By The Associated Press
Just after 2 a.m. ET, the Senate passed about $9 billion in federal spending cuts requested by President Donald Trump, including deep reductions to public broadcasting and foreign aid, moving forward on his top priorities despite concerns from several Republican senators.
The legislation, which now moves to the House, would have a tiny impact on the nation’s rising debt but could have major ramifications for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and U.S. food aid internationally. It also could complicate efforts to pass additional spending bills this year, as Democrats and even some Republicans voice objections to broadly ceding congressional spending power with little idea of how the White House Office of Management and Budget would apply the cuts.
The 51-48 vote came after Democrats sought to remove many of the proposed rescissions during 12 hours of amendment votes. None of the Democratic amendments were adopted.
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More sanctions against Tren de Aragua leaders
New measures announced by the Treasury and State departments on Thursday designate the gang’s chief, Hector Rusthenford Guerrero, and five other top leaders as members of a transnational criminal organization, blocking their property and assets.
A reward of $5 million for information leading to Guerrero’s arrest or conviction was offered more than a year ago. Tren de Aragua has already been designated a “foreign terrorist organization” by the State Department for its involvement in the illicit drug trade, extortion, money laundering, human smuggling and trafficking, and the sexual exploitation of women and children.
Some alleged gang members who had been imprisoned in the U.S. have been deported to a high-security prison in El Salvador.
Former Fox News host advanced as top federal prosecutor in DC
The Senate Judiciary Committee has advanced former Fox News host Jeanine Pirro to be the top federal prosecutor for the nation’s capital.
The committee’s Republican members voted unanimously Thursday to send Pirro’s nomination to the Senate floor after Democrats walked out to protest Emil Bove’s nomination to become a federal appeals court judge.
Pirro has served as acting U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia since May. Trump withdrew his first pick, Ed Martin Jr., after a key Republican senator said he could not support him, given Martin’s outspoken support for rioters who stormed the U.S. Capitol.
Before she replaced Martin, Pirro cohosted the Fox News show “The Five” on weekday evenings. She was elected as a judge in New York’s Westchester County Court in 1990 before serving three terms as the county’s elected district attorney.
A previous Border Patrol hiring spree offers lessons as ICE expands
As Immigration and Customs Enforcement prepares to add 10,000 employees in five years to enable Trump’s mass deportations, the Border Patrol’s torrid expansion in the early 2000s serves as a cautionary tale. Hiring and training standards were loosened, arrests for employee misconduct rose and attrition spiked.
“If they don’t uphold pretty rigorous standards and background checks, you can end up hiring the wrong people, and then you pay a huge price in how the public perceives them,” said Gil Kerlikowske, who ran Customs and Border Protection from 2014 to 2017.
ICE is set to get $76.5 billion, nearly 10 times its annual budget, under the bill Trump signed. “The unprecedented funding for ICE will enable my hard-working officers and agents to continue making America safe again by identifying, arresting and removing criminal aliens from our communities,” acting ICE director Todd Lyons said.
More than a million US children could be displaced. HUD secretary says helping them is wasteful
Amid a worsening national affordable housing and homelessness crisis, Trump’s administration is determined to reshape HUD’s expansive role providing stable housing for low-income people, which has been at the heart of its mission for generations.
At a June congressional budget hearing, HUD Secretary Scott Turner argued that imposing a two-year limit on rental assistance will fix waste and fraud in public housing and Section 8 voucher programs.
“It’s broken and deviated from its original purpose, which is to temporarily help Americans in need,” Turner said. “HUD assistance is not supposed to be permanent.”
Trump’s proposed HUD time limit could evict 1.4 million of nation’s poorest renters
More than 1 million low-income households — most of them working families with children — who depend on the nation’s public housing and Section 8 voucher programs could lose government-subsidized homes under the Trump administration’s proposal to impose a two-year time limit on rental assistance.
New research from New York University obtained exclusively by The Associated Press the limit could affect as many as 1.4 million households helped by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
The NYU report published Thursday predicts “enormous disruption and large administrative costs,” for public housing authorities that “would have to evict all of these households and identify new households to replace them.”
Democrats walk out as Republicans advance judicial nomination of Emil Bove
The uproar started when Republican Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley moved to vote on the nomination of Bove, a top Justice Department official, to the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
Democratic Sen. Cory Booker expressed frustration that not all voices had been heard yet, prompting the rest of the Democrats on the committee to walk out before Republicans advanced his nomination to the floor.
Bove, who along with Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche served as a criminal defense lawyer for Trump, has been behind some of the most scrutinized Justice Department actions since Trump returned to office, including the dismissal of New York City Mayor Eric Adams’ corruption case.
A former Justice Department lawyer accused Bove of suggesting the department might have to defy court orders. Bove denied that claim.
Blanche wrote in a piece published by Fox News Wednesday that Bove’s “legal acumen is extraordinary, and his moral clarity is above reproach.”
