The debate over the debt limit will likely flare tensions between centrist and far-right Republicans the closer the country gets to the real deadline sometime later in the year. (Photo by Getty Images)

WASHINGTON — When Republicans won unified control of government during the November elections, they also won the responsibility to address the country’s debt limit after the current suspension expires on Jan. 1.

Lawmakers will have a few months of wiggle room thanks to accounting maneuvers to broker a deal before the country would default for the first time in history — which most economists believe would kick-start a global financial crisis.

How long the Treasury Department will be able to use what’s known as extraordinary measures to give Congress more time to find agreement will lead to a high-stakes guessing game on Capitol Hill.

The debate will also likely flare tensions between centrist and far-right Republicans the closer the country gets to the real deadline sometime later in the year.

“That is always a tortured path,” West Virginia Republican Sen. Shelley Moore Capito said during a brief interview. “A lot of people that are here probably never voted for a debt limit increase, so I think it’s probably going to be a negotiated settlement with some, maybe constraints on spending and other things that would go along with that.”

Capito, who will become the Republican Policy Committee chair next year, said she doesn’t anticipate Congress will simply raise or suspend the debt limit without caveats.

President-elect Donald Trump threw a curve ball into those negotiations in late December when he publicly announced he wanted the party to suspend the debt limit for at least four years or eliminate it entirely before he takes office.

GOP leadership tried to suspend the debt limit for two years as part of a larger spending package, but ultimately withdrew that provision to avoid a government shutdown.

The 48-hour fiasco set the stage for considerable Republican disagreement next year.

“Congress must get rid of, or extend out to, perhaps, 2029, the ridiculous Debt Ceiling,” Trump posted on social media. “Without this, we should never make a deal. Remember, the pressure is on whoever is President.”

What is the debt limit, and why does it matter?

The debt limit allows the Treasury Department to borrow money to pay all the country’s bills in full and on time.

That borrowing authority is necessary because Congress has established a tax code that brings in far less revenue than the federal government spends on hundreds of programs.

During fiscal year 2023, the federal government brought in $4.4 trillion in revenue and spent $6.1 trillion, leading to an annual deficit of $1.7 trillion, according to data from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.

When the difference between taxes and spending, or the deficit, is added up over decades, it accounts for the country’s $36 trillion-plus debt.

Congress requires itself to regularly give the Treasury Department more borrowing authority to pay for all the spending not covered by revenue. Lawmakers failing to take action to raise or suspend that debt limit would lead to a default.

How to reduce the deficit?

There are several ways for lawmakers to reduce the annual deficit of nearly $2 trillion, though most experts agree it will take a combination of tax increases and spending cuts.

Congress would also need to take a look at the major drivers of government spending — Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

At the moment, Republicans are talking about using their unified control of government to pass two major packages on their own.

The first would focus on border security, defense and energy policy. The second package the GOP plans to move through the complex budget reconciliation process is aimed at cutting taxes.

One of the biggest questions GOP leaders will face in the new year is whether to go at it alone, relying solely on their members to raise the debt limit, or to negotiate with Democrats, which would require major concessions.

The debt limit has become something of a political hot potato for GOP lawmakers during the past couple decades, with many in the party viewing it as an inflection point to press for spending cuts. 

That’s not likely to change next year, though Republicans won’t be able to rely on Democratic votes to carry the bill across the finish line like they have in the past, if they choose to move it through the budget reconciliation process.

If, alternatively, the GOP moves a debt limit bill through the regular process, they’ll need the support of Democrats to get past the Senate’s legislative filibuster, which requires at least 60 senators to move bills toward a final passage vote.

Tax increases and spending cuts

Douglas Elmendorf, professor of public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, told the House Budget Committee during a hearing in December that getting the country’s borrowing under control in the long term will require both tax increases and spending cuts.

Elmendorf testified that stabilizing the country’s deficit over the next three decades would “require policy changes totaling a little more than 2% of (gross domestic product), which amounts to about $600 billion per year today.”

“Cutting spending that much would require large cuts to popular and important government programs and raising taxes that much would require large tax increases for many people,” Elmendorf said. “So the only realistic way forward is through a combination of those changes.”

California Republican Rep. Tom McClintock rebuked his own party during the hearing for not approaching reconciliation as a genuine way to reduce the deficit by bringing revenue and spending into alignment.

He argued that Republicans misused budget reconciliation when they had unified control of government during 2017 and 2018, the first two years of Trump’s last presidency.

McClintock said GOP leaders at the time “squandered this authority to chase shiny political objects — repealing Obamacare, then tax reform.”

“And because of the fiscal constraints of reconciliation, Obamacare ended up in this mangled mess that collapsed in the Senate and the tax cuts had to be made temporary,” McClintock said. “And we seem to be poised to repeat the same mistakes that got us here and that would be an immense national tragedy.”

Instead, McClintock said the Budget Committee should focus its attention next year on making the types of tough choices that would begin to reduce the annual deficit and then use the reconciliation process to put those in place.

Drivers of debt

Reconciliation is typically used only when one party controls the House, Senate and White House as a way to implement policy changes without getting the bipartisan support required to get past the Senate’s 60-vote legislative filibuster.

When Republicans hold that power, they typically use it to cut taxes, but don’t always pay for those reductions in revenue, further exacerbating the deficit.

Georgia Republican Rep. Buddy Carter said during the same Budget Committee hearing that Congress must address the largest drivers of government spending, like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, if it wants to bring spending closer to revenue. 

“If we don’t address that, we can do away with everything else and still not balance our budget,” Carter said. 

He also cautioned his party against going at it alone, saying “it would be political suicide for one party to try to do it by themselves.” That would mean the GOP needs to negotiate with Democrats, likely eroding some of the party’s goals.

‘Mortgaging our children’s future’

Wisconsin Republican Sen. Ron Johnson said during a brief interview the debt limit is “supposed to concentrate everybody’s minds on the fact that we are mortgaging our children’s future and that we ought to stop the madness.”

Johnson said Republicans could use the reconciliation process they’re planning to use to address defense priorities, border security, energy policy and taxes to cut spending, but he said deficit hawks will be constrained by the rules that govern the special legislative process.

“I’m completely supportive of doing two separate reconciliations — do something pretty simple, primarily focused on the border with real spending cuts. I don’t want to see any gimmicks in this thing. So, you know, I’ll approach it that way,” Johnson said.

Iowa Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley said in an interview before Trump’s announcements that GOP lawmakers have begun to discuss how exactly to address the debt limit next year, though he said no agreements have been reached.

“Some people want a separate debate on it and some people want to put it in reconciliation,” Grassley said. “I prefer reconciliation, but I guess whatever we decide to do, we’re going to have to do it.”

Tesla CEO Elon Musk , right, co-chair of the newly announced Department of Government Efficiency, carries his son on his shoulders at the U.S. Capitol following a meeting with businessman Vivek Ramaswamy, left, the other co-chair of the Department of Government Efficiency, Rep. Kat Cammack, center, and other members of Congress on Dec. 5, 2024 in Washington, D.C. Musk and Ramaswamy met with lawmakers about DOGE, a planned presidential advisory commission with the goal of cutting government spending and increasing efficiency in the federal workforce. (Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

WASHINGTON — President-elect Donald Trump enlisted Washington outsiders Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to tell members of Congress how they should run things.

But Musk and Ramaswamy as they build their Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, don’t actually hold any elected or bureaucratic positions in the federal government — giving two hard-driving businessmen far less authority than they’re used to having in the private sector.

The duo will need to garner support from hundreds of members of Congress for any of their suggested spending cuts to become law, even with Republicans in control of the White House and both chambers of Congress. That is an uphill slog many have failed at before.

The mix of personalities, differing committee jurisdictions and separation of powers laid out in the Constitution could create tension, to say the least, when powerful Republican lawmakers disagree with or outright ignore Musk and Ramaswamy. Several Republicans indicated in interviews with States Newsroom that they intend to listen to the DOGE duo but will not back down from their roles as elected representatives of the people.

Maine Republican Sen. Susan Collins, the incoming chairwoman of the Appropriations Committee, said during a brief interview she believes the two men can offer lawmakers “valuable insights” and advice, but cautioned the power of the purse rests with Congress.

“It doesn’t mean that we will take all of these issues, but it’s always helpful to have additional oversight,” Collins said. “And so I look forward to seeing what they come up with.”

Rhode Island Democratic Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, chairman of the Budget Committee, summed up Democrats’ views on the Musk-Ramaswamy entity in a social media post.

“What does Doggie (“DOGE”) do? Maybe think of it this way: you have to watch a couple of precocious toddlers for the day,” Whitehouse wrote. “They need activities, but you don’t want them near stoves, cars, electrical equipment, or anything operational.”

Meet the appropriators

In Congress, the Appropriations Committee is tasked with drafting the dozen annual government funding bills that total about $1.7 trillion. The legislation funds the vast majority of federal departments and agencies, including Agriculture, Defense, Energy, Interior, Justice, State and Transportation.

The other two-thirds of federal spending covers interest payments on the debt, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

Idaho GOP Rep. Mike Simpson, chairman of the Interior-Environment Subcommittee, told States Newsroom he expects there will be “conflict” between Congress and the Musk-Ramaswamy group, in part, because they don’t have the years, or even decades, of experience learning the ins and outs of federal spending that appropriators hold.

“I noticed that they’ve said that they want to defund public television. I think they might get some kickback on that,” Simpson said. “To me, that’s a policy decision, not an efficiency issue.”

When GOP lawmakers met with Musk and Ramaswamy behind closed doors in early December to talk about government spending, Simpson said, the two pressed the idea that Trump should be able to cancel spending he deems “waste.”

But what Trump might consider unnecessary could be an essential program to a GOP lawmaker or a rural community, Simpson said.

There’s also a federal law called the Impoundment Control Act that prevents presidents from halting funding that Congress has approved and a Supreme Court ruling that bars the president from using line-item vetoes.

Arkansas Republican Rep. Steve Womack, chairman of the Transportation-HUD Subcommittee, told States Newsroom he expects there will need to be some “deconfliction” once Musk and Ramaswamy release their proposals.

“There will be a lot of different, competing interests and ideas, and we’ll just have to see what those are,” Womack said. “It’s a little premature, but, yeah, I’m sure there’ll be some deconfliction, there’ll be some negotiating. Some of this will be leveraged with other significant emotional events up here like debt ceiling, or funding the government.”

Floor votes could also be a hurdle for the various DOGE groups if they don’t gain Democratic support. Republicans will hold just 220 seats in the House at the start of the 119th Congress before a few of their members depart for other opportunities. That razor-thin margin means proposals from Musk and Ramaswamy will need support from the full spectrum of GOP lawmakers to pass.

Then they’ll need to gain the support of nearly all 53 GOP senators if they expect any spending cuts proposals to become law through the complex budget reconciliation process. 

Proving their value

One of the many challenges for Musk and Ramaswamy will be showcasing how their efforts differ from those of the White House budget office.

Bipartisan Policy Center Managing Director for Economic Policy Rachel Snyderman said in an interview with States Newsroom she’ll be watching closely to see whether Musk and Ramaswamy integrate their proposals with the president’s budget request, which the White House will likely release sometime in the spring.

That massive document tells Congress how the president wants lawmakers to change tax and spending policy. Congress, however, rarely follows it to the letter and often ignores large swaths of it.

If Musk and Ramaswamy’s proposals go a completely different route, it could create confusion about what exactly it is the Trump administration wants lawmakers to do and could bog down any support they might get on Capitol Hill.

But simply mirroring what’s already in the budget request would lead to a question about whether or not Musk and Ramaswamy serve any real purpose.

“If you go back and look at the budgets from Trump’s first term … they averaged about $1.6 trillion in cuts over a 10-year budget window,” Snyderman said. “And at least for the first two years, those were presented to a GOP trifecta as well and not implemented as policy.”

Snyderman said Musk and Ramaswamy will likely want to do something other than reinvent the wheel by simply republishing the hundreds of government efficiency and spending cuts proposed over the years by the Congressional Budget Office, the Government Accountability Office and inspectors general.

Those groups have given lawmakers and presidents plenty of recommendations to reduce waste, fraud and abuse. But government officials don’t always act on their suggestions.

“There have been so many resources over the years doing just this — proposing smart, sensible, but tough pills to swallow when it comes to government efficiency,” Snyderman said. “What I think it’s going to really boil down to is what’s politically palatable through legislative or executive action. And where as a nation we’re willing to make those trade-offs in service to improve our fiscal outlook and trying to get a handle on the national debt.”

One of the more recent examples, she said, was the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office’s release of a detailed, 116-page report on ways that lawmakers could reduce the deficit in mid-December.

Impoundment law

If Republicans disagree with Musk and Ramaswamy’s suggestions or only put a few of them in place, it could lead Trump to try to cut spending unilaterally.

Such a decision would create considerable issues for Republicans, since it would violate the Impoundment Control Act and potentially set a new precedent that future Democratic presidents could use to ignore Congress on conservative spending priorities.

That Impoundment Control Act, enacted after then-President Richard Nixon refused to spend billions approved by lawmakers, essentially says a president must distribute money Congress has approved for various federal departments and agencies. It also gives the president a couple of paths to ask lawmakers to cut spending they’ve already approved, but they must agree.

Russ Vought, who has been nominated as director of the Office of Management and Budget, is likely to press the belief that presidents can unilaterally cancel spending, often called “impoundment.”

