Mike Johnson’s Disastrous Budget Bill Is Already in Trouble

House Republicans aren’t quite falling into line behind their leadership’s plans to advance Donald Trump’s sweeping legislative agenda, which is set to be presented to the committee Thursday.

House Budget Committee Chairman Jodey Arrington’s nascent budget reconciliation plan has been stalled in committee for weeks, and has faced tough opposition from his Republican colleagues—but the embattled Texas Republican said Tuesday that the panel would take up the massive border, tax, and energy resolution in two days, giving it just hours left to manifest into an agreeable existence.

Arrington’s plan, presented in a private panel meeting on Tuesday, calls for a massive target of $2 trillion in cuts on mandatory spending, with a $1.5 trillion floor, two sources and Representative Ralph Norman told The Hill.

According to one of the sources, a White House official, a handful of House members are asking Trump to bless Medicaid cuts as a way to help pay for reconciliation, but the official said that lawmakers wouldn’t actually lay out what the Medicaid cuts would be.

“We’re not just going to agree to some number in cuts to please a score,” the official told NOTUS. “Stop being constrained by [the Congressional Budget Office].”

Arrington’s plan also included a $4.5 trillion cap on new deficits, to offset an extension of Trump’s 2017 tax cuts. Representative Jason Smith, who chairs the Ways and Means Committee, which oversees tax policy, said that a $4.5 trillion cap was “a good starting point,” but he had pushed—unsuccessfully—to expand the scale of the tax cuts.

Smith seemed frustrated afterward, and he told reporters that Arrington’s plan wouldn’t allow for a permanent extension of Trump’s 2017 tax cuts, as well as other priorities from the president’s campaign. “Anything less would be saying that President Trump is wrong on tax policy,” Smith groused.

Arrington’s plan had reportedly received approval from House Speaker Mike Johnson, who was allegedly “snatching the pen” from Arrington to shop around his own deal on Monday, though Arrington later pushed back on this report at a closed-door GOP conference meeting, according to Politico.

It was then that Arrington called for a meeting of the House Budget Committee to be scheduled for Thursday, to attempt to reconcile differences and advance the bill, giving him just hours to put together all the pieces into a coherent deal. It’s not even clear whether it will be the same deal he presented on Tuesday.

“We’ll soon find out if Jodey is in over his head,” one GOP lawmaker, who was granted anonymity, told Politico Tuesday.

But it’s not looking good.

Representative Eric Burlison, of the House Freedom Caucus, which released its own budget resolution on Monday, was less than thrilled by Arrington’s plan.

“It’s pathetic,” Burlison said, according to NOTUS’s Reese Gorman.

Representative Chip Roy had worked with Arrington to go against Smith in determining the parameters of the sweeping bill, according to Politico.

But Roy remained a holdout on supporting the resolution Wednesday, according to Bloomberg News’s Erik Wasson. Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky also was reportedly not fully on board.

Donald Trump’s Federal Communications Commission is taking aim at broadcast outlets for promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, with Comcast, the parent company of NBC and Universal, being the first target.

In a letter sent to Comcast CEO Brian Roberts on Tuesday, FCC Chair Brendan Carr said that the agency is investigating the company’s DEI practices.

“The FCC will be taking fresh action to ensure that every entity the FCC regulates complies with the civil rights protections enshrined in the Communications Act ... including by shutting down any programs that promote invidious forms of DEI discrimination,” the letter states, according to Reuters, which obtained a copy.

Comcast confirmed it received the letter and would cooperate with the FCC’s investigation, issuing a statement saying that “for decades, our company has been built on a foundation of integrity and respect for all of our employees and customers.”

Carr said the FCC was starting out with Comcast because of “substantial evidence that your companies are still engaging in the promotion of DEI,” noting that the company has cable, high-speed internet, broadcast TV stations, and wireless divisions covered by the agency.

Democratic FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez said Carr’s investigation went against the FCC’s actual purpose.

“Stoking partisan culture wars is not the FCC’s job. It is time we return to our core mission—closing the digital divide, fostering innovation, and protecting consumers,” she said.

That’s not likely to happen under the Trump administration. The FCC has already turned its sights on media outlets for reasons besides DEI—last week, Carr announced an investigation into San Francisco radio station KCBS for its coverage of immigration enforcement.

This followed an announcement from Carr that the FCC was investigating NPR and PBS for allegedly “violating federal law by airing commercials.” And don’t forget the FCC’s battle with CBS over a Kamala Harris interview that Trump falsely claimed was edited.

It seems that aside from regulating America’s communications and broadcasts, the Trump administration will be using the FCC as a political tool to go after media that he doesn’t like, or that goes against the right wing, blatantly violating the Constitution’s First Amendment right to a free press.

