Trump-forward budget proposal imperiling Medicaid narrowly passes in Republican-led House
The House narrowly passed the budget resolution by a 217-215 vote after an intense push by Mike Johnson, the speaker, and Donald Trump.
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.
The budget measure needed to pass by the 14 March deadline or risk a government shutdown.
Key events
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:
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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‘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.
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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”.
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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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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The Senate confirmed Daniel Driscoll, an Iraq war veteran and adviser to JD Vance, as secretary of the army.
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.
Undocumented immigrants in the US who fail to register with the federal government could face fines, imprisonment, or both, according to a directive issued Tuesday by the Department of Homeland Security.
“The Trump administration will enforce all our immigration laws – we will not pick and choose which laws we will enforce,” a DHS spokesperson said. “We must know who is in our country for the safety and security of our homeland and all Americans.”
According to the US Citizenship and Immigration Services website, all immigrants over the age of 14 who were not fingerprinted or registered when applying for a US visa and who remain in the country for 30 days or longer must register and be fingerprinted.
Once registered and fingerprinted, DHS will provide evidence of registration, which immigrants over the age of 18 are required to carry at all times.
Last month, upon returning to office, Donald Trump declared illegal immigration at the US-Mexico border a national emergency and directed DHS to ensure that immigrants register with the federal government.
The administration is also working to end the Biden-era CBP One entry program, which allowed hundreds of thousands of migrants to legally enter the US by scheduling appointments through an app.
Trump-forward budget proposal imperiling Medicaid narrowly passes in Republican-led House
The House narrowly passed the budget resolution by a 217-215 vote after an intense push by Mike Johnson, the speaker, and Donald Trump.
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.
The budget measure needed to pass by the 14 March deadline or risk a government shutdown.
The Social Security Administration said on Tuesday that it dissolved its office of civil rights and equal opportunity, and its employees will be put on administrative leave as of today.
Lee Dudek, Social Security’s acting commissioner, said in a statement that terminating the civil rights office “advances the President’s goal to make all of government more efficient in serving the American public”.
The agency’s office of civil rights and equal opportunity is responsible for planning and implementing programs designed to ensure equal opportunity in employment for all employees regardless of race, color, national origin, etc., according to its webpage.
SSA says it will transfer responsibility for processing civil rights complaints and reasonable accommodation requests to other agency offices “to ensure compliance with existing legal authorities”.
Nearly 6,000 veterans have been fired across the federal government since the start of Trump’s term, according to a new analysis by House Democrats.
Lauren Gambino
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.
“Our veterans make significant sacrifices in service of our country, but those sacrifices do not seem to matter to President Trump and unchecked billionaire Elon Musk,” Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro, ranking member of the House appropriations committee, said in a statement. “They are an essential part of our federal workforce, bringing their expertise to every single agency. Republicans are turning their back on them, allowing Musk to fire at least 6,000 veterans and leave them with no way to feed their families or keep a roof over their heads.”
Republicans have countered that the cuts are a necessary part of a long-overdue effort to root out government waste and inefficiency.
The federal government is the largest US employer of veterans, who comprise about 30% of the workforce.
Trump says Zelenskyy set to visit White House on Friday to sign minerals deal
Andrew Roth
Donald 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.
Media outlets reported late on Tuesday that the terms of an agreement had been reached.
“I hear that he’s coming on Friday,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office. “Certainly it’s OK with me if he’d like to.”
According to the Financial Times, which first reported the deal, the new terms of the deal did not reportedly include the onerous demands for a right to $500bn in potential revenue from exploiting the resources, which include rare earth metals and Ukrainian oil and gas resources.
A framework for the deal included joint ownership of a fund to develop Ukraine’s mineral resources with certain caveats for those resources already contributing to the state budget.
More on the story here:
Michael Sainato
The Guardian’s labor reporter, Michael Sainato, spoke to USAid workers who are expected to be ‘escorted’ back to the office to collect their belongings amid Trump’s bid to shut down the foreign aid agency.
