinite nationwide injunction on the president’s executive order.
Emil Bove, a former Trump attorney who is now a top justice department official, attempted to assuage concerns over his request for the names of every FBI agent who worked on January 6 cases.
Before a dozen Republican senators were against USAid, they were for it. “I have been on USAid’s case for years now,” Senator Joni Ernst told Fox News on Tuesday. But a review of two letters sent by Ernst in 2022, and signed by 11 of her current Republican Senate colleagues, shows that her main complaint was that the agency was not distributing funds quickly enough.
The Office of Personnel Management’s chief financial officer resigned after a political appointee asked her if she was “loyal”. The CFO, Erica Roach, managed approximately $1 trillion in assets available for benefits and made monthly payments to almost 3 million people totaling more than $80 billion annually.
Updated
The Office of Personnel Management’s chief financial officer has resigned after she apparently failed to reassure a political appointee who asked her if she was “loyal” and was told that she would be reassigned.
CNN reports:
The CFO, Erica Roach, was asked last week in a meeting with a Trump political appointee if she was someone they could “trust” and if she was “loyal,” according to one of the sources.
The source said Roach responded that she “always” does “the right thing.” Roach was not given a reason for why she was removed from her role but rather offered another position that would have been a demotion, the source said. She chose to resign instead.
The OPM manages the Civil Service Retirement and Disability Fund, which has approximately $1 trillion in net assets available for benefits and makes monthly payments to almost 3 million annuitants and survivors which exceed $80 billion annually.
