Reporting from Washington
The House Rules Committee completed the hearing part of its meeting at 8:42 p.m. — more than 19 hours after it started — and is now voting on which amendments to allow for consideration on the House floor when all lawmakers vote on a massive bill to advance Trump’s agenda.
There are 537 amendments, most of them submitted by Democrats.
A 42-page amendment offered by Republicans would, among other things, cap what’s known as the SALT deduction at $40,000 per household for incomes up to $500,000.
More than 200 wealthy, mostly anonymous crypto buyers are going to Washington tomorrow to have dinner with Trump. The price of admission: $55,000 to $37.7 million.
That’s how much the 220 winners of a contest to meet Trump spent on his volatile cryptocurrency token, $TRUMP, according to an analysis by the blockchain analytics company Nansen.
The top $TRUMP coin holders at a specific time — determined by the dinner’s organizers — secured seats.
Democratic Rep. Mikie Sherrill faces new attacks on the airwaves in the New Jersey governor’s race, with rivals targeting campaign donations from the PAC tied to billionaire Elon Musk’s rocket company.
Two new attack ads launched this week note that Sherrill’s House campaign received donations from a corporate PAC for Musk’s company SpaceX, underscoring how Democrats are looking to invoke Musk in attacks, not just against Republicans but also against members of their own party.
The ads come at a critical moment in the hotly contested New Jersey primary, weeks before Democrats will choose their nominee on June 10. And they also offer a preview of potential attacks to come in other Democratic contests, after years of the SpaceX PAC’s spreading money around Washington.
Reporting from Washington
Tech billionaire and Trump adviser Elon Musk met for more than an hour this afternoon with a group of Republicans on the Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee.
Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, the committee chair, told NBC News that Musk briefed the senators on artificial intelligence, specifically on innovation challenges and ramping up energy production in the United States to stay competitive with China.
“This was for Republican members of the Commerce Committee to ask questions, and he brought his X AI team to answer technical questions about what they’re doing and what the challenges are they’re facing,” Cruz said after the meeting on Capitol Hill.
“I think it was very productive. We try to — I try to periodically bring together experts who can help inform members of the committee of what the challenges are that we’re facing as a country and what potential solutions are to help us overcome those challenges,” he added.
Cruz said that the group did not discuss the Department of Government Efficiency and that Musk spoke only about AI.
Musk, who was at the White House earlier today, did not answer questions from reporters after the meeting.
Vice President JD Vance said Chief Justice John Roberts held a “profoundly wrong sentiment” with regard to comments he made this month about the judiciary’s role in checking the “excesses” of the president.
“I thought that was a profoundly wrong sentiment. That’s one half of his job. The other half of his job is to check the excesses of his own branch,” Vance told New York Times columnist Ross Douthat in a podcast interview published today.
“You cannot have a country where the American people keep on electing immigration enforcement and the courts tell the American people they’re not allowed to have what they voted for, and that’s where we are right now,” he said.
Roberts said at an event in Buffalo, New York, this month that the judiciary’s “job is to, obviously, decide cases but, in the course of that, check the excesses of Congress or the executive, and that does require a degree of independence.”
Vance also repeatedly said the courts should exercise deference toward Trump.
“I think that the courts need to be somewhat deferential. In fact, I think the design is that they should be extremely deferential to these questions of political judgment made by the people’s elected president,” he said.
Reporting from Washington
Senate Republicans are pushing forward with a simple-majority vote as early as tonight to undo an electric vehicle mandate in California, which Democrats and the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office say should be subject to the 60-vote filibuster rule.
The move turns a battle over clean energy policy into a high-stakes clash over the fate of the filibuster, with consequences for the future of the Senate.
The vote would bypass the 60-vote rule, which can be done in limited circumstances. Democrats warn that if Republicans proceed in defiance of the Senate parliamentarian, who has sided with the GAO in the dispute, they’d be setting a precedent to nuke the legislative filibuster and turn the Senate into a majority-vote body.