The Center for Renewing America, the think tank Vought established following his stint as OMB director during the first Trump administration, has repeatedly argued the Impoundment Control Act is unconstitutional and published a detailed history of how presidents canceled spending before the 1974 law took effect.

The Trump administration ignoring the ICA would likely lead to legal challenges and eventually a Supreme Court ruling.

Checks and balances

North Dakota Sen. John Hoeven, the top Republican on the Agriculture Appropriations Subcommittee, told States Newsroom some of the government efficiency proposals that Musk and Ramaswamy pursue will be able to move through executive action, but said any spending cuts must go through Congress.

“This is a country of 320 million people that all have a different point of view about all these different issues, which is why you’ve got to have the kind of process we have, the checks and balances and all that — to figure out where is there enough support to implement these recommendations,” Hoeven said. “That’s how the system works because you’re talking about something that’s very far-reaching and it’s going to affect people throughout the country.”

Arkansas Sen. John Boozman, the top Republican on the Military Construction-VA spending subcommittee, said he expects there will be a lot of communication between lawmakers, Musk and Ramaswamy about constitutional authority to try to avoid public disagreements, though he didn’t rule that out.

“I think as long as the communication lines are open, we should hopefully end most of that,” he said.

Incoming Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., said during a press conference he expects it will take some time for Musk and Ramaswamy to “scrutinize government operations and figure out where we can achieve savings and efficiencies” before Congress reviews those recommendations and puts them in a bill.

Thune said he would like to see some of those move through the budget reconciliation process that Republicans are planning to use to get around the Senate’s 60-vote legislative filibuster; essentially allowing the GOP to move sweeping policy changes without Democratic input.  

More cooks in Congress

Republicans have talked about cutting government spending for decades, but haven’t used unified control of government to make significant structural reforms in quite some time.

Newly formed groups in the House and Senate will likely provide some support for Musk and Ramaswamy’s proposals, but they may disagree with them as well, or come up with completely separate ideas.

The combination of Musk and Ramaswamy’s DOGE, a soon-to-be-formed House Oversight subcommittee on government efficiency chaired by Georgia Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and the government efficiency caucus could become a too-many-cooks scenario.

The Delivering Outstanding Government Efficiency Caucus already holds several Republican lawmakers among its ranks, but it doesn’t have the jurisdiction that the Appropriations Committee holds. Neither does the Oversight subcommittee.

Iowa Republican Sen. Joni Ernst established the caucus alongside Florida Rep. Aaron Bean and Texas Rep. Pete Sessions

North Carolina’s Ted Budd, Texans John Cornyn and Ted Cruz, Oklahoma’s James Lankford, Utah’s Mike Lee, Kansan Roger Marshall, Ohio’s Bernie Moreno, Missouri’s Eric Schmitt, Florida’s Rick Scott and Alaska’s Dan Sullivan have all joined the group on the Senate side.

House members include Rick Allen of Georgia, Jim Baird of Indiana, Andy Barr of Kentucky, Stephanie Bice of Oklahoma, Josh Brecheen of Oklahoma, Ben Cline of Virginia, Jeff Duncan of South Carolina, Ron Estes of Kansas, Pat Fallon of Texas, Randy Feenstra of Iowa, Scott Franklin of Florida, Carlos Giménez of Florida, Glenn Grothman of Wisconsin, Diana Harshbarger of Tennessee, Doug LaMalfa of California, Nick Langworthy of New York, Debbie Lesko of Arizona, Barry Loudermilk of Georgia, Anna Paulina Luna of Florida, Celeste Maloy of Utah, Tom McClintock of California, Cory Mills of Florida, Dan Newhouse of Washington, Ralph Norman of South Carolina, Gary Palmer of Alabama, David Rouzer of North Carolina, Mike Rulli of Ohio, Maria Elvira Salazar of Florida, Jeff Van Drew of New Jersey, Beth Van Duyne of Texas, Derrick Van Orden of Wisconsin, Tim Walberg of Michigan, Randy Weber of Texas, Daniel Webster of Florida, Roger Williams of Texas and Joe Wilson of South Carolina. 

Social Security legislation passed by the U.S. Senate, which would cost more than $195 billion over 10 years, now goes to President Joe Biden for his signature. (Photo by Getty Images).

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Senate approved a broadly bipartisan bill early Saturday that would increase Social Security benefits for millions of Americans with pensions by ending two of the program’s policies in place for decades — the windfall elimination provision and government pension offset.

The legislation, which would cost more than $195 billion over 10 years, now goes to President Joe Biden for his signature. While he hasn’t released a public endorsement of the bill, extensive support in the House and Senate could signal he’s likely to support the measure becoming law.

The Senate vote was 76-20 and the House vote in November was 327-75.

Maine Republican Sen. Susan Collins said during floor debate Wednesday that a fix for the two provisions has been decades in the making, noting she held the first hearing on the issue in the upper chamber in 2003.

Collins later partnered with the late California Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein to introduce the first version of the bill in 2005, before working with former Maryland Democratic Sen. Barbara Mikulski in 2007 on another version.

“Social Security is the foundation of retirement income for most Americans, yet many teachers, firefighters, police officers and other public servants often see their earned Social Security benefits unfairly reduced by two provisions,” Collins said. 

The windfall elimination provision, she said, “affects public servants who receive a pension from a job not covered by Social Security, but who also worked long enough in another job to qualify for Social Security benefits.”

The government pension offset affects people who worked in jobs that weren’t eligible for Social Security, but were eligible for a spousal benefit. That pension offset, Collins said, can reduce a spouse’s Social Security benefit by two-thirds of the non-covered pension, leading to 70% of those affected by the GPO to lose the entire Social Security benefit.

“This issue is extraordinarily important in my state of Maine because the state’s pension system does not include a Social Security component,” Collins said. “And among those most affected are Maine school teachers.”

Collins called the WEP and the GPO “an unfair, inequitable penalty.” 

Hit to trust fund

North Carolina Republican Sen. Thom Tillis said the bill’s title made it sound like “motherhood and apple pie,” but argued it wasn’t the right approach to address the problem.

He expressed concern the bill would reduce the Social Security trust fund by an additional $200 billion during the next decade, moving up the insolvency date by six months.

“This chamber needs courage and needs to say what needs to be said — we are about to pass an unfunded $200 billion spending package for a trust fund that is likely to go insolvent over the next nine to ten years and we’re going to pretend like somebody else has to fix it,” Tillis said. “Well, when you’re a U.S. senator and you have your election certificate, that falls on us.”

Tillis said he agreed with Collins and others who support the bill that the WEP and the GPO must be fixed, but said that should be part of a larger conversation about addressing Social Security’s upcoming insolvency.

“We do not disagree with what we ultimately need to do,” Tillis said. “This is a disagreement in how to get here and how to have something that assesses the downstream risk. So it is with some trepidation that I come to the floor and criticize the good work of Sen. Collins. But I do it because there is so much riding on us getting this right and having the courage to fix Social Security over the next few years.”

Ohio Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown said during floor debate Wednesday that people who paid into Social Security for the required amount of time should receive their full benefits. 

“Social Security we know is a bedrock of our middle class — it’s retirement security that Americans pay into and earn over a lifetime,” Brown said. “You pay in for 40 quarters, you pay in essentially for 10 years. You’ve earned it. It should be there when you retire.”

Brown said it “makes no sense” that workers in certain public service jobs, like teachers, police officers and firefighters, cannot draw their full benefits. 

“They protect our communities, they teach our kids, they pay into Social Security just like everyone else,” Brown said.

How do these provisions work?

The pension offset reduces a “spousal or widow(er)’s benefits of most people who also receive pensions based on federal, state, or local government employment not covered by Social Security,” according to a report from the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service.

The windfall elimination provision changes the formula to reduce Social Security benefits for people “who are also entitled to pension benefits based on earnings from jobs that were not covered by Social Security,” the report said.

The pension offset affects about 746,000 Americans while the windfall provision affects 2.1 million.

“The share of Social Security beneficiaries affected by the GPO varies widely by state,” the CRS report says. “States with a relatively larger share of GPO-affected beneficiaries are usually those with a larger share of state and local government employees not covered by Social Security or those with more (Civil Service Retirement System) retirees.”

The pension offset has a disproportionate impact on Social Security beneficiaries in Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Missouri, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Ohio, Rhode Island, Texas and Utah. 

The windfall elimination provision affects a larger percentage of residents in Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Rhode Island, Texas, Utah, Virginia and Washington, Wyoming. 

“Similar to the GPO, the share of Social Security beneficiaries affected by the WEP varies by state,” CRS wrote. “Typically, states that have a larger share of state and local government employees not covered by Social Security or more CSRS retirees have a relatively larger share of Social Security beneficiaries affected by the WEP.”

Bipartisan House support

The U.S. House voted 327-75 in November to approve the four-page bill, sponsored by Louisiana Republican Rep. Garret Graves and Virginia Democratic Rep. Abigail Spanberger.

Graves said during floor debate that for 40 years, Social Security worked by “treating people differently, discriminating against a certain set of workers.”

“These are police officers, teachers, firefighters, and other public servants,” Graves said at the time. “I worked side by side with these folks. They are not people who are overpaid. They are not people who are underworked.”

Spanberger called the windfall elimination provision and the government pension offset “two misguided provisions that were added to the Social Security Act in 1983 (and) have denied Americans the retirement security they worked for and expected to receive.”

“For more than 40 years, public servants have tirelessly implored their representatives in Congress to listen to their stories and to correct this glaring injustice,” Spanberger said. “Today, for the first time, Congress will vote on the Social Security Fairness Act, to repeal the WEP and the GPO, and to finally put an end to this theft.”

Opposition to bill

Missouri Republican Rep. Jason Smith, chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, said the two provisions affect around 4% of all Social Security beneficiaries, more than 60% of whom are concentrated in 10 states.

The two provisions, he said, “were put in place more than four decades ago to prevent workers with earnings that were exempt from Social Security payroll taxes from getting more generous treatment from Social Security than workers who spent their whole careers contributing to Social Security.”

“Unfortunately, these policies still result in overly generous benefits for some while unfairly penalizing others,” Smith said, before arguing the bill wasn’t the right way to address the two provisions. 

Smith said that getting rid of the two provisions “without a replacement potentially trades unfair treatment for preferential treatment.”

He also expressed concern about how pulling more money from the Social Security trust fund would impact solvency. 

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated the bill would cost $195.65 billion during the next 10 years and wrote in a letter to Iowa Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley that it would likely move up the Social Security insolvency date by six months.

“If H.R. 82 was enacted, the balance of the (Old-Age and Survivors Insurance) trust fund would, CBO projects, be exhausted roughly half a year earlier than it would be under current law,” CBO Director Phillip L. Swagel wrote. “The agency estimates that under current law, the balance of the OASI trust fund would be exhausted during fiscal year 2033.”

The Social Security trustees report for 2024 says that the program will be able to pay full benefits until 2035. After that, if Congress hasn’t brokered a solution, Social Security would be able to pay about 83% of benefits. 

U.S. Speaker of the House Rep. Mike Johnson, R-La., speaks to members of the press at the U.S. Capitol on Dec. 20, 2024 in Washington, D.C.  (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)

WASHINGTON — Congress finally approved a stopgap spending bill early Saturday that will keep the government open for a few more months, after a raucous 48 hours that served as a preview of what President-elect Donald Trump’s second term in office might look like.

The short-term spending package, the third version of a bill to be released this week, will give lawmakers until mid-March to negotiate agreement on the dozen full-year government funding measures and provide about $100 billion in natural disaster assistance. 

Although it technically was passed by the Senate after the midnight deadline for a shutdown, deputy White House press secretary Emilie Simons said on X that agencies would continue normal operations. 

The House passed the bill Friday evening following a 366-34 vote with one Democrat voting “present.” The Senate voted 85-11 shortly after midnight Saturday. President Joe Biden signed the bill Saturday morning. 

The legislation did not include any language either raising or suspending the debt limit, rejecting a demand by Trump that it be addressed. Congress and Trump will have to deal with that next year when they control the House, Senate and the White House.

The 118-page bill will extend programs in the five-year farm bill through September, giving the House and Senate more time to broker a deal, even though they are already more than a year late.

The package would not block members of Congress from their first cost-of-living salary adjustment since January 2009, boosting lawmakers’ pay next year from $174,000 to a maximum of $180,600.

It does not include a provision considered earlier this week that would have allowed the year-round sale of E15 blended gasoline nationwide in what would have been a win for corn growers and biofuels.

The White House announced during the House vote that Biden supports the legislation.

“While it does not include everything we sought, it includes disaster relief that the President requested for the communities recovering from the storm, eliminates the accelerated pathway to a tax cut for billionaires, and would ensure that the government can continue to operate at full capacity,” press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre wrote. “President Biden supports moving this legislation forward and ensuring that the vital services the government provides for hardworking Americans – from issuing Social Security checks to processing benefits for veterans — can continue as well as to grant assistance for communities that were impacted by devastating hurricanes.”

Appropriators at odds

House Appropriations Chairman Tom Cole, R-Okla., urged support for the bill during floor debate, saying it would avoid a partial government shutdown, provide disaster aid and send economic assistance to farmers.

“Governing by continuing resolution is never ideal, but Congress has a responsibility to keep the government open and operating for the American people,” Cole said. “The alternative, a government shutdown, would be devastating to our national defense and for our constituents and would be a grave mistake.”

Connecticut Democratic Rep. Rosa DeLauro, ranking member on the Appropriations Committee, spoke against the bill and criticized GOP negotiators from walking away from the original, bipartisan version released Tuesday.