After allowing Elon Musk and his college-aged Department of Government Efficiency groupies to root around federal agencies for weeks, the Trump administration apparently still hasn’t uncovered any fraud or abuse.

During a press hearing on Wednesday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt waved around screenshots of “contracts upon contracts” that she claimed DOGE had “found” in the government. But as she ran through a list of the financial arrangements—some of which had to do with diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts from previous administrations—it became clear that the DOGE-targeted contracts didn’t constitute fraud but instead were simply “against the president’s policies and his America-first agenda.”

“Are all those things you just mentioned fraud? Or are they just contrary to the president’s policies?” pressed CBS News senior White House reporter Jennifer Jacobs.

“I would argue that all of these things are fraudulent,” Leavitt responded. “They are wasteful, and they are an abuse of the American taxpayer’s dollar. This is not what the government should be spending money on. They are contrary to the president’s priorities and agenda.”

Having federal line items that go against the grain of the president’s agenda doesn’t constitute fraud. Yet instead of providing legitimate receipts to back up that claim, Leavitt took the populist route, beckoning the American people to judge the media for daring to question Trump’s agenda. Leavitt further implored journalists to consider the Trump administration’s rationale, even though Musk has been granted free license to shrink federal oversight under the apparently faux banner of uprooting fraud.

“If anybody in here wants to argue that the federal government is not fraudulent, be my guest because I think that the American people at home would beg to differ,” Leavitt said.

So far, Musk’s team has gained access to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, the Education, Commerce, Defense, and Energy Departments, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and, among other agencies, the Federal Aviation Administration. (That last one comes during a period in which the U.S. has experienced an unprecedented uptick in critical aviation accidents, with four deadly crashes taking place since Trump took office. Before 2025, the last deadly crash involving a U.S. airliner was in 2009).

Through all these agencies, Musk has extracted sensitive data on hundreds of millions of Americans, including their Social Security numbers, home addresses, and medical histories.

Democrats had their fangs out for Elon Musk during the first ever House Delivering on Government Efficiency Subcommittee hearing Wednesday.

Representative Melanie Stansbury, the top Democrat on the subcommittee, said that lawmakers “can’t just sit here today and pretend like everything is normal.” She further accused Republicans of shielding Musk and Donald Trump, who are “clearly breaking the law.”

“Come and testify in front of the American people under oath, because we want to know what you’re up to,” Stansbury said in a direct missive to the world’s richest man.

Other Democrats were equally infuriated by the unrestricted demolition taking place across the executive branch under Musk’s direction. So far, Musk’s team has gained access to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, the Education, Commerce, Defense, and Energy Departments, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and, among other agencies, the Federal Aviation Administration. (That last one comes during a period in which the U.S. has experienced an unprecedented uptick in critical aviation accidents, with four deadly crashes taking place since Trump took office. Before 2025, the last deadly crash involving a U.S. airliner was in 2009.)

Through all these agencies, Musk has extracted sensitive data on hundreds of millions of Americans, including their Social Security numbers, home addresses, and medical histories.

But Democrats on the subcommittee were quick to highlight that, despite Musk’s apparent affinity for combing through the details of Americans’ lives under the helm of the executive branch, the multibillionaire hasn’t been too keen when the government has rooted through his own backyard.

“Five inspector generals that were looking into Elon Musk’s companies were fired by the Trump-Musk administration,” said Texas Representative Greg Casar. “These inspector generals, who are independent, protected by law; they are the people that find the waste, fraud, and abuse … fired because they were looking into Elon Musk.”

“You know what Elon Musk doesn’t seem to be looking into?” Casar continued. “His own contracts.”

“Just last year, Elon Musk was promised $3 billion from close to 100 contracts with the federal government,” Casar said, highlighting the discrepancy that seniors who rely on Social Security are dependent upon $65 a day from the government. “We’re not looking into Elon Musk’s $8 million a day. This subcommittee chaired by Marjorie Taylor Greene and the House Republicans is looking into your grandmother’s $65 a day.”

Greene pushed back on claims that the administration shouldn’t be hacking and slashing away at all facets of government spending.

“We as a country are $36 trillion in debt,” Greene said during the hearing. “In 2025, interest payments are projected to be $952 billion, which is more than our entire military budget.”

But Democrats weren’t taking her direction very seriously, either.

“I find it ironic that our chairman, Representative Greene, is in charge of running this committee. In the last Congress, Chairwoman Greene literally showed a dick pic in our Oversight hearing, so I thought I’d bring one as well,” California Representative Robert Garcia told the committee, bringing out a large poster-board portrait of Musk. “This, of course, is President Elon Musk.”