“It’s going nuclear, plain and simple. It’s overruling the parliamentarian,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., told reporters yesterday.
Sen. Roger Marshall, R-Kan., this afternoon blocked an effort by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., to pass a resolution by unanimous consent that would bar using a foreign plane as Air Force One.
The resolution, which was not expected to pass, is in response to Trump’s acceptance of a luxury jet from Qatar. It would have prohibited the Defense Department from procuring or modifying a foreign aircraft for the purpose of transporting the president.
The Pentagon said today that it has officially accepted a luxury jet from Qatar to use as the new Air Force One for Trump.
The administration’s decision to accept the plane has drawn criticism from even Trump’s staunchest allies, some of whom criticized the jet as a national security risk, a sentiment Schumer amplified today on the Senate floor.
“This gift screams national security risk. It is bribery in broad daylight. Donald Trump is thumbing his nose at Republicans and practically daring them to stop him. Well, today the Senate can,” he said. “This is about ensuring our national security and about not wasting taxpayer dollars on an utterly senseless deal.”
By trying to pass the measure through unanimous consent, Schumer would have needed the support of all 100 senators. Marshall objected to the resolution without explaining why.
As House Republicans prepare to investigate former President Joe Biden’s health and mental fitness in office, they are increasingly zeroing in on his use of a so-called autopen to sign certain pieces of legislation and executive orders.
Autopens have been used in the White House to generate signatures for decades, with Barack Obama being the first president to use them to sign legislation. But congressional Republicans — who are largely taking their cues from Trump — see the use of autopens as a key line of attack as they reopen a probe into Biden’s mental acuity and his ability to do his job as president.
“We’re focused on the autopen,” House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., told NBC News. “Who was making the decisions? Who was authorizing his signature? Was it him?”
There is no official record of how often Biden used an autopen for official government business. The conservative Heritage Foundation accused the administration in a study of using an autopen extensively, largely based on the timing of when he signed documents compared with when he was traveling.
Russia’s military intelligence service is carrying out a large-scale cyberespionage campaign to hack into Western logistics organizations and technology companies, including those helping transport foreign assistance to Ukraine, according to U.S. and Western intelligence agencies.
In a joint advisory to industry today, the National Security Agency and 10 other governments said Russia’s “cyber espionage-oriented campaign” has targeted public and private firms in air, ground and sea transportation, as well as in internet-connected cameras at Ukrainian border crossings and near military bases.
“This malicious campaign by Russia’s military intelligence service presents a serious risk to targeted organizations, including those involved in the delivery of assistance to Ukraine,” Paul Chichester, director of operations at Britain’s National Cyber Security Centre, said in a statement.
The advisory said the hacking offensive was being carried out by the Russian military intelligence service’s unit 26165, sometimes referred to as Fancy Bear or APT28, which has been blamed for previous cyber operations in the West. In April, France accused the unit of orchestrating cyberattacks on government ministries, defense companies and think tanks over several years to sow instability in the country.
The joint advisory said the Russian cyber unit is targeting “dozens of entities, including government organizations and private/commercial entities across virtually all transportation modes” in NATO member states, inside Ukraine and at international organizations.
The hackers conducted reconnaissance of at least one organization involved in producing industrial control system components used to manage railway networks, but there was no confirmation that the system was breached, the advisory said.
The Russian cyber actors were using familiar tactics, including “credential guessing, spear-phishing and exploitation of Microsoft Exchange mailbox permissions,” the advisory said.
Western companies and organizations need to recognize the elevated threat the Russian hacking campaign poses and take measures to bolster their cyber defenses outlined in the joint warning, the advisory said.
The advisory was signed by the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Canada, the Czech Republic, Poland, Australia, Estonia, Denmark and the Netherlands.
Russia’s embassy in Washington did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
After a deportation flight with eight migrants left Texas reportedly intended for South Sudan this week, a federal judge ruled today that the Trump administration had violated a previous order.