She rejected billionaire Elon Musk, a close Trump ally, seemingly calling the shots as if he were an elected lawmaker, though she ultimately voted for passage. 

“The United States Congress has been thrown into pandemonium,” DeLauro said. “It leads you to the question of who is in charge?”

Trump, Musk objections

Democrats and Republicans reached an agreement earlier this week to fund the government, provide disaster aid, extend the agriculture and nutrition programs in the farm bill, extend various health care programs and complete dozens of other items. But Trump intervened, preventing House GOP leaders from putting that bill on the floor for an up-or-down vote. 

Trump and Musk were unsupportive of some of the extraneous provisions in the original bill and Trump began pressing for lawmakers to address the debt limit now rather than during his second term.

House Republicans tried to pass their first GOP-only stopgap bill on Thursday night, but failed following a 174-235 vote, with 38 GOP lawmakers voting against the bill. That bill included a two-year debt limit suspension, but that was dropped from the version passed Friday. 

Speaker Mike Johnson, a Louisiana Republican, said Friday before the vote that the GOP was united on its plan forward.

“We have a unified Republican Conference. There is a unanimous agreement in the room that we need to move forward,” Johnson said following a 90-minute closed-door meeting. “I expect that we will be proceeding forward. We will not have a government shutdown. And we will meet our obligations for our farmers, for the disaster victims all over the country, and for marking sure the military and essential services and everyone who relies on the federal government for a paycheck is paid over the holidays.”

A total of 34 House Republicans voted against the bill. No House Democrats voted against passage.

No shutdown, for now

The House and Senate not agreeing on some sort of stopgap spending bill before the Friday midnight deadline would have led to a funding lapse that would likely have led to a partial government shutdown just as the holidays begin.

During a shutdown, essential government functions that cover the protection of life and property continue, though no federal workers would have received their paychecks until after the shutdown ends. That loss of income would have extended to U.S. troops as well.

“If there is going to be a shutdown of government, let it begin now, under the Biden Administration, not after January 20th, under “TRUMP,” the president-elect posted on social media Friday morning. “This is a Biden problem to solve, but if Republicans can help solve it, they will!”

In a separate post that went up just after 1 a.m. Eastern, Trump doubled down on his insistence that any short-term spending bill suspend the debt limit for another four years or eliminate the borrowing ceiling entirely.

“Congress must get rid of, or extend out to, perhaps, 2029, the ridiculous Debt Ceiling,” Trump wrote. “Without this, we should never make a deal. Remember, the pressure is on whoever is President.”

U.S. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., left, and U.S. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, R-La.,  look on during a menorah lighting ceremony during a Hanukkah reception at the U.S. Capitol Building on Dec. 17, 2024, in Washington, D.C. (Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

WASHINGTON — The U.S. House failed to pass a Republican stopgap spending package Thursday, sharply increasing the odds a partial government shutdown will begin after the current funding bill expires Friday at midnight. 

The 174-235 House vote came less than three hours after GOP leaders released a second stopgap spending bill this week. The first version, released just two days ago, was widely rejected by President-elect Donald Trump as well as his allies on and off Capitol Hill.

A total of 38 GOP lawmakers and 197 Democrats voted against passage. Only two Democrats voted in support of the measure. One Democrat voted “present.”

House Republicans tried to approve the new measure under a process called suspension of the rules, which required at least two-thirds of lawmakers to support the legislation for passage, including Democrats. Trump endorsed this new version, which included a two-year suspension of the debt limit.

GOP leaders could next try to put the failed bill up for a vote under a rule, which requires a simple majority vote to approve, but that path takes a few more steps and isn’t a guarantee this legislation could pass.

House Appropriations Chairman Tom Cole, R-Okla., said during floor debate the bill was necessary to avoid a shutdown and provide disaster aid to states throughout the country.

“We need to provide the necessary disaster recovery aid for states and communities as our fellow citizens rebuild and restore. The relief efforts are ongoing — it will be months, if not years, before life returns to normal,” Cole said.

No input from Democrats

Connecticut Rep. Rosa DeLauro, the top Democrat on the Appropriations Committee, rebuked GOP lawmakers for walking away from the deal both parties reached on the first stopgap package.

“There were things in it that Democrats liked and Republicans did not, and there were things in it that Republicans liked and Democrats would have preferred to leave out. But that is the nature of government funding bills,” DeLauro said. “They require compromise and the support of Democrats and Republicans.”

The legislation House lawmakers were about to vote on had no input from Democrats, she said.

While Republicans have a narrow majority in the House, Democrats control the Senate and the White House, making bipartisan agreement on legislation essential to it becoming law.

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre wrote in a statement released Thursday just before the vote that the GOP was “doing the bidding of their billionaire benefactors at the expense of hardworking Americans.”

“Republicans are breaking their word to support a bipartisan agreement that would lower prescription drug costs and make it harder to offshore jobs to China — and instead putting forward a bill that paves the way for tax breaks for billionaires while cutting critical programs working families count on, from Social Security to Head Start,” she wrote. “President Biden supports the bipartisan agreement to keep the government open, help communities recovering from disasters, and lower costs — not this giveaway for billionaires that Republicans are proposing at the 11th hour.”

Trump calls new bill ‘a very good deal’

The stopgap spending package that failed Thursday night would have kept the government funded through mid-March while boosting disaster aid by about $100 billion.

The legislation would have suspended the nation’s debt limit for an additional two years through January 2027 and given Congress until September to finish the much overdue farm bill.

Trump cheered the new version of the stopgap spending bill before the vote after rejecting the first version released just two days ago.

“Speaker Mike Johnson and the House have come to a very good Deal for the American People,” Trump wrote on social media. “The newly agreed to American Relief Act of 2024 will keep the Government open, fund our Great Farmers and others, and provide relief for those severely impacted by the devastating hurricanes.”

“A VERY important piece, VITAL to the America First Agenda, was added as well – The date of the very unnecessary Debt Ceiling will be pushed out two years, to January 30, 2027,” Trump added. “Now we can Make America Great Again, very quickly, which is what the People gave us a mandate to accomplish.”

Two days of tension

The second stopgap bill came after a dramatic 48 hours that began with the Tuesday night release of a different stopgap spending package before Trump’s ally Elon Musk called on GOP lawmakers to reject the bill their leadership team on Capitol Hill had negotiated over weeks.

Trump then told Republicans to address the debt limit in the package or get rid of it entirely, throwing another complex issue into the mix at the last minute.

The core elements of the stopgap spending package House Republicans released Thursday afternoon were similar to the Tuesday night package, though it dropped dozens of measures, including a provision allowing the nationwide sale of 15% ethanol blended gasoline year round.

The new package, same as the old package, doesn’t include a long-standing provision that prevents members of Congress from receiving a cost of living adjustment. Unless that’s changed, lawmakers would receive a 3.8% raise next year increasing their annual salary from $174,000 to $180,600.

“It removed key provisions to limit the power of pharmaceutical companies, and abandons our bipartisan efforts to ensure American dollars and intellectual property are reinvested in American businesses and workers; instead of fueling the Chinese Communist Party’s technology and capabilities,” DeLauro said during debate.

The new 116-page stopgap spending bill was considerably shorter than the 1,547-page version released Tuesday.

Several new deadlines

The spending package would have given Congress until March 14 to complete work on the dozen annual government funding bills that were supposed to become law by the start of the new fiscal year on Oct. 1.

It would have given the House and Senate until Sept. 30, 2025, to reach agreement on the five-year farm bill, which lawmakers were supposed to negotiate a new version of more than a year ago.

The legislation would suspend the debt limit through Jan. 30, 2027.

The bill includes tens of billions in emergency spending to help communities throughout the country recover from various natural disasters, including wildfires, tornadoes and hurricanes.

A summary of the bill, released by House Democrats on Tuesday, showed the Federal Emergency Management Agency and Department of Agriculture would receive the bulk of the natural disaster recovery funding. House Republicans didn’t appear to have altered any of the original funding levels for disaster aid in the updated Thursday version.

The USDA would get $33.5 billion in funding, with $21 billion of that designated for disaster assistance and another $10 billion for economic assistance to farmers and producers.

Other agriculture assistance funding would go toward the Agriculture Research Service, Emergency Watershed Protection Program, Emergency Forest Restoration Program and Rural Development Disaster Assistance Fund, among several others.

The Department of Homeland Security would receive $30.8 billion in funding, with $29 billion for the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s disaster relief fund.

An additional $1.5 billion would go to the Hermit’s Peak and Calf Canyon Fire fund “to continue efforts to support families who suffered damages due to the April 2022 wildfire,” according to the summary. 

The wildfire was the largest in New Mexico’s history and caused about $5.14 billion in damages, according to a report released this week.

The Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Community Development Block Grant program for disaster recovery would receive $12 billion in additional funding.

Another $8 billion would go to the Transportation Department to “reimburse states and territories for damage from natural disasters to roads and bridges in the National Highway System, including 100 percent of costs associated with rebuilding the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore,” according to Democrats’ summary.

The Forest Service would get $6.4 billion for ongoing recovery efforts from natural disasters that took place in 2022, 2023 and this year. The National Park Service would receive $2.3 billion as part of the Department of the Interior’s $3 billion total.

The Defense Department would get $3.4 billion to repair damages related to natural disasters. The Army Corps of Engineers would receive $1.5 billion for repairs and to increase resiliency.

The Small Business Administration would receive $2.25 billion for disaster loans.

Filibuster threat

Shortly before House GOP leaders announced their second stopgap package, North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis and South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham committed to holding a talking filibuster to delay passage of any stopgap funding measures if that bill doesn’t include substantial disaster aid.

The two, along with North Carolina Sen. Ted Budd, all of whom are Republicans, held a press conference Thursday afternoon to urge GOP leaders in the House to keep the roughly $100 billion in emergency disaster aid in any short-term spending package.

They also rejected calls from some members of their own party to find ways to pay for the new emergency spending, saying that’s not how disaster aid packages have traditionally been handled.

“When you’re in the middle of a crisis, I don’t think anybody’s going to want to hear somebody come to the floor and talk about the fiscal responsibility of giving these people a home again, or giving them an opportunity to open up a business again and employ people,” Tillis said. “So, no I don’t think $10 billion or $20 billion, and ‘I promise we’ll do something more in March’ is an acceptable solution. We know what the need is today. It was negotiated in a package and it needs to be in a package to get my support to get out of here.” 

Graham sought to explain the realities of divided government and pointed out that even when Republicans control the House and Senate next year, they’ll still need Democratic support on spending bills.

“We need 60 votes to get it done in the Senate,” Graham said, referring to the chamber’s legislative filibuster, which requires at least 60 lawmakers vote to advance bills toward final passage.

“Mike Johnson is going to have to pick up a handful, at least, of Democrats, because there’s some Republicans who will never vote for anything,” Graham added.

Tillis was unable to answer a question about whether a partial government shutdown beginning Saturday at 12:01 a.m. would affect the federal government’s ongoing natural disaster response in his home state.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency, Department of Agriculture, Department of Transportation and numerous federal departments would be required to follow their shutdown guidance if Congress doesn’t fund the government on time.

Those departments and agencies divide up their staffs into excepted employees, whose jobs address the protection of life or property, and non-excepted employees, who don’t.

Neither category of federal employee gets paid until after the shutdown ends.

American Federation of Government Employees National President Everett Kelley released a written statement Thursday that a shutdown would harm federal workers who “inspect our food, protect our borders, ensure safe travel during the holidays, and provide relief to disaster victims.”

“Over 642,000 of them are veterans of our armed services,” Kelley wrote. “Allowing them to go without a paycheck over the holidays is unacceptable.”

Some kind of spending bill must become law before Friday at midnight, otherwise a partial government shutdown would begin. Shown is the U.S. Capitol on Nov. 26, 2024. (Photo by Shauneen Miranda/States Newsroom)

WASHINGTON — U.S. House Democrats released details early Thursday on how much federal disaster aid each state would lose if Republicans drop it from a stopgap spending bill that’s been rejected by their own members as well as President-elect Donald Trump.

The state-by-state breakdown of roughly $100 billion came just hours after Trump and many of his closest allies, including tech billionaire Elon Musk, urged GOP leaders in Congress to walk away from a bipartisan year-end spending package.

That short-term spending bill, or some version of it, must become law before Friday at midnight, otherwise a partial government shutdown would begin. A partial shutdown would halt paychecks to federal employees and U.S. troops just ahead of the holiday season.

The breakdown shows states battered by hurricanes and other natural disasters such as California, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Maryland, Minnesota, Nebraska, New York, North Carolina, South Carolina, Texas and Virginia would miss out on more than $2 billion each, though the figures for the larger states go above $10 billion.

Misinformation over pay raise

The stalemate over the short-term spending bill began shortly after congressional leaders released the 1,547-page package on Tuesday evening.

Speaker Mike Johnson defended some of the extraneous measures during a press conference Tuesday before it was publicly released and during a Fox News interview Wednesday morning.

The Louisiana Republican reinforced the need for disaster aid and economic assistance to farmers, though the spending package includes dozens of unrelated items, including a provision that would allow the nationwide sale of 15% ethanol blended gasoline year round.

The bill also dropped a long-standing provision that blocked members of Congress from getting an annual cost of living adjustment salary increase.

There was considerable misinformation Wednesday around how much of a boost in pay lawmakers would stand to receive next Congress, riling up people who didn’t have access to the correct figures.