Staff who spoke to the Guardian sounded the alarm over the impact of these moves on global security, warning that closing USAid and withdrawing foreign aid is “only leaving war on the table”.
The agency is “the canary in the coal mine” as Trump seeks to test the limits of his executive powers, said one USAid official, who requested to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation and harassment. “We see us as the most acute and boldest example of overreach, that checks and balances ought to restrain the powers of the president and the president should abide by the powers of Congress and the courts.
“Can the president act like a king? We’re a glaring flare for all of those things.”
The agency has been subjected to attacks and conspiracy theories about its work, with Elon Musk and his supporters making false claims about funding, including a baseless claim about the agency sending $50m to Gaza for condoms, and false claims about grants such as the suggestion by the so-called “department of government efficiency” that $21m had been sent to India to influence elections.
Musk has called the agency “a criminal organization” and argued that it was “time for it to die”. Pushed on his false condoms claim earlier this month, he responded: “Some of the things I say will be incorrect.”
Health clinics reliant on USAid grants in Zimbabwe, Ethiopia, Iraq and other countries around the world have been forced to shut down and international aid groups have already cut thousands of jobs due to the funding freeze.
The Trump administration is fighting challenges in court to freeze all USAid funding, place nearly all employees on leave.
“USAid was established by act of Congress. It needs to be un-established by act of Congress. They are ignoring that rule,” the USAid official said. “I would guess around 500 workers, no one has provided specifics, senior leaders, HR and IT people, are left behind to participate in the dismantling of the agency.”
Contracts and grants are still being cut and terminated, with only a small fraction of the agency’s work abroad still continuing, they said. “We’re a lifesaving agency. They certainly have done damage that will take years to undo, but even though they’ve closed the building and banned us from it, we’re not done. We still exist,” they said.
Read the full story here:
Americans are getting more concerned about a potential economic downturn caused by the policies of Donald Trump’s administration.
US consumer confidence plummeted in February, the biggest monthly decline in nearly four years, the Conference Board, a business research group, said on Tuesday. Inflation and a significant increase in mentions of trade and tariffs were the top concerns for respondents to the board’s survey.
The group’s consumer confidence index plummeted this month to 98.3 from 105.3 in January. That’s far below the expectations of economists, who projected a reading of 103, according to a survey by FactSet.
The proportion of consumers expecting a recession over the next year jumped to a nine-month high, the board said.
Consumer spending accounts for about two-thirds of US economic activity and is closely watched by economists for signs about how the American consumer is feeling.
Marina Dunbar
Trump’s Iron Dome for America system is now reportedly called Golden Dome
Donald Trump’s Iron Dome for America initiative for a missile defense system protecting US skies from attack has been reportedly renamed the Golden Dome for America.
In a video published on Thursday, secretary of defense Pete Hegseth referred to the project as “the Golden Dome or Iron Dome”. A defense official confirmed shortly after that the name of the initiative has been officially changed to “Golden Dome”, according to military news website Defense One.
A spokesperson for Space Force did not respond to a Guardian query on the possible name change.
The idea of a new name comes as a team of technical experts has been assembled by the US Space Force to determine which programs can help build out the initiative.
The Iron – or perhaps now Golden – Dome for America executive order, signed by Trump on 27 January, is a directive for Hegseth to submit a comprehensive plan that details an implementation strategy, including the required architecture, for a missile defense system.
Trump is known for his grand renaming of things, including the Gulf of Mexico, which is now known officially in the US as the Gulf of America, as well as having a gaudy taste for golden and luxurious decorations, such as that which often adorn his apartments and buildings like Trump Tower in New York.
The defense system focuses heavily on the concept of space-based sensors and interceptors. The company that currently dominates the market for such equipment is the Elon Musk-owned SpaceX, leading to concerns that this project is another way for Musk to make money from federal programs.