U.S. District Judge Brian Murphy in Massachusetts said at a hearing that the Trump administration had failed to adhere to the injunction he issued in March preventing people from being sent to a country other than their own without giving them opportunities to raise fears of persecution or torture.
The Department of Homeland Security confirmed at a news briefing this morning that eight people from Myanmar, Laos, Vietnam, Cuba, Mexico and South Sudan were deported this week. According to DHS, many of them had violent criminal convictions, including murder and sexual assault.
“The department’s actions,” Murphy said, “are unquestionably violative of this court’s order.”
The Defense Department said it has officially accepted a luxury jet plane from Qatar to use as the new Air Force One for Trump.
“The Secretary of Defense has accepted a Boeing 747 from Qatar in accordance with all federal rules and regulations,” said Sean Parnell, the Pentagon’s chief spokesman. “The Department of Defense will work to ensure proper security measures and functional-mission requirements are considered for an aircraft used to transport the President of the United States.”
Parnell referred additional requests for information to the Air Force. Qatari officials did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
News that Trump was considering accepting a plane from a foreign government broke before his planned visit to Qatar last week. Delays had slowed the timeline for delivery of a Boeing contract for two jets to be used as new Air Force One planes.
Ramaphosa said in his remarks in the Oval Office that a majority of the people being killed in his country are Black, not white, as Trump has claimed.
“There is criminality in our country,” Ramaphosa said. “People who do get killed, unfortunately, through criminal activity are not only white people. The majority of them are Black people.”
In response, Trump claimed farmers who are being killed in South Africa “are not Black.”
“The people that are being killed in large numbers, and you saw all those gravesites … they’ve died violently,” Trump said, referring to clips played in the Oval Office that he purported showed support for targeting white farmers with violence.
Other members of South Africa’s delegation at the meeting eventually chimed in and echoed Ramaphosa’s assertion, saying gang violence is part of the problem.
After a reporter asked Trump what it would take to be convinced that there is no genocide in South Africa, Ramaphosa responded, saying it would take Trump’s “listening to the voices of South Africa, some of whom are his friends.”
“If there was Afrikaner farmer genocide, I bet you these three gentlemen would not be here,” Ramaphosa said, referring to others in his delegation.
The interjection drew a retort from Trump, who said the White House had “thousands of stories talking about it.”
“Is somebody here to show that?” Trump asked before clips purporting to back up his claims about violence against farmers began playing for several minutes. “Turn the lights down. Turn the lights down and just put this on. It’s right behind you,” he said.
As the conversation grew heated, Ramaphosa began clarifying that the speeches being made in the clips aren’t government policy.
It was unclear who was speaking in the clips or what they portrayed.
Speaking to the media before a bilateral meeting with South Africa’s president in the Oval Office, Trump addressed why his administration is accepting Afrikaners into the United States while it’s revoking Temporary Protected Status for refugees from other countries.
“We’ve had tremendous complaints about Africa, about other countries, too,” Trump said when NBC News asked about the situation.
“When you say we don’t take others, all you have to do is take a look at the southern border,” Trump said, claiming that millions have come through it “totally unchecked, totally unvetted.”
“They came from all over the world,” he continued. “In many cases, they’re criminals. They come from prisons, they come from mental institutions, they come from street gangs and drug dealers.”
Trump said many people in South Africa have felt persecuted and claimed again that a genocide against white farmers is happening, which the country’s government has strongly denied.
Ramaphosa arrived at the White House, where he was greeted by Trump. The two leaders shook hands before heading inside. They will head to the Oval Office before having lunch.
South African President Cyril Ramaphosa at the White House today.Alex Wong / Getty Images
Members of the House Freedom Caucus will meet with Trump at the White House this afternoon about the budget package, two people with direct knowledge of the meeting said.
House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., and members of his leadership team will also attend the meeting this afternoon, three sources told NBC News.
The meeting comes after conservative hard-liners told reporters moments ago that they are making progress on the negotiations over the bill, but the measure is not on track to be passed by the House today.