The incorrect numbers were spread by many online, but received special attention from Musk, who advocated shutting down the government before Trump and Vice President-elect J.D. Vance weighed in later Wednesday.

Lawmakers would receive a maximum 3.8% salary increase, boosting their annual pay from $174,000 to $180,600, according to a report released in September by the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service. Lawmakers haven’t received a COLA increase since January 2009.

Sudden debt limit demand

The full package, which congressional leaders and committees spent weeks negotiating, would have given Congress until March 14 to negotiate a bicameral agreement on the dozen annual government funding bills that were supposed to become law by the start of the fiscal year on Oct. 1.

Republicans wanted to hold over the full-year spending bills until they have unified control of government next year.

The package would have given lawmakers until Sept. 30 to work out a deal on the five-year farm bill, which they should have completed work on well over a year ago.

Trump pressed Wednesday for lawmakers to add the debt limit to negotiations, with just about two days left before the shutdown deadline. Working out a bipartisan agreement to raise or suspend the nation’s borrowing authority typically takes months of talks.

Trump said he didn’t want to have to deal with the debt limit debate once his second administration begins on Jan. 20 and would rather have had it on President Joe Biden’s record.

Trump told NBC News on Thursday morning that he wanted Congress to eliminate the debt limit entirely, marking a substantial shift in how Republicans have approached the cap on borrowing.

The GOP typically leverages the debt ceiling debate to push for spending cuts, though not always successfully.

Democratic leaders in Congress maintain they are not going to renegotiate with Republicans, which would prevent any Republican-only bill from becoming law before the deadline. While the GOP controls the House, Democrats right now run the Senate and hold the White House.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, a New York Democrat, said Thursday morning in a floor speech that GOP infighting over the bipartisan bill was risking an unnecessary government shutdown.

“Unfortunately, it seems Republicans are in shambles over in the House,” Schumer said. “But as they try to piece things together, they should remember one thing — the only way to get things done is through bipartisanship.”

Jeffries urges vote on stopgap

House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., on didn’t entirely rule out lawmakers from his party voting for a slimmed-down stopgap spending bill, but urged GOP leaders to stick with the version they spent weeks negotiating.

“This reckless Republican-driven shutdown can be avoided if House Republicans will simply do what is right for the American people and stick with the bipartisan agreement that they themselves negotiated,” Jeffries said at a Thursday press conference.

Trump’s insistence that the package address the debt limit in some way was “premature at best,” he said.

Jeffries also said Democrats would not give Johnson extra votes to secure the speaker’s gavel in January, should several of his GOP colleagues refuse to vote for him during a floor vote.

Numerous far-right Republicans have hinted or said directly that they might not support Johnson continuing on as speaker due to their grievances over provisions in the stopgap spending bill.

Republicans will have an extremely narrow House majority next year, meaning Johnson can only lose a few votes before the GOP would begin the third prolonged speaker race in just two years.

Former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy began this session of Congress in January 2023 going through 15 floor votes before he was able to secure the votes needed to become speaker.

Republicans voting to oust him a little over a year ago led to several GOP speaker nominees, who were unable to get the 218 votes needed to become speaker on a floor vote or who opted to not even try.

Republicans nominated House Majority Leader Steve Scalise of Louisiana, Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan and Minnesota’s Tom Emmer before landing on Johnson, who was able to win a floor vote.

Musk for speaker?

Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who tried but failed to oust Johnson as speaker in May, has been leading the charge to select someone else, possibly Musk. The Constitution is silent on the question of whether the speaker must be a member of the House.

“The establishment needs to be shattered just like it was yesterday,” Greene wrote on social media. “This could be the way.”

This report has been updated with state-by-state numbers revised by U.S. House Democrats later Thursday morning.

 

U.S. House Majority Whip Rep. Tom Emmer, R-Minn., left, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, R-La., center, and House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, R-La., take part in a news conference at the U.S. Capitol on Dec. 17, 2024 in Washington, D.C. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)

WASHINGTON — Efforts to prevent a partial government shutdown from starting this weekend fell apart Wednesday when numerous Republicans, on and off Capitol Hill, expressed their frustration with the many extraneous provisions added to a short-term funding package.

Complicating the situation, Vice President-elect J.D. Vance posted on social media that he and President-elect Donald Trump believe Republicans should leverage the two days left before a shutdown to get Democrats to raise or suspend the debt limit.

The catch-all, year-end spending legislation released Tuesday would not only fund the government through March 14, but provide an extension of the agriculture and nutrition programs in the farm bill through Sept. 30. The 1,547-page package also holds tens of billions in emergency aid for communities recovering from natural disasters.

But it includes several sections that have angered far-right members of the Republican Party as well as Trump and his allies. They argue the extra provisions that don’t relate to essential programs should be scrapped, throwing a wrench in weeks of negotiations between the Republican House and Democratic Senate.

How a shutdown works

Congress must pass a short-term spending bill before midnight on Friday when the current stopgap spending bill expires, otherwise every single federal department and agency would be required to shut down.

That would mean federal employees categorized as exempt would have to work without pay and employees categorized as non-exempt would be furloughed.

Unlike the 35-day partial government shutdown that took place during Trump’s first administration, this shutdown would affect larger swaths of the federal government.

Congress had approved several of the full-year appropriations bills ahead of the 2018-2019 shutdown insulating the departments of Defense, Education, Energy, Health and Human Services, Labor and Veterans Affairs.

Lawmakers had also approved the Legislative Branch spending bill, ensuring members of Congress and their staff were paid throughout the shutdown.

This time around, failing to pass some sort of stopgap spending bill ahead of the Friday midnight deadline would mean cutting off U.S. troops from pay, not to mention dozens of other national security agencies like Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

It could also wreak havoc on the numerous federal departments and agencies assisting communities with response and recovery efforts stemming from natural disasters, including hurricanes Helene and Milton.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency, Department of Agriculture and Small Business Administration would all be affected by a funding lapse, as would anyone who receives funding from those programs.

Debt limit

The debt limit was not part of the spending negotiations until Wednesday when Vance insisted it be included in any type of stopgap spending bill.

The current suspension of the debt limit is set to expire Jan. 1, but lawmakers will likely have a few months where the Treasury Department can use accounting maneuvers called extraordinary measures before the country would default.

Vance, however, doesn’t seem inclined to deal with the country’s borrowing authority next year.

“The most foolish and inept thing ever done by Congressional Republicans was allowing our country to hit the debt ceiling in 2025,” Vance wrote in his social media post. “It was a mistake and is now something that must be addressed.”

Vance wrote that addressing “the debt ceiling is not great but we’d rather do it on Biden’s watch.”

“If Democrats won’t cooperate on the debt ceiling now, what makes anyone think they would do it in June during our administration?” Vance wrote. “Let’s have this debate now. And we should pass a streamlined spending bill that doesn’t give Chuck Schumer and the Democrats everything they want.”

Elon Musk, a billionaire whom Trump has tasked with trying to make the federal government more efficient through steep spending cuts, wrote on social media that no legislation should move through Congress until Jan. 20, after Trump’s inauguration.

That would create havoc for hundreds of government programs, including the agriculture and nutrition assistance programs within the farm bill.

“Any member of the House or Senate who votes for this outrageous spending bill deserves to be voted out in 2 years!,” Musk wrote.

While every member of the House who chooses to run for reelection will campaign during the 2026 midterm elections, just one-third of the Senate will be up for reelection since they are elected to six-year terms. 

North Carolina Republican Sen. Thom Tillis posted on social media that any short-term spending bill, sometimes called a continuing resolution or CR, must carry disaster aid to help his home state recover from a devastating hurricane.

“If Congressional leaders intend to leave DC before the holidays without passing disaster recovery, they should be prepared to spend Christmas in the Capitol,” Tillis wrote. “I’ll use every tool available to block a CR that fails Western North Carolina communities in need of long-term certainty.”

West Virginia Republican Sen. Shelley Moore Capito said during a brief interview she wants to see disaster aid remain in a stopgap spending bill.

“I went down and saw the Asheville disaster,” she said “I think we need to get the disaster aid to those affected areas, some of which are in West Virginia, believe it or not.”

White House reaction

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre released a written statement Wednesday evening saying that “Republicans need to stop playing politics with this bipartisan agreement or they will hurt hardworking Americans and create instability across the country.”

“President-elect Trump and Vice President-elect Vance ordered Republicans to shut down the government and they are threatening to do just that—while undermining communities recovering from disasters, farmers and ranchers, and community health centers,” she wrote. “Triggering a damaging government shutdown would hurt families who are gathering to meet with their loved ones and endanger the basic services Americans from veterans to Social Security recipients rely on. A deal is a deal. Republicans should keep their word.”

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Wednesday a Louisiana resident is believed to have been infected with a severe case of bird flu through sick or dead birds on their property that were not part of a commercial poultry flock. In this photo, a seagull flies against a coastal backdrop. (Photo by Adrijan Mosesku/Getty Images)

WASHINGTON — A Louisiana resident has contracted the country’s first severe case of highly pathogenic avian influenza in a human, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced Wednesday.

The unidentified person is believed to have been infected with the virus through sick or dead birds on their property that were not part of a commercial poultry flock, though federal public health officials declined to provide more details on a call with reporters, citing patient confidentiality. The virus is also called bird flu, or H5N1.

“Previously, the majority of cases of H5N1 in the United States presented with mild illness, such as conjunctivitis and mild respiratory symptoms, and fully recovered,” Demetre Daskalakis, director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases at the CDC, said during the call.

“Over the 20-plus years of global experience with this virus, H5 infection has previously been associated with severe illness in other countries, including illnesses that resulted in death in up to 50% of cases,” Daskalakis said. “The demonstrated potential for this virus to cause severe illness in people continues to highlight the importance of the joint, coordinated U.S. federal response, the One Health response, to address the current animal outbreaks in dairy cows and poultry and limit the potential of transmission of this virus to humans through animal contact.”

Despite the Louisiana case, Daskalakis said on the call, the CDC believes the threat to the general public remains low.

The Louisiana Department of Health wrote in a press release posted Friday that the person lives in the southwestern region of the state and was hospitalized, but didn’t provide additional information.

Emma Herrock, communications director for the Louisiana Department of Health, told States Newsroom in an email Wednesday the “patient is experiencing severe respiratory illness related to H5N1 infection and is currently hospitalized in critical condition.”

The patient, she said, “is reported to have underlying medical conditions and is over the age of 65.”

61 confirmed cases in humans

The CDC has confirmed 61 human cases of H5N1 throughout nine states this year, but the Louisiana patient is the first severe case of bird flu in someone within the United States. 

Daskalakis declined to say during the call why the Louisiana case is considered severe when a Missouri resident who was hospitalized due to bird flu was not classified the same way.

The Missouri patient, who was admitted to a hospital in August, had significant underlying medical conditions, according to public health officials. That person experienced “acute symptoms of chest pain, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea and weakness,” according to the CDC.

The CDC declined to say Wednesday what symptoms the Louisiana patient was experiencing, citing privacy concerns.

Bird flu has affected wild birds and poultry flocks throughout the United States for years, but it wasn’t until March that dairy cattle began becoming infected with the virus.

The dairy outbreak has affected 865 herds through 16 states this year, according to data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. There have been 315 new cases in dairy cattle during the last month, with the vast majority of those diagnoses in California, while one herd each tested positive in Nevada and Texas.

Bird flu has affected nearly 124 million poultry throughout 49 states, according to USDA.

Milk testing

Eric Deeble, deputy under secretary for marketing and regulatory programs at USDA, said on the call the nationwide milk testing strategy launched earlier this month has expanded to several states.

The program requires anyone responsible for a dairy farm — such as a bulk milk transporter, bulk milk transfer station, or dairy processing facility — to share unpasteurized or raw milk samples when requested.

California, Colorado, Indiana, Maryland, Michigan, Mississippi, Montana, New York, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Vermont and Washington are the 13 states currently enrolled in the program, he said.

In California, Gov. Gavin Newsom on Wednesday proclaimed a state of emergency “to further enhance the state’s preparedness & accelerate the ongoing cross-agency response efforts,” the governor’s press office said. 

“These states represent a geographically conversant list of states, some of which have been affected by H5N1 in dairy cows, and some of which have never detected the disease,” Deeble said. “Additionally, these first two groups of states represent eight of the top 15 dairy-producing states in the country, accounting for nearly 50% of U.S. dairy production. We anticipate continuing to enroll additional states in the coming weeks.”

The USDA also continues to have a voluntary bulk milk testing program for any farms planning to ship dairy cattle across state lines to provide an easier pathway to establishing the herd is negative for H5N1, instead of having to test each cow individually.  

 Congressional leaders unveiled a catch-all, year-end package Tuesday night that would provide disaster aid along with stopgap funding to keep the government running through mid-March. Heavy rains from Hurricane Helene caused record flooding and damage on Sept. 28 in Asheville, North Carolina. (Photo by Melissa Sue Gerrits/Getty Images)

WASHINGTON — Congressional leaders unveiled a catch-all, year-end package Tuesday that would provide more than $100 billion in disaster aid and give lawmakers more time to wrap up overdue work on government funding, the farm bill and a handful of other issues they decided not to finish.

The disaster aid section of the package will bolster funding for the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Department of Agriculture, the Small Business Administration and several other federal agencies to continue their ongoing response efforts following a slew of natural disasters during the last two years.

The 1,547-page package would give Congress until mid-March to complete work on the dozen annual government funding bills that were supposed to become law by Oct. 1.

