GOP Senators Are Having to Literally Beg Trump for Their Own Money

Republican Senators are being forced to grovel at the thrones of Donald Trump and Elon Musk to collect the very funding they appropriated in the first place.

Amid Trump’s sweeping freezes on spending, massive cuts to the federal workforce, and dismantling of government agencies, some Republican senators have been forced to make their appeals for funding (and mercy) directly to Trump’s Cabinet secretaries and other administration officials, according to a report Wednesday from The Washington Post.

While this system of pleading favors Trump allies who can dial up the president directly, not everyone is opting to give him a ring.

Senator Lisa Murkowski told the Post that she had been on the phone with “pretty much all the departments,” hoping to obtain funding in the face of federal freezes.

The Alaska Republican has spoken with the Environmental Protection Agency, Interior Department, and Agriculture Department, as well as lobbied the Trump administration to exempt Native American tribes from being affected by executive orders targeting programs for diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Senator Shelley Moore Capito told the Post she had been working “aggressively” with EPA head Lee Zeldin to resume the grant program providing money for schools to buy electric buses. The EPA has paused more than 30 grant programs.

Senators Katie Britt from Alabama and Susan Collins of Maine each took their concerns about severe cuts to the National Institutes of Health directly to Trump’s new Secretary of Health Robert F. Kennedy Jr. A new NIH policy announced earlier this month would cap “indirect cost” reimbursements, which cover all research expenses, at 15 percent for research institutions, effectively kneecapping entire fields of research.

Others took more desperate means to beseech Trump’s cadre: tweeting at them.

“I urge @SecRubio to distribute the $340 million in American-grown food currently stalled in U.S. ports to reach those in need,” Senator Jerry Moran wrote in a post on X earlier this month aimed at Secretary of State Marco Rubio, whose agency absorbed some functions of USAID after Musk gutted the agency. “Time is running out before this life-saving aid perishes.”

He followed up with another post days later: “GOOD NEWS: State Dept. has approved shipping to resume, allowing NGOs to distribute the $560 million of American-grown food aid sitting in US & global ports to those in need. Thanks to @SecRubio for helping make certain this life-saving aid gets to those in need before it spoils.”

Senator Tommy Tuberville imagined a future where senators would have to approach the unelected DOGE czar Elon Musk with a line-item list, and beg him not to cut spending on infrastructure.

“If we have to lobby for, ‘Hey wait a minute, what about the bridge in Birmingham?’ or ‘There’s a bridge in Mobile or whatever.’ I think that could be very possible,” the Alabama Republican told reporters.

Crucially, federal agencies are still withholding funding, even after multiple judges ordered a pause on the president’s sweeping funding freeze, summoning a torrent of additional lawsuits alleging that the president is unlawfully withholding money in violation of Congress. The administration’s actions have jeopardized hundreds of billions of dollars to programs across the government, according to the Senate Appropriations Committee.

While Congress, in particular the House of Representatives, is vested with the power of the purse, Trump hopes to use a process called impoundment to refuse to spend the money appointed by Congress.

Donald Trump is trying to extend his authority over government agencies that Congress made independent.

The president issued an executive order Tuesday ordering these agencies to first send any proposed regulations to the White House for review. It also gives Trump the power to block the agencies from using funds for anything that goes against what he wants, and requires agencies to accept the Justice Department and Trump’s interpretation of the law as binding.

The agencies the order is going after include the National Labor Relations Board, the Federal Communications Commission, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the Federal Trade Commission. It partially covers the Federal Reserve in issues related to regulating Wall Street, but doesn’t include its monetary policies such as controlling interest rates.

The move is a blatant power grab on Trump’s part to control agencies that could push back against his agenda. Plus, it sets up a showdown with Congress over the funding given to these agencies, as the legislature appropriates funds to them for specific purposes. In effect, Trump is trying to take away Congress’s authority over such agencies.

“This is a power move over independent agencies, a structure of administration that Congress has used for various functions going back to the 1880s,” legal scholar Peter M. Shane told The New York Times.

Conservatives have long sought to weaken these independent agencies, if not bring them under total control of the president, in order to free business interests from what they see as restrictive regulations. Russell Vought, recently confirmed to run the Office of Management and Budget and an architect of the conservative manifesto Project 2025, said two years ago that such a presidential takeover was the goal.