They pointed to a new “offer” from the White House overnight, but did not provide details. One source said the White House told Freedom Caucus members that it would not stand in the way of any votes they are able to secure for provisions they’re seeking.
House Freedom Caucus members just made clear that they’re not ready to support the reconciliation package that Republicans have been debating all morning in the Rules Committee.
The chairman of the conservative group, Rep. Andy Harris, R-Md., told reporters that the White House had offered a proposal late last night that would be acceptable to his members, but he said, “I don’t think it can be done today. I mean, the runway is short today.”
Harris was unsure if the House could pass the bill this week, as Republican leaders want, instead offering up a 10-day timeline.
Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, another member of the far-right caucus, said they’ve made significant progress in negotiations to advance Trump’s agenda in the reconciliation legislation, but “there’s a long way to go.”
Another group member, Scott Perry, R-Pa., said the caucus can’t support the current version of the bill, which doesn’t include the White House’s latest proposals.
While the Freedom Caucus members said that they want to end “waste, fraud and abuse” in Medicaid and end energy-related tax credits, they repeatedly declined to provide specifics about what it would take to gain their support for the bill.
The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court this morning to prevent the Department of Government Efficiency from having to turn over documents about its operations.
“The U.S. DOGE Service (USDS) is a presidential advisory body within the Executive Office of the President” and is therefore “exempt from the Freedom of Information Act,” Solicitor General D. John Sauer argued in the court filing.
The oversight group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington had filed suit earlier this year after using FOIA to try to get DOGE and the Office of Management and Budget to turn over information about DOGE’s operations, contending it’s not just an advisory body, it’s a government agency, which would be subject to FOIA.
A federal judge has ordered the administration to turn over information to help him decide whether or not that’s the case — an action Sauer maintains crossed a line.
“The district court below ordered USDS to submit to sweeping, intrusive discovery just to determine if USDS is subject to FOIA in the first place,” Sauer wrote. “That order turns FOIA on its head, effectively giving respondent a win on the merits of its FOIA suit under the guise of figuring out whether FOIA even applies.”
Sauer wants the high court to halt the deadlines for it to turn over information while it weighs the issue and to stop a deposition of acting DOGE head Amy Gleason from proceeding.
Steve Witkoff, Trump’s Middle East envoy, is scheduled to travel to Rome later today to meet with Iranian officials for discussions about a possible nuclear deal, according to two administration officials.
Witkoff drew criticism from Tehran over the weekend when he said during an interview on ABC News’ “This Week” that the U.S. position is that any deal would not allow Iran to enrich any uranium.
“We have one very, very clear red line, and that is enrichment,” he said. “We cannot allow even 1% of an enrichment capability. We’ve delivered a proposal to the Iranians that we think addresses some of this without disrespecting them.”
Iranian officials shot back, calling those unrealistic expectations for Iran not to maintain any uranium enrichment.
Talks between the U.S. and Iran began on April 12.
The House Rules Committee is in its 11th hour of meeting on the Republican budget bill and there is no sign of it ending anytime soon.
The committee finished hearing from the chairs and ranking members of other committees about their specific reconciliation sections. Now, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y.; Minority Whip Katherine Clark, D-Mass.; and Democratic Caucus Chair Pete Aguilar, D-Calif., are speaking to the committee.
Next, the amendment process will begin. There are 537 amendments. Rules Chair Virginia Foxx, R-N.C., announced that there will be panels of eight members at a time testifying on their amendments.
Meanwhile, there is still no manager’s amendment, which is how Republican leaders will make the final updates to the bill. House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., has been going in and out of his office and a room off of the Rules Committee meeting room with Freedom Caucus members.
The Justice Department is dismissing lawsuits against a number of local police departments and ending investigations into patterns and practices of unconstitutional behavior, officials announced today.
The pullback from police oversight comes amid major change at the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division since the start of the Trump administration and the confirmation of Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon, who is leading the division.