It also extends the farm bill through Sept. 30, 2025. In a victory for corn growers, the bill includes a provision to allow nationwide sales of a gasoline blend that includes up to 15% ethanol throughout the year.

House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Louisiana Republican, said during a press conference before the bill was publicly released he had hoped the year-end stopgap spending bill would simply extend current funding until next year, when the GOP will hold the House, Senate and White House.

“But a couple of intervening things have occurred. We had, as we describe them, acts of God. We had these massive hurricanes if you know, in the late fall — Helene and Milton and other disasters,” Johnson said. “We have to make sure that the Americans who were devastated by these hurricanes get the relief they need. So we are adding to this a disaster relief package and that’s critically important.”

“Also important is the devastation that is being faced by our farming community,” he said. “The agriculture sector is really struggling. They’ve had effectively three lost years and commodity prices are a bit of a mess. And you have input costs that have skyrocketed because of Bidenomics.”

Johnson defended his decision to attach the other provisions in the stopgap spending bill, also known as a continuing resolution. Numerous Republicans have expressed frustration with his choice to bundle all the bills together in one package, instead of moving them individually.

“We have to be able to help those who are in these dire straits and that’s what the volume of the pages to this is,” Johnson said.

House Appropriations Committee ranking member Rosa DeLauro, a Connecticut Democrat, said in a written statement she would support the bill when that chamber votes on it later this week.

“While I — and so many of my colleagues on both sides of the aisle — wish we were voting on full-year funding bills, I am pleased that this package includes important resources for American farmers, emergency defense investments, investments in the Virginia Class submarine program, and increased funding for child care,” DeLauro wrote. “It also includes outbound investment protections I have long fought for to prevent American dollars from fueling the Chinese Communist Party’s policies with our capital and capabilities.”

“However, I am concerned that we could not agree on additional funding for veterans health care, and we must be vigilant in ensuring that the incoming Administration does not ration care promised to every affected veteran,” DeLauro added. “The passage of this bill should mark the beginning of negotiations on final 2025 funding bills. The start of a new Congress does not change the reality that any funding bills will still need the support of Democrats and Republicans in the House and in the Senate in order to become law.”

Hurricanes, tornadoes, bridge collapse

President Joe Biden asked Congress to approve nearly $100 billion in emergency aid to bolster the accounts of several agencies that are helping residents, small businesses, farmers, and local and state governments recover from dozens of natural disasters.

The emergency supplemental request came shortly after Hurricanes Helene and Milton caused widespread devastation throughout Alabama, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia.

The funding will also help communities recover following tornadoes throughout the Midwest; the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore, Maryland; and severe storms in Alaska, Connecticut, Illinois, Louisiana, New Mexico, Pennsylvania and Virginia.

The disaster response section of the spending package would include:

• $29 billion for FEMA’s disaster relief fund

• $21 billion for disaster assistance for farmers and ranchers

• $12 billion for the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s community development block grant program for disaster assistance

• $10 billion in economic assistance for farmers and ranchers

• $8 billion for the Department of Transportation to provide disaster relief for federal highways

• $3.25 billion for State and Tribal Assistance Grants for water infrastructure repairs.

• $2.2 billion for the Small Business Administration’s disaster loan program

• $1.3 billion to replace the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore, Maryland

Congress headed for finish line

The package is expected to pass the House and Senate before members depart for their holiday break on Friday. Biden is expected to sign the bill into law.

When Congress convenes again on Jan. 3 for the start of the 119th Congress, the Senate will flip from Democratic to Republican control. The House will remain red, though with a slightly smaller majority and very little, possibly no, room for GOP lawmakers to vote against partisan bills.

Republicans hope they can use unified control of Washington, which will begin after President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration on Jan. 20, to move through sweeping changes to federal spending and policy.

That is one of the reasons, Congress included a second continuing resolution in the package released this week. That stopgap spending bill will avoid a partial government shutdown until at least March 14.

That part of the bill is necessary since Congress has brushed off its responsibility to fund the government by failing to complete work on the dozen annual appropriations bills before the start of the fiscal year on Oct. 1.

Lawmakers approved another stopgap spending bill in late September to keep funding levels mostly flat through Dec. 20, but did not use the extra time to negotiate a compromise between the Republican House and Democratic Senate.

GOP leaders have opted to hold over those full-year government funding measures until they control both chambers of Congress next year, in hopes they’ll be able to more closely align the final versions of the 12 bills to their goals.

But Republican leaders will still need Democratic support to get the final spending bills, or another stopgap spending bill, through the Senate next year if they want to avoid a partial government shutdown.

The Senate requires at least 60 lawmakers to vote to advance major legislation toward a final, simple majority passage vote. The GOP will hold 53 seats next year, short of the requirement. Several Republican senators have also staked their reputations on consistently voting against any spending bill, making Democratic votes necessary to avoid a shutdown.

Republicans in the House will also likely need Democrats to move government funding bills through that chamber, given they too have a significant faction of members who refuse to vote for the full-year spending bills and often vote against the short-term stopgap bills as well. 

Farm bill extension

The end-of-year catchall bill released Tuesday also includes another extension for the farm bill through next year, a new version of which Congress was supposed to pass more than a year ago.

Instead, lawmakers in both chambers have prioritized other interests, delaying work on the legislation that authorizes agriculture and nutrition programs.

Congress last approved a farm bill in December 2018, which the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said at the time would cost $428 billion during the five years it was supposed to cover.

Funding for nutrition, crop insurance, farm commodity programs and conservation accounted for about 99% of the mandatory spending in the law, according to a report from the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service.

Nutrition has become one of the higher price tag items in the farm bill during the last few decades and accounted for about $326 billion of the mandatory spending in the 2018 farm bill. Another $38 billion went to crop insurance, $31 billion to commodities and $29 billion to conservation during the five-year window that has since lapsed.

The nutrition funding goes toward several federal food programs for lower income people, including the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program or SNAP and the Emergency Food Assistance Program. 

The Republican House and Democratic Senate have been unable to work through their differences on a new five-year farm bill, despite giving themselves more than a year of extra time.

The bill lawmakers are set to approve this month will give unified Republicans in control of Washington another year to get the work done.

D.C. Deputy Bureau Chief Jacob Fischler contributed to this report. 

U.S. President-elect Donald Trump speaks at a news conference at Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort on Dec. 16, 2024 in Palm Beach, Florida. (Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)

WASHINGTON — President-elect Donald Trump pledged Monday to keep the polio vaccine available throughout his presidency, but didn’t extend that protection to other vaccines, saying he expects his administration will look closely at safety — something the U.S. Food and Drug Administration already does before granting approval.

Trump’s comments came during an hour-long press conference where he hinted at trying to privatize the Postal Service and said he planned to file a lawsuit against a presidential preference poll published by The Des Moines Register that found him trailing Vice President Kamala Harris in the last days before the election.

Trump, who will take the oath of office on Jan. 20, also said he would solve the war between Ukraine and Russia and establish the Middle East as a “good place,” though he declined to provide details.

“Starting on day one, we’ll implement a rapid series of bold reforms to restore our nation to full prosperity,” Trump said in his first formal back-and-forth with reporters since the Nov. 5 election. “We’re going to go full prosperity and to build the greatest economy the world has ever seen, just as we had just a short time ago.”

Trump said he expects Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the vaccine denier he has said he will nominate to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, will be “much less radical” than some people expect.

Trump said Kennedy and others in his administration will file reports sharing what they think about vaccines, but didn’t say what actions might be taken after those reports are released.

Trump said he didn’t like the idea of mandating vaccines, but didn’t go as far as saying he’d change vaccine policy for parts of the federal government, like the Defense Department, which has numerous requirements for troops, including the so-called peanut butter shot.

Kennedy is notorious for spreading misinformation about vaccine safety, one of the many issues that could imperil his attempts to garner U.S. Senate confirmation and actually lead HHS.

Trump said he wanted this administration to look at why autism rates have increased in recent decades. Multiple research studies have debunked any connections between vaccines and autism.

His administration, Trump said, would also look at ways to lower the costs of health care and prescription drugs within the United States, but he didn’t provide details.

Lawsuit threats

Trump doubled down on his grievances with news organizations during the press conference at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, saying he planned to file several lawsuits in the days and weeks ahead against people or organizations he believes have wronged him.

The announcement came just days after Trump’s legal team reached a settlement with ABC News in which the news organization agreed to pay $15 million to Trump’s presidential library.

The suit centered on anchor George Stephanopoulos saying during an interview that a New York state jury had found Trump liable for the rape of writer E. Jean Carroll, when the jury had found him civilly liable for “sexual misconduct.”

Trump said during his press conference that he would likely file lawsuits against Iowa pollster J. Ann Selzer, the news show “60 Minutes” and the Pulitzer Prize organization for awards given to the New York Times and Washington Post. 

“In my opinion it was fraud and election interference,” he said of the Iowa Poll published by the Des Moines newspaper. “She’s got me right, always. She’s a very good pollster. She knows what she was doing, and she then quit before and we’ll probably be filing a major lawsuit against them today or tomorrow.”

Selzer, a longtime pollster, said last week on Iowa PBS that she hadn’t yet figured out what went wrong with the poll she released just ahead of Election Day that showed Democratic presidential nominee Harris outperforming Trump in the state by 3 percentage points. Trump won Iowa in the election with 56% of the vote to her 42.7%.

“There wasn’t anything that we saw that needed to be fixed. The reality is that more people supporting Donald Trump turned out,” she said. “I’m eagerly awaiting the secretary of state’s turnout reports that will happen in January to see what we can glean from that.

“But there wasn’t an adjustment to my data when we saw that it was going to be a shocker that I would have said okay, let’s adjust it. It’s not like I know ahead of time what the right numbers are going to be in the future. So, you kind of take the data designed to reveal to me our best shot at what the future is going to look like.”

Selzer said during the PBS interview that she was “mystified” about allegations that she sought to interfere in the election results through the poll. Carol Hunter, executive editor of The Des Moines Register, could not be reached for comment.

Trump said he also planned to sue the CBS News program “60 Minutes” over how it edited an interview with Harris that was released before the election.

He said he wants to sue the Pulitzer Prize organization for awarding staff at The New York Times and The Washington Post the national reporting award in 2018 for their reporting on “Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and its connections to the Trump campaign, the President-elect’s transition team and his eventual administration.”

“I want them to take back the Pulitzer Prizes and pay big damages,” Trump said.

The Pulitzer Prize Board announced in July 2022 that it would not revoke the prizes in response to an inquiry from Trump and two independent reviews of the work.

“Both reviews were conducted by individuals with no connection to the institutions whose work was under examination, nor any connection to each other,” the board wrote. “The separate reviews converged in their conclusions: that no passages or headlines, contentions or assertions in any of the winning submissions were discredited by facts that emerged subsequent to the conferral of the prizes.

“The 2018 Pulitzer Prizes in National Reporting stand.”

Israel and Ukraine

Trump said during his press conference that he would address the ongoing Israel-Gaza war as well as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine once he takes office, but didn’t say exactly how he’d encourage those countries to end their conflicts.

Trump said he believed that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is doing a “fantastic job” and said he thinks his second administration will be able to solve longstanding issues throughout the Middle East.

“I think the Middle East will be in a good place,” Trump said. “I think actually more difficult is going to be the Russia-Ukraine situation. I see that as more difficult.”

Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022 and has refused to leave the country’s borders. In the years since Russia launched a war, numerous organizations, including the United Nations, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have all made allegations of war crimes against Russia.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken released a statement in February 2023 that “Russia’s forces and other Russian officials have committed crimes against humanity in Ukraine.”

Russia, he wrote, had engaged in torture, rape, execution-style killings and “deported hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian civilians to Russia, including children who have been forcibly separated from their families.”  

Trump said during his press conference that he didn’t believe the Biden administration should have allowed Ukraine to shoot long-range missiles into Russia’s sovereign territory and said he may reverse the policy once in office.

“I thought it was a very stupid thing to do,” Trump said of the Biden administration’s policy. 

On the Israel-Hamas war, Trump declined to clarify exactly what he meant when he said there would be “hell to pay” if Hamas had not released the remaining hostages abducted in October 2023 before Trump took over the Oval Office. He simply added that it “would not be pleasant.”

Postal Service, TikTok, primary challengers

Trump left many questions about his agenda unanswered following the press conference.

He declined to clarify whether he would press to privatize the U.S. Postal Service, saying only that there was “talk” about severing the agency and that his team is “looking at that.”

He didn’t divulge whether his administration would seek to force social media giant TikTok to divest from its Chinese parent company if it wants to remain operational within the United States. TikTok on Monday asked the U.S. Supreme Court for a stay of an appeals court order preserving a bipartisan law forcing ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, to cease operations in the United States.

“We’ll take a look at that,” Trump said.

He left open supporting Republican primary challenges against GOP senators who don’t support his nominees to lead federal departments and agencies.

A senator voting against one of his nominees “for political reasons or stupid reasons” would likely earn them a primary challenger, he said. But Trump added that wouldn’t have anything to do with him.

Trump also declined to say whether he expected Chinese leader Xi Jinping to attend his inauguration after extending an invitation.

“If he’d like to come, I’d love to have him, but there’s been nothing much discussed,” Trump said. “I have had discussions with him, letters, etc, etc, at a very high level. You know, we had a very good relationship until COVID. COVID didn’t end the relationship, but it was a bridge too far for me.”

Trump then added he believes Xi is “an amazing person.”

Iowa Capital Dispatch reporter Robin Opsahl contributed to this report.