Read the full story here:
John Thune, the Senate majority leader, is defending the Trump administration’s cuts to federal workers and programs, calling them a long overdue “scrub” of the federal government.
Still, the Republican from South Dakota acknowledged that the reductions are affecting the home states of GOP senators.
“I think we all understand that this government, the federal government, is long in need of the kind of scrub that is being done to figure out how we can do things better,” Thune said at the Capitol.
He said that senators would make the Trump administration aware if programs, such as those that impact health and safety, are at risk.
The Trump administration plans to cut employees at the US Department of Housing and Urban Development who assist officials and citizens in navigating government housing programs, the AP reports.
These cuts are among the first steps in the administration’s broader plan to reduce HUD’s workforce by half.
The field policy and management division is expected to lose at least 145 employees – about 40% of its staff – by 18 May.
A memo from the HUD secretary Scott Turner, dated Monday, states that all positions within the office at a certain pay grade and below “are being abolished”.
Trump reinstates rule on healthcare cost transparency
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 previously issued a similar order during the final year of his first term.
Hospitals and insurers had strongly opposed the rule, with many failing to comply.
“It’s been unpopular in some circles because people make less money,” Trump said. “But it’s great for the patient. It’s great for the people in our country.”
Fox News senior White House correspondent, Jacqui Heinrich, condemned the Trump administration’s decision to determine which outlets have access to the president as part of the press pool, a selection that the White House Correspondents’ Association makes.
“This move does not give the power back to the people – it gives power to the White House,” Heinrich posted on X. “The WHCA is democratically elected by the full-time White House press corps.”
“WHCA has determined pools for decades because only representatives FROM our outlets can determine resources all those outlets have – such as staffing – in order to get the President’s message out to the largest possible audience, no matter the day or hour,” she added.
USAid staffers have only 15 minutes to retrieve belongings from their former offices, according to The Associated Press.
For nearly three weeks, many staffers at the agency’s main building in Washington have been barred from entering as the administration continues dismantling the facility.
Several employees have requested permission to retrieve personal items, including family photos and work shoes stored in drawers.
The notice about the arrangements says that aid workers must undergo security screening before reentering.
The Guardian’s labor reporter Michael Sainato reports that, in the notice, staffers were told to “bring their own boxes, bags, tape, and/or other containers to remove their personal items; these items will not be provided”.
“Neither USAID, nor any of our assisting agencies, will provide boxes, tape, protective wrapping, or other packaging materials to assist with the retrieval process,” the notice reads.
President Donald Trump signed an executive order suspending security clearances for lawyers at the Covington & Burling law firm that worked with special counsel Jack Smith.
Smith led the federal cases against Trump on charges of trying to overturn his 2020 election defeat and mishandling of classified documents.
The order comes less than a month after the US justice department fired more than a dozen prosecutors who worked on the criminal cases against Trump in a move to purge people who worked for Smith.
Donald Trump said he wants to begin selling gold cards for $5m to foreigners who want to move to the US and create jobs.
The president said the immigration program, which he said was legal, could start in about two weeks. He added it is possible Russian oligarchs could qualify for the gold cards.
“That’s going to give you Green Card privileges,” he said on Tuesday. “Plus, it’s going to be a route to citizenship and wealthy people will be coming into our country by buying this card.”
White House officials said that the administration aims to end the EB-5 visa program and replace it with the gold card.
“They’ll be wealthy, and they’ll be successful, and they’ll be spending a lot of money and paying a lot of taxes and employing a lot of people,” Trump added.
Edward Wong of the New York Times reports that Trump appointees at USAid have sent recently-fired employees a list of more than 100 weapons they are prohibited from bringing when returning to the office to collect their belongings.
Firearms, axes, martial arts weapons, including nunchucks and throwing stars, were in the list, as well as spearguns and dynamite.
Staff will collect their personal belongings at the Ronald Reagan Building this Thursday and Friday
There have been no known recent incidents of aid agency employees making weapon-related threats, Wong reports.