“What we’re trying to do is identify the pockets of independence and seize them,” Vought said.

In a court filing Sunday, the Trump administration argued that the president has “unrestricted power” to fire agency heads. It seems that in the opinion of Trump and his fellow conservatives, such power is only the tip of the iceberg.

Infighting is brewing among the GOP’s congressional ranks, as Elon Musk’s takeover of the government and sweeping federal employee purge begins to hit red states.

Multiple Republican members of Congress  expressed anxiety and dissatisfaction to Axios regarding Trump and DOGE’s cuts, as agencies like USAID, the Federal Aviation Administration, and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration—agencies that many Republicans actually like and support—have been crippled. 

Susan Collins, chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, told Axios that Trump is moving “too fast,” and that Musk and DOGE should adopt “a more surgical approach” instead of slashing indiscriminately, as some of their recent moves “violate restrictions that are in current law.” Collins also said the team is “making mistakes,” referencing the Trump administration accidentally firing USDA employees working amid a bird flu outbreak.

“Before making cuts rashly, the Administration should be studying and staffing to see what the consequences are. Measure twice before cutting. They have had to backtrack multiple times,” Representative Don Bacon said.

“We all want efficiencies, there is a way to do it, and the way these people have been treated has been awful in many cases,” Senator Lisa Murkowski opined. “Awful.”

The elderly Chuck Grassley told RadioIowa the situation is “a tragedy for people that are getting laid off,” but conceded that it was “an executive branch decision,” and that “Congress can’t do anything except complain about it.”

Only time will tell just how far Republicans will let this freight train go before speaking up and slowing it down.

The U.S. has experienced four serious aviation disasters since Donald Trump took office just last month—but his administration doesn’t want you to believe that the unprecedented uptick has anything to do with their government-wide staffing cuts.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy told Newsmax on Tuesday that “it’s rich” for people to blame the Trump administration for the plane crashes, even though they’re the ones in charge.

“To cast blame on this administration for the policy failures of the last four years and say it’s our fault is outrageous, but it’s rich,” Duffy said.

Duffy then went on to confirm that “less than 400 employees” had been laid off at the Federal Aviation Administration since last week, though he attempted to minimize the cuts by highlighting the overall staffing of the agency, which Duffy claimed sits at around 45,000 employees.

Still, the union representing FAA employees slammed the mass firing as a “hastily made decision” that would exhaust a burnt-out workforce “already stretched thin.”

“This decision did not consider the staffing needs of the FAA, which is already challenged by understaffing,” David Spero, national president of the Professional Aviation Safety Specialists, said in a statement. “Staffing decisions should be based on an individual agency’s mission-critical needs. To do otherwise is dangerous when it comes to public safety. And it is especially unconscionable in the aftermath of three deadly aircraft accidents in the past month.”

Before 2025, the last deadly crash involving a U.S. airliner was in 2009—but despite the disturbing trend, Trump has opted to vaguely scapegoat minorities.

After a mid-air crash in January between a passenger plane and a U.S. military Black Hawk helicopter over Reagan International Airport killed 67 people, Trump pointed a finger at diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, blaming inclusive work initiatives for the deadly lapse.

“You’re talking about extremely complex things, and if they don’t have a great brain—a great power of the brain, they’re not going to be very good at what they do and bad things will happen,” Trump said at the time.

Former National Transportation Safety Board investigators and safety advisers have pointed to the decades-long air traffic controller shortage as the underlying cause of the crashes, and told Newsweek that the FAA should re-prioritize “aeronautical decision-making.”

Under former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg’s stewardship, the FAA increased hiring, placing 2,000 new employees in the system. But their numbers will just barely replace some 1,100 staff who are either retiring or exiting the high-stress field.

“That’s because nearly half of those hired in any given year will wash out of the program before they get to actually control aircraft after about three years from their initial start date,” CNN reported.

Donald Trump’s administration can’t stop mis-firing.

The Department of Agriculture is scrambling to rescind the terminations of “several” agency employees who were working to address the bird flu outbreak, amid sweeping layoffs at the behest of Trump, Elon Musk, and the Department of Government Efficiency.