Former House Speaker Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., arrives to speak on stage during the third day of the Democratic National Convention at the United Center on Aug. 21, 2024, in Chicago, Illinois.  (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

WASHINGTON — Former U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi underwent hip replacement surgery over the weekend after falling while on an official trip to Europe marking the 80th anniversary of the Battle of the Bulge.

“Speaker Pelosi is grateful to U.S. military staff at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center at Landstuhl Army Base and medical staff at Hospital Kirchberg in Luxembourg for their excellent care and kindness,” spokesperson Ian Krager said in a statement released Saturday.

The surgery announcement came one day after the California Democrat’s office said she had sustained an undisclosed “injury” while in Luxembourg. The Associated Press reported that Pelosi had fallen.

Krager said in the statement released over the weekend that following surgery Pelosi was “enjoying the overwhelming outpouring of prayers and well wishes and is ever determined to ensure access to quality health care for all Americans.”

Pelosi, 84, became a member of Congress in June 1987 and is currently the fifth-most-senior member of the House.

Kentucky Republican Rep. Hal Rogers, New Jersey Republican Rep. Chris Smith, Maryland Democratic Rep. Steny Hoyer and Ohio Democratic Rep. Marcy Kaptur are the only House members who have been in the chamber longer than Pelosi, according to the House Clerk’s office. 

Pelosi was the top Democrat in the House from January 2007 through January 2023, holding the speaker’s gavel when Democrats were in the majority and the role of minority leader when the party was in the minority.

She stepped aside from leadership at the beginning of this Congress, but remains a member of the House and a significant part of Democratic politics.

Voters in California’s 11th Congressional District, which covers parts of San Francisco, reelected Pelosi to another two-year term in the House during November’s elections. 

U.S. House Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., leaves a meeting with Jordan's King Abdullah II at the Capitol on Dec. 4, 2024, in Washington, D.C.  (Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)

WASHINGTON — Former U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was injured while on an official trip to Luxembourg to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the Battle of the Bulge and admitted to a hospital, her office said Friday.

“Speaker Emerita Pelosi is currently receiving excellent treatment from doctors and medical professionals,” spokesperson Ian Krager wrote in a statement.

“She continues to work and regrets that she is unable to attend the remainder of the CODEL engagements to honor the courage of our servicemembers during one of the greatest acts of American heroism in our nation’s history,” Krager wrote, using the abbreviation for congressional delegation, the term for an official trip.

“Speaker Emerita Pelosi conveys her thanks and praise to our veterans and gratitude to people of Luxembourg and Bastogne for their service in World War II and their role in bringing peace to Europe.”

Krager wrote in the statement that after sustaining “an injury” Pelosi “was admitted to the hospital for evaluation.” He didn’t provide any additional details. The Associated Press reported that Pelosi “tripped and fell while at an event with the other members of Congress.”

Pelosi, 84, was sworn in as a member of Congress in June 1987 and rose through the ranks to become the first woman in the country’s history to hold the speaker’s gavel.

House Democrats elected Pelosi speaker in 2007 and she remained the top member of the party in the House until January 2023, when New York Democratic Rep. Hakeem Jeffries became minority leader following his election by Democrats.

After she retired from leadership at the beginning of this Congress, she took on the title of speaker emerita.

Pelosi represents California’s 11th Congressional District, which covers parts of San Francisco.

Voters in the district reelected Pelosi to another two-year term in Congress during November’s elections. She secured 81% of the vote in the heavily Democratic district over a Republican challenger.

Pelosi’s undisclosed injury came just days after Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., fell in the U.S. Capitol, sustaining an injury to his wrist and a small cut on his face.

Lawmakers on trip

House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., led the bipartisan trip that included House Foreign Affairs Committee Chair Michael McCaul, R-Texas; House Republican Policy Committee Chair Gary Palmer, of Alabama; House Veterans’ Affairs Committee Chair Mike Bost, R-Ill; and House Veterans’ Affairs Committee ranking member Mark Takano, D-Calif.

Reps. Salud Carbajal, D-Calif; Andrew Clyde, R-Ga.; Neal Dunn, R-Fla.; Scott Franklin, R-Fla; Scott Fitzgerald, R-Wis.; John Joyce, R-Pa; Thomas Kean Jr., R-N.J.; Mariannette Miller-Meeks, R-Iowa; Nathaniel Moran, R-Texas; Keith Self, R-Texas; Lloyd Smucker, R-Pa.; Derrick Van Orden, R-Wis.; and Joe Wilson, R-S.C., also attended.

The U.S. Embassy in Luxembourg posted a photo showing the group on social media on Friday.

The photo shows Wyoming GOP Sen. John Barrasso, Maine Republican Sen. Susan Collins, New Hampshire Democratic Sen. Maggie Hassan and Kansas Republican Sen. Jerry Moran were on the trip as well. 

U.S. Capitol Police Chief Thomas Manger testifies during a Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on the Legislative Branch hearing at the U.S. Capitol on May 22, 2024, in Washington, D.C. (Photo by Kent Nishimura/Getty Images)

WASHINGTON — U.S. Capitol Police Chief Thomas Manger testified Wednesday that more than 700 threats against members of Congress were made during the last month alone, with at least 50 cases of people making false 911 calls in an attempt to get police teams to respond to lawmakers’ homes, often called “swatting.”

Manger, who took over the police department following the Jan. 6 attack, said the agency has done a relatively good job bolstering security at the Capitol building during the last few years, but needs more officers and money to address lawmakers’ security when they are back home or at offsite events.

Manger pointed to the dignitary protection division, which is responsible for keeping congressional leadership safe wherever they go, as “woefully understaffed.”

“We provide the protection at the level it needs to be. But you do that through officers working double shifts and averaging … 50 hours of overtime every pay period,” Manger said.

The division that protects leadership currently holds about 250 officers, but Manger pressed for that to be doubled to at least 500.

“And not only can we provide protection for the leadership 24/7, but when we have people that have threats against them that require us to stand up temporary details, we can do that,” Manger said. “Because right now, when we do it, we’re robbing Peter to pay Paul. We’re yanking somebody off another detail to stand up a detail to help someone for a temporary threat situation.”

There are numerous situations, he testified, where if USCP had more officers it could better protect lawmakers both on and off Capitol Hill. For example, USCP needs more than the 20 or so agents it currently has investigating threats against members of Congress.

Woman in Georgia killed

Threats against lawmakers have been on the rise for years, but are having increasingly dire consequences. Just this week a woman in Georgia was killed in what local police described as a “tragic chain of events” after an email falsely claimed there was a bomb in the mailbox at Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s home there.

Manger said during the hearing in the Senate Rules Committee that lawmakers need to raise USCP’s spending levels to allow it to continue holding 12 recruiting classes per year of 25 officers each for the next few years.

The mandatory retirement age for USCP should also be raised from 60 to 65 to match the “tweak” the Secret Service holds that allows it to keep senior officers working above the ceiling of 57 years old for federal law enforcement, which Manger called “shameful” because he believes it is too low.

“We have people that are in the prime of their career at that age and they got to go. And so, you know, I’ve been able to get the Capitol Police Board to agree to extend it to the age 60. And I have several officers that I’ve spoken with just in the last month who are hitting 60 years old, and they said, ‘Chief, I don’t want to go,’” Manger said. “And you look at them, and they look like they’re 35 and they certainly can still do the job, physically, mentally, and they’re some of the best cops you’d ever want to work with. But I have no ability to hold on to them.” 

Holstein milking cows at an Idaho dairy on July 20, 2012. (Photo by Kirsten Strough/USDA)

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Department of Agriculture announced Friday it will require dairy farms to share samples of unpasteurized milk when requested, in an effort to gather more information about the spread of highly pathogenic avian influenza.

Public health officials have tracked the spread of bird flu or H5N1 in domestic poultry flocks for years before the virus began showing up in the country’s dairy herds this March, raising concerns.

While the risk to the general public remains low and there is no evidence to suggest bird flu can spread from person to person, nearly 60 people, mostly farmworkers, have contracted the virus this year.

The new milk testing requirements from USDA will apply nationally but will begin first in California, Colorado, Michigan, Mississippi, Oregon and Pennsylvania, the week of Dec. 16. 

“Among many outcomes, this will give farmers and farmworkers better confidence in the safety of their animals and ability to protect themselves, and it will put us on a path to quickly controlling and stopping the virus’ spread nationwide,” Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said in a written statement.

Unpasteurized milk

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has repeatedly tested pasteurized milk on store shelves throughout the country to reaffirm it’s safe to drink. Other dairy products, like cheese and ice cream, have also been found safe.

But the FDA continues to urge people against consuming unpasteurized milk, since it doesn’t go through the heating process that kills off viruses and bacteria.

Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra said in a written statement the new milk “testing strategy is a critical part of our ongoing efforts to protect the health and safety of individuals and communities nationwide.”

“Our primary responsibility at HHS is to protect public health and the safety of the food supply, and we continue to work closely with USDA and all stakeholders on continued testing for H5N1 in retail milk and dairy samples from across the country to ensure the safety of the commercial pasteurized milk supply,” Becerra said. “We will continue this work with USDA for as long and as far as necessary.”

The USDA began a voluntary bulk tank testing program for milk this summer in an attempt to make it easier for farmers to move their cattle across state lines without having to test each cow. The department also began a year-long study in August to test for bird flu in dairy cattle moved into meat production, seeking to confirm prior studies that found it safe to eat.

The bird flu outbreak has affected 720 dairy herds throughout 15 states so far this year, though California became the epicenter during the last month, according to data from the USDA.

The Golden State holds nearly all of the 273 herds diagnosed, with just four found in Utah during the last 30 days.

California also holds the bulk of bird flu infections in people, with 32 of the 58 diagnosed cases this year, according to information from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Colorado accounts for another 10 human cases and Washington state confirmed 11 people infected with H5N1. Michigan has had two cases this year, while Missouri, Oregon and Texas have each had one positive human case.

USDA order

The USDA federal order announced Friday will require anyone responsible for a dairy farm — such as a bulk milk transporter, bulk milk transfer station, or dairy processing facility — to share unpasteurized or raw milk samples when requested.

Any farm owners whose dairy herds test positive for H5N1 will be required to share epidemiological information that would allow public health officials to perform contact tracing and other types of disease surveillance. 

Additionally, private laboratories and state veterinarians must alert USDA to positive samples that were collected as part of this National Milk Testing Strategy.

The J. Edgar Hoover FBI Building is seen on Jan. 28, 2019 in Washington, D.C. (Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images)

WASHINGTON — The decade-long endeavor to move the Federal Bureau of Investigation out of its crumbling headquarters in downtown Washington, D.C., and into a new facility outside the city could face roadblocks next year.

President-elect Donald Trump and some of his top allies in Congress have rebuked the federal agency that undertook the search for a new suburban location, ultimately deciding on Greenbelt, Maryland, over two other options.

Once Trump is back in the Oval Office and the GOP controls both chambers of Congress, the funding stream for the General Services Administration to build the new facility could end.

Republican lawmakers could also require the GSA to restart the search process, change the criteria the federal agency used to select the Greenbelt location, or simply tell the agency it must construct the new headquarters in a different location. Other options floated by GOP lawmakers include Alabama and somewhere inside the District of Columbia. Or they could require GSA to build the new FBI headquarters in either Springfield, Virginia, or Landover, Maryland — the other two locations considered for the new building.

Maryland Sen. Chris Van Hollen, the top Democrat on the spending panel that controls GSA’s budget, told States Newsroom he believes the issue is settled, in part, because some funding has already been allocated for the project.

“We’re going to work very hard to make sure we keep the program on track,” Van Hollen said. “I think there’s a consensus that the FBI’s current headquarters does not meet the security requirements, does not meet the other requirements. So, you know, from our perspective, a decision has been made and we will work hard to make sure it’s executed, implemented.”

Construction funding

Congress approved $200 million for the headquarters project this spring as part of a much larger government spending package.

Beyond that, funding is less certain.

The Senate Appropriations Committee, controlled by Democrats, has proposed $375 million for construction in this year’s GSA spending bill. That measure, which includes numerous other funding proposals, received bipartisan support during a committee vote. In January, control of the Senate will flip to the GOP.

The House version of the bill, drafted by Republicans, doesn’t include any funding for a new FBI headquarters and would require the GSA to send Congress “a detailed plan and timeline to support the District of Columbia based personnel by keeping the current FBI headquarters operational or identifying another Federally owned location in the District of Columbia that can serve as the FBI headquarters building.”

The two chambers will likely negotiate a final, bicameral version of the bill during the first few months of next year, once the GOP holds unified control of Congress and the White House. 

Trump hotel

Virginia Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine said during an interview he hadn’t really thought about whether his state could become the new site for the FBI headquarters.

“If you just go by history, Trump didn’t want to put any money into a new FBI headquarters,” Kaine said. “He didn’t want that block that the FBI is on to be cleared and opened for a hotel that might compete with his own hotel. So four years of the Trump administration was him basically doing everything he could to stop a move and to stop funds being used for the move.

“Now he may not have the same financial interest that he had back then so I bet it’s hard to say.”

Trump owned a hotel in the old Post Office building along Pennsylvania Avenue during his first term in office, but it was later sold and is now a Waldorf Astoria. The building is about one block away from the current FBI headquarters.

Maryland Rep. Steny Hoyer, the top Democrat on the House panel that funds the GSA, told States Newsroom there’s “no doubt” the Greenbelt location “is the best site, both in terms of security and in terms of finances.”