House Republican leaders are racing to drag a sweeping bill for President Donald Trump’s agenda across the finish line even as some holdouts are dug in and key issues remain unresolved.
The House Rules Committee began debating the multitrillion-dollar domestic policy package shortly after 1 a.m. ET Wednesday, the final step before it heads to the full chamber. Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., said he hopes the House will vote on the legislation and send it to the Senate as soon as Wednesday evening.
Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., urged Trump to require Elon Musk and other special government employees involved in the Department of Government Efficiency’s government downsizing efforts to sign a certification that they will not use nonpublic information to their benefit.
“Given the unprecedented nature of the access DOGE SGEs have had to vast swathes of some of the most sensitive U.S. government data, I am very concerned that SGEs, many of whom come from the tech field, may return to the private sector and use nonpublic information from the federal government to give their personal business activities an unfair and anticompetitive boost,” Shaheen wrote in a letter to the president obtained by NBC News.
The letter was inspired by former Trump adviser Steve Bannon’s recent comments that he wanted a similar certification to ensure Musk wouldn’t take government data. “Trust, but verify,” he told Semafor.
“Our concern is in putting the pieces together,” a Senate aide told NBC News. “If the SGEs were to take or act upon the nonpublic information that they have had access to, that conceivably could give Elon Musk a head start on something like an American WeChat or an expansion of Twitter or some new business venture.”
A senior White House official called the letter “pointless.”
“SGEs are already required to abide by executive branch ethics rules including the rules relating to misuse of position or other government resources or information,” the official told NBC News in a statement.
While regulation bars government officials, including special government employees, from using nonpublic information for their financial benefit, there’s no statutory prohibition. Recently, Attorney General Pam Bondi faced scrutiny for selling off stocks on April 2, the day Trump announced sweeping tariffs on U.S. trading partners.
Last month, Shaheen unveiled legislation to bar federal contracts or grant funding for companies owned by special government employees.
Without waiting for Washington, the European Union and the U.K. announced a new raft of sanctions against Russia today, less than 24 hours after Trump and his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, exchanged a friendly, if fruitless, phone call about ending the war in Ukraine.
The measures will crack down on Moscow’s so-called shadow fleet — around 200 vessels used to transport Russian oil exports globally — the 27-nation bloc and London said in separate statements. They are the 17th set of European sanctions imposed on Russia since it invaded its neighbor in 2022, the E.U. said.
Donald Trump Jr., the president’s eldest son, didn’t rule out a potential future presidential run in remarks at the Qatar Economic Forum in Doha today.
“You never know,” he said at the event. “The answer is, I don’t know, maybe one day. You know, that calling is there.”
The 47-year-old has previously shot down speculation about him launching a future White House bid.
Elon Musk, who was born and raised in South Africa, will join the U.S. delegation meeting with South African President Cyril Ramaphosa today, according to an advisory from their government.
A White House spokesperson also confirmed that Musk would participate in Trump’s lunch and meeting with Ramaphosa.
Musk is a staunch and vocal critic of his birth country, and he has claimed numerous times that there is a genocide against white people in South Africa — a claim that is vigorously denied by South Africa.
As House Republicans move closer to a floor vote on their sweeping domestic agenda bill, a new analysis by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates the effects of the bill across the income spectrum.
In short, the mix of tax breaks and spending cuts to benefit programs such as Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, also known as food stamps, would benefit upper earners while reducing household resources for the lowest earners, the budget office found.
The lowest 10% of earners would see their household resources decrease by about 2% in 2027 and 4% in 2033, while the highest 10% of earners would see their resources increase by about 4% in 2027 and 2% in 2033, said the report, which was requested by Democratic leaders.
The Rules Committee is still considering the bill this morning and will amend it before it goes to the House floor for a vote. The changes could include a larger state and local tax deduction, known as SALT, which is used primarily by upper earners and some middle income earners in high-tax jurisdictions.
