Closing summary
Our live coverage is ending now. In the meantime, you can find all of our live US politics coverage here. Here is a summary of the key developments from today:
A Trump-forward budget proposal imperiling Medicaid narrowly passed in the Republican-led House. The budget plan includes an estimated $800bn in potential cuts from Medicaid, a federal program providing healthcare coverage to more than 72 million Americans. The resolution also includes a $4.5tn in tax cuts and increased funding for defense and border security, offset by $2tn in spending reductions over the next decade.
Nearly 6,000 veterans have been fired across the federal government since the start of Donald Trump’s term, according to a new analysis by House Democrats. The report, compiled from data provided by the office of personnel management, estimates that roughly 38,000 federal workers have been fired since Trump took office last month and empowered Elon Musk’s ‘efficiency’ agency to dramatically reduce the federal workforce.
Trump has said that 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. The announcement followed days of tense negotiations between the US and Ukraine in which Zelenskyy alleged the US was pressuring him to sign a deal worth more than $500bn that would force “ten generations” of Ukrainians to pay it back.
Trump reinstated a rule requiring cost transparency in healthcare. The rule requires hospitals to publish online the prices for some of their most common services, including MRI scans and caesarean section deliveries. The lack of transparency has often left patients shocked by medical bills.
Trump signed an executive order instructing the commerce secretary to launch an investigation into whether foreign copper production and imports threaten US economic and national security. According to White House officials, the investigation could lead to new tariffs on foreign copper, a material essential to manufacturing and construction, as well as critical to the US military and emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence.
‘More than one million’ federal workers have responded to Elon Musk/Doge’s ultimatum email, the White House has claimed. Trump’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, also said agency heads will “determine the best practices” for dealing with the ‘what did you do last week’ email in terms of whether people should respond and who, if anyone, would get fired. NBC News reported that responses to the email will reportedly be fed into an artificial intelligence system to determine whether their jobs are necessary.
In a significant shift of journalistic power, the White House press team will now decide which journalists and media outlets will make up the White House press pool. Leavitt said legacy outlets will still be allowed to join and participate in the press pool, but the “privilege” will also be extended to “new voices” from “well-deserving outlets”. It builds on the decision to revoke the Associated Press’s full access to presidential events over its continued use of “Gulf of Mexico” as opposed to “Gulf of America”.
Some 40% of the federal contracts the Trump administration claims to have canceled as part of its signature cost-cutting program aren’t expected to save the government any money, the administration’s own data shows. Doge last week published an initial list of 1,125 contracts that it terminated in recent weeks across the federal government. Data published on Doge’s “wall of receipts” shows that more than one-third of the contract cancellations, 417 in all, are expected to yield no savings.
Meanwhile, more than 20 civil service employees resigned from Doge, saying they were refusing to use their technical expertise to “dismantle critical public services. “We swore to serve the American people and uphold our oath to the constitution across presidential administrations,” the 21 staffers wrote in a joint resignation letter, a copy of which was obtained by the Associated Press. “However, it has become clear that we can no longer honor those commitments.”
A federal judge in Seattle blocked the Trump administration’s effort to halt the nation’s refugee admissions system. US district judge Jamal Whitehead said in his ruling after the hearing on Tuesday that the president’s actions amounted to an “effective nullification of congressional will” in setting up the nation’s refugee admissions program. “The president has substantial discretion ... to suspend refugee admissions,” Whitehead told the parties. “But that authority is not limitless.”
A US judge extended an order blocking the Trump administration from instituting a sweeping freeze on trillions of dollars in federal funding by pausing grants, loans and other financial support. US district judge Loren AliKhan in Washington wrote that while some funds had become unfrozen since she first temporarily blocked the administration’s spending pause, there remained a risk the administration might again try to shut off funding. The judge said for those reasons she agreed with groups representing nonprofits and small business that a preliminary injunction was necessary blocking a further funding freeze.
A federal judge in Washington has ordered the Trump administration to pay foreign aid funds to contractors and grant recipients by 11.59pm on Wednesday night, saying there was no sign that it had taken any steps to comply with his earlier order that the funds be unfrozen.
The Senate confirmed Daniel Driscoll, an Iraq war veteran and adviser to JD Vance, as secretary of the army.
Updated
The tax cut proposals in this GOP budget blueprint passed on Tuesday center on $4.5tn in tax breaks, which would extend the tax cuts Trump implemented during his first term.
These tax cuts are currently set to expire later this year and the proposed package aims to prolong them. But the details of how these tax breaks would be structured haven’t been specified yet.
Trump’s tax cuts helped billionaires massively during his first term, with the richest families in the US paying a lower tax rate than the working class for the first time in history in 2018.
Several lawmakers are concerned that the proposed cuts – especially the $880bn over the next decade assigned to the committee overseeing healthcare spending, including Medicaid, and the $230bn allocated to the agriculture committee responsible for food stamps – could hinder their constituents back home.
“The House Republican budget will make people sicker and poorer,” said Ken Martin, chair of the Democratic National Committee. “It will force even more families to live paycheck to paycheck while giving the wealthiest Americans a windfall big enough to buy a new private jet.”
Next steps involve weeks of committee hearings to draft the full legislative text, as well as negotiations with the Senate, where Republicans have their own scaled-back version.
Updated