“I’m going to continue to push that position,” Hoyer said. “We need to get this done for the FBI, for the American people. The building is literally falling down. And the fact that we have delayed this … is testament that we’ve escalated cost, decreased security for the federal employees at FBI, and we ought to move on. And hopefully we will.”

The Maryland and Virginia governors’ offices declined to comment for this article. A GSA representative, speaking on background, said the agency has submitted a report to Congress that was required by the spending package lawmakers approved in March 2022.

GSA, the person said, is trying to secure “resolutions” from congressional committees before it obligates funds to buy the site or begin design and construction activities. They said this is consistent with other large-scale development projects that require congressional approval. It was not clear what those resolutions would say.

Evaluation of selection process continues

The GSA has been under review by its inspector general for how it undertook the site selection process for more than a year, one factor that could potentially complicate things during unified Republican control of Washington.

GSA acting Inspector General Robert Erickson launched an evaluation into the agency’s process in November 2023, a few weeks after GSA announced its decision to pick the Greenbelt, Maryland, location.

That evaluation is ongoing, and the inspector general continues “to work thoroughly and expeditiously on the project,” according to a spokesperson.

Virginia Democratic Sen. Mark Warner told States Newsroom in a brief interview he’s waiting to see the inspector general’s evaluation before deciding on a path forward.

“I know people thought that it might come out in the spring. It didn’t,” Warner said. “The reports we’ve got is that they’re still doing the investigating, and let’s see what that says first.”

Hoyer said he doesn’t expect the results of that evaluation will affect moving the FBI headquarters to Greenbelt.

“I think everything was done absolutely as it should have been,” Hoyer said. “An argument was made by both sides in public on the merits of their sites.”

Debate over process

FBI Director Christopher Wray also questioned the decision last year, writing in a letter to employees that he and others held “concerns about the fairness and transparency in the process,” though he wrote those “concerns are not with the decision itself but with the process.”

Trump has announced he will name Kash Patel as head of the FBI, though Wray would have to be fired or quit first. Trump has not yet named someone to lead the GSA.

The Greenbelt decision brought about some bipartisanship in Congress, with House Oversight & Accountability Committee Chair James Comer, a Kentucky Republican, and Rep. Gerry Connolly, a Virginia Democrat, urging GSA to conduct a full investigation into the site selection process. 

The two said the most disturbing aspect to them was that then-GSA Commissioner of the Public Building Service Nina Albert “overturned the unanimous site decision of an expert panel of civil servants representing GSA and its agency client, the FBI.”

Albert left that role on Oct. 13, 2023, about a month before the final decision was announced. General Services Administrator Robin Carnahan had also said two years earlier Albert didn’t have a conflict of interest.

“Congress created GSA in 1949 to increase the efficiency and economy of federal government operations — not least the procurement and use of property,” Comer and Connolly wrote in their letter. “To fulfill that mission, GSA must be fair and transparent in its operations. Its real estate dealings should consider only what is best for taxpayers and the Nation. It must set aside political or parochial interests.”

Comer and Connolly added they were “deeply concerned that GSA’s choice of a new FBI headquarters site departed from those principles — and in doing so, failed to put taxpayers and the public interest first.”

U.S. Sen. John Thune, R-S.D., arrives for the Senate Republican leadership elections at the U.S. Capitol on Nov. 13, 2024, in Washington, D.C.  Thune was elected majority leader for the Congress that convenes in January. (Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)

WASHINGTON — Senate Republicans huddled behind closed doors Tuesday to plot the path forward for the unified control of government they won in the November elections, though GOP senators said afterward a very narrow House majority will likely determine how sweeping their policy proposals will be.

Republicans are planning to use the complicated budget reconciliation process to address immigration and energy in one bill before turning their attention to taxes later next year in a separate bill. The specifics of those measures or how they might affect policy are not yet clear.

That budget reconciliation process will allow the GOP to get around the 60-vote legislative filibuster in the Senate that typically forces bipartisanship on big-ticket items. Reconciliation is generally used when one party controls the House, Senate and the White House, since it requires a majority vote in each chamber.

With House Republicans’ majority dropping to just 220 seats during the upcoming session of Congress, there will be very little room for GOP lawmakers in that chamber to vote against reconciliation bills, since Democrats are not likely to be included in negotiations or to vote for the final versions.

GOP leaders will also be down a seat from the beginning since former Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz, who resigned to focus on his confirmation process for attorney general before dropping out, isn’t planning to take his oath of office.

New York Rep. Elise Stefanik, nominated for United Nations ambassador, and Florida Rep. Michael Waltz, who will become Trump’s national security adviser, are expected to resign from Congress early next year, leaving GOP leaders down three slots until special elections are held. That would make for a 217-215 split.

Those extremely narrow margins could throw the chamber into gridlock if Republicans lawmakers miss a vote or are absent due to illness. There’s even a scenario where Democrats could have more votes on the floor than Republicans if several of their members are out.

The last time Republicans held unified control of Congress and the White House in 2017, when they passed their tax package via reconciliation, they held 241 House seats, a significantly wider margin than they’ll have next year. 

Thune says options presented

South Dakota Sen. John Thune, who will become majority leader in January, said lawmakers are working through “how best to maximize the opportunity we have through reconciliation to achieve a lot of the president’s and our objectives and things that he campaigned on.”

“And, you know, there obviously is the tax piece, but we’ve got until the end of the year to do that,” Thune said, referring to 2025. “So the question is how do we execute on using the opportunity of reconciliation.

“So we presented some different options, all of which our members are considering. And so, you know, we’ll see in the end where it lands but we’ve got to work with the House of Representatives and with obviously incoming President Trump to get the best path forward.”

North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis said Republicans still have a lot of work to do ironing out the details of the two packages, given the narrow margins for passage.

“If you take a look at the priorities of one end of the spectrum for the House caucus and the other end on border, there’s some reconciliation, pun intended, that needs to be done before reconciliation,” Tillis said.

House Republican leaders have struggled at times during this Congress to keep centrist GOP lawmakers and far-right members both supportive of large-scale policy bills. Adding in proposals or amendments from one side meant the GOP often lost votes from the other, forcing leaders to constantly walk a metaphorical tightrope when drafting legislation.

Republicans could have a more narrow House majority during the next Congress, likely causing headaches for leadership as they hold “family discussions” on the reconciliation bills.

Johnson stops by Senate GOP huddle

Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va., said House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., attended the Senate Republican meeting as the two chambers work to stay on the same page heading into January.

“I think we’re pretty unified on where we want to go. It’s just getting there,” she said. “You know, the devil’s in the details.”

Capito, who will become Republican Policy Committee chair next year, said election results sent a clear message to the GOP about what policy changes Americans expect to see during the next two years.

“What the voters are telling us they want us to do is very clear in some ways,” Capito said. “And we can go through the clearest ones first.”

Maine Sen. Susan Collins, who will become the first Republican woman to chair the Senate Appropriations Committee next year, cautioned the reconciliation process requires a lot of coordination and planning.

“Reconciliation is extremely complex, as those of us who have been through it before know,” Collins said. “And I think we’re going to have a very busy beginning of the year, which is why I’d like to see the disaster supplemental pass before we leave here for Christmas.

“And I would also still argue that it would be important to try to finish up the FY 25 appropriations bills. I realize that’s going to have to go into January at this point. But I’m still hoping we don’t go into March, because with reconciliation coming down the pike, the president’s new budget, which is due the first Monday of February, also coming at us, there’s going to be a ton of work to do.”

Delayed spending bills

Congress was supposed to complete work on the dozen annual government funding bills by Oct. 1, but instead relied on a stopgap spending bill to extend the deadline until Dec. 20.

Since they haven’t made any real progress on the full-year bills, congressional leaders are now debating how long a second continuing resolution should last.

That appropriations work will likely pile up at the beginning of next year, overlapping with Republican efforts to push through their first reconciliation package before turning their attention to the second one.

Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley said he’s confident House GOP leaders will be able to whip the votes necessary amid another razor-thin majority to approve the two reconciliation packages next year.

“We need to show that we’re recognizing the mandate of the last election, and have something smaller and hard-hitting before we take on the big issues,” Grassley said.

House Republicans, he said, “know there’s a mandate to deliver on. And they know that they better deliver.”

‘We have a directive from the American people’

Alabama GOP Sen. Katie Britt said Johnson will be able to keep the centrist and far-right members of the House Republican Conference united as details emerge in the weeks and months ahead about how exactly the two reconciliation packages will change policies.

“We know we have a slim majority in the House, but Speaker Johnson is aware of that,” Britt said. “And I think that they will work through issues over there, because we know that we have a directive from the American people to actually get things done. And I think that that’s what we’re unified to do.”

Asked about the narrow margins Republicans will have, Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson said “hopefully, this will all be things that we can form consensus on.”

“It’s what President Trump ran on and we’re going to try and, obviously, pass his agenda,” he said.

Arkansas Sen. John Boozman, a Republican, said their timeline is “as soon as possible” but that they’ll have to wait.

“It’s going to be a lot going on, but the budget is number one — we have to do that to start the process, and then just as quickly as possible,” Boozman said.

Congress must adopt a budget resolution in order to unlock the reconciliation process. That tax and spending blueprint is not a bill and does not become law. Instead, it sets Congress’ goals for the 10-year budget window.

In order to actually fund government departments and agencies, Congress must pass the dozen appropriations bills, which they’ve mostly ignored for the last several months.

Ariana Figueroa contributed to this report.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, a New York Democrat, speaks with reporters in the basement of the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday, Feb. 7, 2024.  (Photo by Jennifer Shutt/States Newsroom)

WASHINGTON — Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer sent a letter to incoming Republican Leader John Thune on Monday urging him to move nominees through the traditional confirmation process, including committee hearings and floor votes.

The letter is likely a response to President-elect Donald Trump urging Senate Republicans to recess the chamber for at least 10 days next year so he can make recess appointments, getting around the Senate’s role confirming nominees. Republicans will be in the majority when the new Congress convenes in January, taking over from Democrats.

“As we transition to the 119th Congress, Senate Democrats stand ready and willing to work with Senate Republicans to provide advice and consent as we evaluate all of the incoming president’s nominations,” Schumer wrote in the one-page letter. “In particular, we commit to working in a bipartisan fashion to process each nominee by reviewing standard FBI background-investigation materials, scheduling hearings and markups in the committees of jurisdiction, and considering nominees on the Senate floor.”

Thune, who GOP senators elected to replace Mitch McConnell next year as their leader, hasn’t committed to recessing the chamber for the time needed to allow Trump to appoint nominees single-handedly, but has repeatedly encouraged Democrats not to slow down the process.

“What we’re going to do is make sure that we are processing his nominees in a way that gets them into those positions, so they can implement his agenda. How that happens remains to be seen,” the South Dakota Republican said in mid-November.

“Obviously, we want to make sure our committees have confirmation hearings, like they typically do, and that these nominees are reported out to the floor,” Thune added. “But I’ve said this and I mean it — that we expect a level of cooperation from the Democrats to work with us to get these folks installed. And obviously, we’re going to explore all options to make sure they get moved and they get moved quickly.”

Narrow path for nominees

Trump’s nominations have received mixed reaction from GOP senators with some, like Florida Sen. Marco Rubio who will likely become secretary of State, receiving widespread praise, while others have received lukewarm receptions.

For example, Trump’s first nominee for attorney general, former Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz, withdrew eight days after Trump said he wanted him to lead the Justice Department amid widespread concerns from Republican senators about allegations of illegal drug use and paying for sex.    

Republicans will have a 53-seat majority in the Senate once the next session of Congress begins on Jan. 3, meaning any nominee can lose the support of three Republican senators and still secure confirmation on a party-line vote with Vice President-elect J.D. Vance breaking the tie. 

Democrats may vote for some of Trump’s nominees if they believe they’re qualified, but are unlikely to support the more controversial picks, like TV personality and former U.S. Pennsylvania Senate candidate Dr. Mehmet Oz, who Trump says he will tap to lead the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. 

With such narrow margins, centrist Republicans like Maine’s Susan Collins, Kentucky’s McConnell and Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski, could have influence over Trump’s Cabinet, unless the chamber allows recess appointments.

Checks and balances

Schumer wrote in his letter the Senate’s role confirming nominees should be respected regardless of who holds the Oval Office or which political party controls the chamber.

“In our system of checks and balances, the Senate plays a vital role in ensuring the President appoints well-qualified public officials that will dutifully serve the American people and honor their oaths to the Constitution,” Schumer wrote. “Regardless of party, the Senate has upheld this sacred duty for generations and we should not and must not waver in our Constitutional duty. We look forward to joining you in these efforts as soon as possible once the Senate and its committees are organized in January.”

A National Institutes of Health Pediatric Oncology Branch POB researcher's lab jacket. The NIH consists of 27 different centers and institutes that each focus on health challenges facing Americans. President-elect Donald Trump announced Tuesday he would nominate Stanford University researcher Dr. Jay Bhattacharya to lead the wide-ranging agency. (Photo credit: NIH)

WASHINGTON — President-elect Donald Trump said Tuesday he has selected a Stanford University professor of health policy and skeptic of COVID-19 precautions to run the National Institutes of Health, the sweeping federal agency tasked with solving many of the country’s biggest health challenges.

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya will require Senate confirmation before taking over the role officially, but assuming he can secure the votes next year when the chamber is controlled by Republicans, he’ll have significant sway over where the federal government directs billions in research dollars.