Mitch McConnell has gone from being one of the most powerful men in the GOP, the face of conservatism, to failing to convince a single Republican colleague to vote “no” with him on Tulsi Gabbard’s nomination for director of national intelligence.

The former Senate majority leader was the only Republican to vote “no” on Gabbard’s confirmation Wednesday, noting her support for NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, her support for Russia’s Vladimir Putin, and her views on China as dealbreakers for him.

“The nation should not have to worry that the intelligence assessments the President receives are tainted by a Director of National Intelligence with a history of alarming lapses in judgment,” McConnell said in a statement after the vote. “Entrusting the coordination of the intelligence community to someone who struggles to acknowledge these facts is an unnecessary risk.”

McConnell’s logic wasn’t enough to convince any of his colleagues. McConnell being the only Republican to vote against Gabbard signals a long fall from power for the man who has long been seen as the last bastion of “normal” conservatism in the face of Trump’s MAGA conservatism (not that they’re all that different in practice). Those days are long gone.

Shocking: Republicans don’t care about fiscal conservatism very much when it comes to funding their—and their rich friends’—agendas.

Mike Johnson and House Republicans on Wednesday released their budget plan, which would raise the debt ceiling by $4 trillion in order to dole out $4.5 trillion in tax cuts to the wealthy. They also threw in $2 trillion of compulsory cuts to Medicaid, which could make health care even more expensive and inaccessible for large swathes of America.

Adding $4 trillion to the national debt limit is a deeply ironic move for a party that is currently allowing the richest man in the world to destroy crucial federal institutions that he doesn’t like, in the name of “efficiency.” The programs that the Department of Government Efficiency is cutting are nowhere near as expensive as this blatantly pro-billionaire handout.

The U.S. Agency for International Development, for example, costs the government about $40 billion a year. The GOP’s tax cuts will eclipse that yearly amount easily, but Republicans are justifying it with classic “trickle-down” economics.

“There will be a lot of economic growth. And if you think about what happened in 2017—dramatic economic growth, possibly even more this time,” Representative Steve Scalise said to HuffPost last Friday.

This appears to be a more shameless redux of the 2017 tax cuts, which crippled the country’s revenue base while lining the pockets of corporations and the wealthy.

The Department of Justice appears to be struggling to keep up with the torrent of lawsuits sparked by Donald Trump’s sweeping actions to freeze funding to federal agencies, and significant errors have cropped up in one of their cases.

In a court filing made Monday, prosecutors were forced to correct two factual mistakes they’d made during a court hearing, according to ABC News.

The lawyers had claimed that only 500 USAID employees had been put on administrative leave, and that only their future contracts had been frozen. In reality, more than 2,100 employees were out of a job, and all future and existing contracts had been paused, the lawyers revealed in the filing.

“Defendants sincerely regret these inadvertent misstatements based on information provided to counsel immediately prior to the hearing and have made every effort to provide reliable information in the declaration supporting their opposition to a preliminary injunction,” the filing said.

The errors had downplayed the scale of the Trump administration’s illegal efforts to dismantle USAID without the permission of Congress.

Last week, some USAID employees received letters telling them they’d been placed on administrative leave with pay “until further notice,” according to correspondence reviewed by The Hill. Some didn’t immediately receive a letter because they had been locked out of the agency’s system. The USAID website was taken down, and when it was eventually restored, it only included a note announcing that employees had been placed on “administrative leave globally.”

In a separate legal battle, in which 19 states are suing to rip Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency goons away from Americans’ taxpayer records at the Treasury, DOJ lawyers made another mistake.

They referred to Marko Elez, the 25-year-old DOGE goon who resigned and was then rehired after his racist social media posts were discovered, as a “special government employee” within the Treasury.

In a filing Monday, lawyers said that Elez was a “Special Advisor for Information Technology and Modernization” at the Treasury, meaning he is a full-fledged employee subject to certain ethics requirements from which a “special government employee” would be exempt, according to ABC News.

Last week, DOJ lawyers also fumbled when asked whether they could ensure that a list of FBI agents who had investigated January 6 rioters would be kept confidential. They later said they had no “intention” to release the names. But Trump said Friday that he intended to “fire some of” the FBI personnel who’d been involved in the investigation, alleging that they were corrupt.

The Senate voted Wednesday to confirm former Democratic Representative and current right-wing personality Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence.

The Senate voted 52–48 to confirm Gabbard, with Republicans falling mostly in line. The only Republican to join all Democrats in voting “no” was Mitch McConnell, a stunning rebuke from the former Senate majority leader.