Rep. Gerry Connolly of Virginia, the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee known for his vocal advocacy of federal workers and his frequent clashes with Republicans during televised hearings, died this morning, his family said. He was 75.
Connolly announced last month that his esophageal cancer had returned despite “grueling treatments,” and that he would not be running for re-election next year.
His death comes less than a year after he won a competitive race to become the ranking member of the Oversight and Government Reform Committee, one of the key panels that are charged with keeping a check on the executive branch.
Reporting from Taipei, Taiwan
The head of American chipmaker Nvidia praised Trump’s move to modify U.S. curbs on the export of artificial intelligence chips to China, saying the Biden-era controls were a “failure” that had cost his and other U.S. companies billions of dollars in sales.
Under former President Joe Biden, the United States rolled out a three-tiered system of export curbs on advanced chips aimed at regulating the global diffusion of AI, blocking China entirely. While Biden said the curbs were necessary to slow China’s development of technology that could have military applications, critics said they could undermine U.S. tech leadership.
The Trump administration said last week that it plans to rescind some of those curbs and replace them with its own restrictions.
Nvidia’s billionaire chief executive, Jensen Huang, said his company controls 50% of the market in China today, compared with almost 95% at the start of the Biden administration in 2021.
The House Rules Committee has moved to its final panel of key lawmakers testifying about the Republican budget bill.
The witnesses include the leaders of the committees on Agriculture, Education and the Workforce, Ways and Means, and Energy and Commerce; they are some of the most important committees involved with the bill, with jurisdiction over the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (also known as food stamps), taxes and Medicaid.
The hearing will still likely last several more hours. There are now 537 amendments to the bill, not including a “manager’s amendment” that makes final changes negotiated by GOP leadership.
Democrats on the Rules Committee continue to complain about the 1 a.m. start time of the meeting, prompting Republicans to push back, with Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, saying “when you got a great product, you want to get after it and get it passed.”
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has ordered a “comprehensive review” of the U.S. military’s chaotic 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan, saying it is needed to ensure accountability for what happened.
Trump has often criticized the Biden administration over the evacuation, during which 13 U.S. service members and more than 150 Afghans were killed in a bombing at the airport in Kabul. The Biden administration said the chaos was a result of troop reductions and a lack of planning by the first Trump administration after it struck a 2020 deal with the Taliban to withdraw U.S. forces.
The new review is “an important step toward regaining faith and trust with the American people and all those who wear the uniform and is prudent based on the number of casualties and equipment lost during the execution of this withdrawal operation,” Hegseth said in a memo yesterday.
The U.S. withdrawal has already been the subject of multiple reviews, including by the U.S. military, the State Department and House Republicans. Hegseth said the new review would be led by his chief spokesperson, Sean Parnell.
Allegheny County Controller Corey O’Connor defeated Pittsburgh Mayor Ed Gainey in the city’s hotly contested Democratic mayoral primary, The Associated Press projected last night, after a race which garnered national attention as a notable proxy fight between progressives and center-left Democrats.
With more than 85% of the vote in, O’Connor led Gainey 54%-46% in the nominating contest.
Former Rep. Matt Gaetz, a close ally of Trump, is still considering a run for governor of Florida — a twist that complicates a Republican primary that already has a Trump-endorsed candidate and, potentially, the current governor’s wife.
Trump has backed Rep. Byron Donalds, R-Fla., for the 2026 race, and a Trump adviser said the endorsement of Donalds — and only Donalds — “is set” no matter what happens. But with Gaetz and Gov. Ron DeSantis’ wife, Casey DeSantis, in the wings, the field remains unsettled.
Trump will host South African President Cyril Ramaphosa at the White House today in an effort to improve relations between the two countries after months of tensions.
The United States admitted 59 white South Africans as refugees this month after they claimed they were fleeing violence and discrimination. Trump and top adviser Elon Musk, who was born in South Africa, have claimed the Afrikaners, white descendants of Dutch and French settlers, were targets of a “genocide.” South African leaders have fiercely disputed the claims.