“Dr. Bhattacharya will work in cooperation with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to direct the Nation’s Medical Research, and to make important discoveries that will improve Health, and save lives,” Trump wrote in the announcement. Kennedy is Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Health and Human Services.

Bhattacharya posted on social media that he was “honored and humbled” by the nomination and pledged to “reform American scientific institutions so that they are worthy of trust again and will deploy the fruits of excellent science to make America healthy again!”

In addition to Kennedy, other Trump nominees for health-related positions include former TV personality and onetime Pennsylvania U.S. Senate candidate Mehmet Oz to lead the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, former Florida Congressman Dave Weldon to run the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Dr. Marty Makary for commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration and Fox News medical contributor Dr. Janette Nesheiwat as the next surgeon general.

“Together, Jay and RFK Jr. will restore the NIH to a Gold Standard of Medical Research as they examine the underlying causes of, and solutions to, America’s biggest Health challenges, including our Crisis of Chronic Illness and Disease,” Trump wrote in his announcement.

Health economist

Bhattacharya received his undergraduate degree from Stanford University in 1990 before earning his medical degree from its School of Medicine in 1997 and a Ph.D. from the university’s Economics Department in 2000.

He focuses his research on health economics and outcomes, according to his curriculum vitae, the academic version of a resume.

Bhattacharya’s biography on Stanford’s website says that in addition to being a professor of health policy, he runs its Center for Demography and Economics of Health and Aging, in addition to working as a research associate at the National Bureau of Economics Research.

“Dr. Bhattacharya’s research focuses on the health and well-being of vulnerable populations, with a particular emphasis on the role of government programs, biomedical innovation, and economics,” according to the biography. 

Among his research areas is the “epidemiology of COVID-19 as well as an evaluation of policy responses to the epidemic.”

‘A fringe component’

Bhattacharya testified before the U.S. House Oversight Committee’s Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic in February 2023 that he believed there was “near universal agreement that what we did failed.”

“Official counts attribute more than one million deaths in the United States and seven million worldwide,” he said.

Bhattacharya was one of three authors of The Great Barrington Declaration in October 2020, arguing that younger, healthy people should have gone about their normal lives in an effort to contract COVID-19, since they were somewhat less likely to die than at-risk populations. 

The brief declaration says that “(a)dopting measures to protect the vulnerable should be the central aim of public health responses to COVID-19.” But it doesn’t list what those measures should include and never brings up masking, physical distancing, or vaccination.

Several public health officials and researchers rejected the declaration, noting that it didn’t cite any research, data or peer-reviewed articles.

Former NIH Director Francis S. Collins, who ran the agency from 2009 through 2021, told The Washington Post in October 2020 that the Barrington Declaration authors’ beliefs were not held “by large numbers of experts in the scientific community.”

“This is a fringe component of epidemiology. This is not mainstream science. It’s dangerous. It fits into the political views of certain parts of our confused political establishment,” Collins said in the Post interview. “I’m sure it will be an idea that someone can wrap themselves in as a justification for skipping wearing masks or social distancing and just doing whatever they damn well please.”

One of the many reasons public health experts recommended masking, working from home and physical distancing before there was a COVID-19 vaccine was to prevent patients from overwhelming the country’s health care system.

There were concerns during some of the spikes in COVID-19 infections that the country would have so many ill people at one time there wouldn’t be enough space, health care professionals or equipment to provide treatment.

Wide-ranging agency

The NIH is made up of 27 different centers and institutes that each focus on health challenges facing Americans.

The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, formerly run by Dr. Anthony Fauci, became one of the more well known institutes during the COVID-19 pandemic, especially when he would regularly appear beside Trump at press briefings.

Other components at NIH include the National Cancer Institute, National Institute on Aging, National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, and the NIH Clinical Center that’s also referred to as America’s research hospital.

Congress approved $48 billion in discretionary spending for NIH during the last fiscal year, continuing a broadly bipartisan push that for years has increased funding to the agency to provide grants to research some of the most challenging diseases and illnesses facing Americans.

The current NIH director, Monica M. Bertagnolli, testified before Congress in early November about how the agency was working to rebuild trust following the pandemic.

Bertagnolli told U.S. House lawmakers the NIH was focusing some of its research on finding cures for rare diseases, since for-profit companies often don’t have the financial incentive to do so.

She also rejected the notion that NIH leaders have allowed politics to interfere with the agency’s mission.

“First and foremost, NIH concentrates on science, not on politics,” Bertagnolli said. “We actually have an integrity mandate against political interference in our work. That is the law for us and we abide by that completely.”

Donald Trump, at the time president of the United States, listens to then-Office of Management and Budget Acting Director Russ Vought deliver remarks prior to Trump signing executive orders on Oct. 9, 2019, in the Roosevelt Room of the White House. (Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead)

WASHINGTON — Incoming White House budget director Russ Vought has spent much of his career learning the detailed, often convoluted mechanisms that make up the Office of Management and Budget.

The agency, little known outside Washington, D.C., is relatively small compared to the rest of the federal government, but it acts like a nucleus for the executive branch and holds significant power.

OMB is responsible for releasing the president’s budget request every year, but also manages much of the executive branch by overseeing departments’ performance, reviewing the vast majority of federal regulations and coordinating how the various agencies communicate with Congress. 

Vought was deputy director, acting director and then director at OMB during Trump’s first term.

Before that Vought worked as vice president of Heritage Action for America, policy director for the U.S. House Republican Conference, executive director of the Republican Study Committee and a legislative assistant for former Texas Republican Sen. Phil Gramm. He has an undergraduate degree from Wheaton College and a law degree from George Washington University Law School.

Following Trump’s first term in office, Vought founded the right-leaning Center for Renewing America. The group’s mission is “to renew a consensus of America as a nation under God with unique interests worthy of defending that flow from its people, institutions, and history, where individuals’ enjoyment of freedom is predicated on just laws and healthy communities.”

Cutting government spending

Vought outlined his agenda for the next four years in Project 2025, a 922-page document from the conservative-leaning Heritage Foundation that led to speculation during the presidential campaign about what Trump would seek to do without Congress, including in areas that constitutionally fall within the legislative branch, like government spending.

The Democratic presidential nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris, repeatedly tried to tie Project 2025 to Trump and his campaign, and they sought to distance themselves from its proposals. But Trump has since nominated some of its authors or contributors to run federal departments and agencies.

Vought, in a 26-page chapter on the executive office of the president, wrote the OMB director “must ensure the appointment of a General Counsel who is respected yet creative and fearless in his or her ability to challenge legal precedents that serve to protect the status quo.”

Trump, Vought and many others are bullish about cutting government spending, but will likely run into legal challenges if they try to spend more or considerably less than lawmakers approve in the dozen annual government funding bills. 

Budget request

One of Vought’s most visible responsibilities will be releasing the president’s annual budget request, a sweeping document that lays out the commander-in-chief’s proposal for the federal government’s tax and spending policy.

The president’s budget, however, is just a request since Congress has the constitutional authority to establish tax and spending policy.

Lawmakers on Capitol Hill write the dozen annual government funding bills that account for about one-third of annual federal spending. The rest of the federal government’s spending comes from Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, which are classified as mandatory programs and mostly run on autopilot unless Congress approves changes and the president signs off on a new law.

That separation of powers led to frustration during Trump’s first term in office and will likely do so again, since he spoke during the 2024 campaign about using “impoundment” to prevent the federal government from spending money Congress has approved.

Trump withheld security assistance funding from Ukraine during his first term in office, leading to one of his two impeachments and a ruling from the Government Accountability Office —a nonpartisan government watchdog — that he had violated the law.

“Faithful execution of the law does not permit the President to substitute his own policy priorities for those that Congress has enacted into law,” GAO wrote. “OMB withheld funds for a policy reason, which is not permitted under the Impoundment Control Act (ICA). The withholding was not a programmatic delay. Therefore, we conclude that OMB violated the ICA.”

Trump spoke on the campaign trail about using “impoundment” to drastically cut government spending, but that would likely lead to lawsuits and a Supreme Court ruling. 

Vought’s think tank, Center for Renewing America, published analysis of presidents using impoundment throughout the country’s history, with the authors concluding the Impoundment Control Act is unconstitutional.

‘Every possible tool’

Vought sought to defend the president’s budget request in his chapter in Project 2025, writing that though “some mistakenly regard it as a mere paper-pushing exercise, the President’s budget is in fact a powerful mechanism for setting and enforcing public policy at federal agencies.”

He signaled the second Trump administration would be more nuanced in its interpretation of presidential authority.

“The President should use every possible tool to propose and impose fiscal discipline on the federal government.” Vought wrote. “Anything short of that would constitute abject failure.”

Vought also wrote about the management aspect of OMB’s portfolio, pressing for political appointees to have more authority and influence than career staff.

“It is vital that the Director and his political staff, not the careerists, drive these offices in pursuit of the President’s actual priorities and not let them set their own agenda based on the wishes of the sprawling ‘good government’ management community in and outside of government,” Vought wrote. “Many Directors do not properly prioritize the management portfolio, leaving it to the Deputy for Management, but such neglect creates purposeless bureaucracy that impedes a President’s agenda—an ‘M Train to Nowhere.’”

The Biden administration is proposing to cover drugs like Ozempic, which is used to treat heart disease, diabetes and obesity, under Medicare and Medicaid. (Photo illustration by Mario Tama/Getty Images)

WASHINGTON — The Biden administration announced Tuesday it’s reinterpreting federal law to allow Medicare and Medicaid patients access to anti-obesity medications to reduce their weight over the long term.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid’s proposed rule, which the Trump administration would need to finalize before it would take effect, is expected to cost $25 billion for Medicare combined with $11 billion in federal spending and $3.8 billion in state spending for Medicaid coverage throughout the next decade. 

CMS is encouraging states to submit comments to the proposed rule explaining when they could implement the Medicaid provision, since that health care program includes cost sharing between federal and state governments.

Medicare is the federal health insurance program for people 65 and older and some younger people with certain disabilities or conditions. Medicaid provides health care to some low-income individuals.

“People with obesity deserve to have affordable access to medical treatment and support, including anti-obesity medications for this disease; just as a person with type two diabetes can access these medications to get healthy,” CMS Administrator Chiquita Brooks-LaSure said on a call with reporters. “That’s why we’re proposing to revise our interpretation of the law and provide coverage of anti-obesity medications for the treatment of obesity.”

Brooks-LaSure said CMS was reinterpreting the law to view obesity as a chronic condition, which the agency believes provides a pathway for Medicare and Medicaid to cover anti-obesity medications.

“The medical community today agrees that obesity is a chronic disease,” Brooks-LaSure said. “It is a serious condition that increases the risk of premature death and can lead to other serious health issues, such as heart disease, stroke and diabetes.”

More than 40% of Americans have obesity and CMS data shows 22% of Medicare recipients were diagnosed with obesity during 2022, double the number from 10 years ago, she said.

CMS wrote in a fact sheet about the proposed rule that since creation of the Medicare Part D program, which provides prescription drug coverage, the agency has “interpreted the statutory exclusion of ‘agents when used for weight loss’ to mean that a drug, when used for weight loss, is excluded from the definition of a covered Part D drug.”

Trump and RFK Jr.

President-elect Donald Trump hadn’t commented on the proposal as of late Tuesday morning, but his planned nominee for Health and Human Services secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has repeatedly criticized newer weight loss drugs like Ozempic.

Kennedy was skeptical of studies showing the benefits of weight loss drugs during an appearance on Fox News last month, arguing the federal government would spend less money if it provided healthy meals to all Americans instead of coverage for weight loss drugs. 

“If we spent about one-fifth of that giving good food, three meals a day, to every man, woman and child in our country, we could solve the obesity and diabetes epidemic overnight,” Kennedy said.

CMS expects that about 3.4 million people in the Medicare program would become eligible for anti-obesity medication coverage under the proposed rule that would take effect in 2026 if Trump decides to finalize it.

Dan Tsai, CMS deputy administrator and director for the Center for Medicaid and CHIP Services, said during the call the agency hopes states submit comments in the weeks and months ahead detailing “when states would be required to implement this provision.”

“We note in the rule that the rule reinterprets the Medicaid statute, which means this would govern all Medicaid programs,” Tsai said. “But we specifically invite comment on a range of implications and timing for states.”

Cost differs in CBO report

The total cost of the program during the next decade that CMS provided on the call for Medicare was somewhat different from a cost estimate the Congressional Budget Office released last month. CBO is a government agency that provides nonpartisan budget information to Congress.

CBO projected it would cost the federal government $35 billion between 2026 and 2034 to cover anti-obesity medications for Medicare patients.

“Relative to the direct costs of the medications, total savings from beneficiaries’ improved health would be small—less than $50 million in 2026 and rising to $1.0 billion in 2034,” CBO wrote in the analysis.

The report explained that Medicare currently covers “some obesity-related services, including screening, behavioral counseling, and bariatric surgery (a procedure performed on the stomach or intestines to induce weight loss).”

While Medicare does cover anti-obesity medications for recipients with diabetes or cardiovascular disease, CBO wrote, Medicare “is prohibited by law from covering medications for weight management as part of the standard prescription drug benefit.”

The CBO report didn’t include a cost estimate for Medicaid, but noted that weight management drug coverage within that program is optional.

“According to one study, of the 47 states with publicly available lists of preferred drugs, nine had Medicaid programs that covered Wegovy in the first quarter of 2023.”

The National Governors Association and National Conference of State Legislatures both declined to comment on the proposed rule and its effect on state Medicaid programs.