Gabbard overcame Republican skepticism after previous concerns over her sympathy for authoritarian leaders, her pro-Russia stances, and her rough confirmation hearings. Gabbard’s nomination also raised national security concerns, considering she met with U.S. adversary and former Syrian dictator Bashar Al Assad while she served in Congress. She was reportedly the subject of a conversation between two Hezbollah operatives while on that trip to the Middle East. In December, nearly 100 former national security officers warned Gabbard would become the “least experienced Director of National Intelligence since the position was created.”

Gabbard, who has ties to the Science of Identity Foundation, an extremist religious organization described as a cult, will now oversee some of America’s most sensitive information.

The Trump administration’s Ukraine policy is off to a poor start.

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is visiting Europe, and met with the Ukraine Defense Contact Group Wednesday in London, immediately telling U.S. allies that liberating all of Russia’s occupied Ukrainian territory “is an unrealistic objective.”

Then it got even worse, with Hegseth telling the alliance of 57 countries, including all 32 members of NATO, that “the United States does not believe that NATO membership for Ukraine is a realistic outcome of a negotiated settlement.

“Instead, any security guarantee must be backed by capable European and non-European troops,” Hegseth added.

Hegseth seems to have given up two main points to Russian President Vladimir Putin, including a key piece of leverage in future negotiations to end the war between Ukraine and Russia. One of Putin’s major complaints about Ukraine has been the prospect of the country joining NATO along with the rest of Eastern Europe.

Coupled with Donald Trump’s comments on the release of American Marc Fogel from a Russian prison Tuesday, where he claimed “we were treated very nicely by Russia,” Hegseth’s remarks suggest the new administration will prioritize better relations with Putin over defending Ukrainian sovereignty. The deal to secure Fogel’s release raises questions too, as a suspected Russian cybercrime kingpin was part of the swap.

While campaigning for president, Trump boasted that he could end the war in Ukraine within “24 hours.” Shortly after Trump’s election, Russia shot down that idea, and even boosted its troop numbers days later. The president’s choice for special envoy to Ukraine and Russia, Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg, has in the past suggested withholding aid for Ukraine in order to force negotiations with Russia, something Trump did just days into his presidency.

In the past few weeks, Trump has said he will use tariffs as leverage against Russia and shaken down Ukraine for its natural resources in exchange for continued support. All of this doesn’t bode well for the future of Ukraine, which seeks not only to end Russian occupation of its land but also better relations with the U.S. and Europe instead of a subservient relationship with Russia. Trump seems more concerned with keeping Putin happy and getting a payoff.

U.S. inflation was up in January, with Americans taking yet more hits from the rising costs of groceries, rent, and energy.

The consumer price index indicated that prices rose by 3 percent in January compared to a year earlier, according to data released Wednesday from the Labor Department.

Rent alone made up 30 percent of that increase, according to The Washington Post’s economic columnist Heather Long, who noted on X that the “core” consumer price index—which excludes the volatile prices of food and energy—had practically stalled since June.

But Americans were still feeling sticker shock for some key grocery staples in January, when the price of a dozen eggs soared by 13.8 percent and averaged $4.95 across the country—a price tag that’s still up by 53 percent from last year, according to The New York Times. Egg prices are only expected to increase amid a widening outbreak of avian flu, which has temporarily shuttered New York City’s poultry markets and skyrocketed the cost of a standard dozen eggs to more than $12 in Key Food and CTown supermarkets, amid a nationwide egg shortage.

But Donald Trump felt that there was only one person to blame. ““BIDEN INFLATION UP!” the president posted on Truth Social Wednesday morning.

On the campaign trail, Trump repeatedly pledged to lower costs for American consumers on “day one.” But three weeks into his second administration, Trump has repeatedly avoided answering the hard questions on exactly how he’s going to provide relief for American’s wallets.

“You said that tariff is a beautiful word,” pressed Fox News’s Brett Baier in an interview with the president over the weekend. “There are some signs in the market, consumer confidence, that they’re a little jittery. So, if all goes to plan, when do you think families would be able to feel prices going down, groceries, energy? Or are you kind of saying to them, hang on, inflation may get worse until it gets better?”

But Trump quickly changed the topic, instead lumping the responsibility of rising inflation onto other countries.

“I think we’re going to become a rich—look, we’re not that rich right now,” Trump said. “We owe $36 trillion. That’s because we let all these nations take advantage of us. Same thing, like $200 billion with Canada. We owe $300—we have a deficit with Mexico of $350 billion. I’m not going to do that. I’m not going to let that happen.”

Last week, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters that the Trump administration doesn’t “have a timeline” for alleviating the nation’s critically high cost of living.