A USDA spokesperson released a statement Tuesday saying, “Although several positions supporting [bird flu efforts] were notified of their terminations over the weekend, we are working to swiftly rectify the situation and rescind those letters.”

The spokesperson said that “USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service frontline positions are considered public safety positions,” and noted that several positions at the agency had been exempted from cuts, promising that the USDA is continuing to “prioritize the response to highly pathogenic avian influenza.”

Politico reported Sunday that USDA’s 14-person National Animal Health Laboratory Network program office, which coordinates laboratories working on the government’s response to animal disease outbreaks, had been hit by the Trump administration’s sweeping layoffs.

“They’re the front line of surveillance for the entire outbreak,” Keith Poulsen, the director of the Wisconsin Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory, told Politico. “They’re already underwater and they are constantly short-staffed, so if you take all the probationary staff out, you’ll take out the capacity to do the work.”

This isn’t the first time Trump and Musk’s sweeping cuts have chopped off a limb sorely needed. Last week, 300 employees who oversee the U.S.’s nuclear stockpile were fired from the National Nuclear Security Administration, and then quickly invited to return to their highly essential jobs.

Earlier this month, Trump’s new Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins said that the agency had invited Musk’s DOGE team in with “open arms,” and promised that layoffs would be “forthcoming.” The White House has stated that DOGE doesn’t make the cuts to federal agencies and departments itself, but rather advises the heads of those agencies on where to trim the fat—or in this case, crucial staff.

Members of the House Agriculture Committee weren’t too pleased with the mistake, according to NBC News.

“They need to be more cautious,” Republican Representative Don Bacon told NBC News, referring to the DOGE team. “There’s an old saying, ‘Measure twice, cut once.’ Well, they are measuring once and having to cut twice. Some of this stuff they’re going to have to return back. I just wish they’d make a better decision up front.”

So far, the bird flu outbreak has led to the death of 22 million birds in the last 30 days, sent the price of eggs skyrocketing, infected 68 people, and resulted in the death of one person. But some experts believe that it can, and will, get worse.

Robert Redfield, the former director for the Centers for Disease Control, told Politico Tuesday that COVID-19 “was a minor epidemic compared to the epidemic that’s coming, which is a bird flu pandemic.”

Redfield warned that “this is not a time to cut our ability to have a rapid public health response agency.”

Donald Trump is attempting to interfere in Brazilian politics on behalf of his far-right ally Jair Bolsanaro.

The president’s company Trump Media Group filed a lawsuit against Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes in U.S. federal court in Tampa, Florida, Wednesday, accusing him of censoring free speech by restricting the company’s Truth Social platform. Video platform Rumble, popular with the right wing, is also a plaintiff in the lawsuit.

The timing is suspicious, because Bolsonaro, formerly the president of Brazil, was indicted Tuesday on charges of attempting a coup after losing the 2022 election. Bolsonaro’s case is now being decided by the Brazilian high court, and de Moraes is not only overseeing that indictment, but also multiple other criminal investigations into the former president.

It’s not the first social media fight for Moraes—last year, he won a legal fight against Elon Musk’s X platform, with X finally agreeing to suspend accounts that Moraes argued were threatening democracy after defying Brazilian court orders for three weeks. Meanwhile, Bolsonaro’s charges include a plot to poison his successor, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, and assassinate de Moraes.

Last month, Bolsonaro called for Trump to take action against de Moraes, accusing the justice of targeting him for political reasons and censoring right-wing voices in Brazil. This lawsuit seems like Trump’s attempt to get involved, and filing it in a friendly U.S. court seems engineered to get a positive ruling for Trump and his fellow coup-plotter. But unlike with Trump, it appears that Brazilian courts may actually be able to hold Bolsonaro accountable.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy issued a stern warning to President Donald Trump on Wednesday after the latter blamed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on Ukraine itself, incorrectly stating they “should have never started it.”

Zelenskiy communicated that he’d like Trump and his administration, which has ceded more and more to Russia every day, to “be more truthful.” He also said that Trump “lives in a disinformation space” and that said disinformation is coming straight from Russia.

Trump on Tuesday also said that new elections in Ukraine would be mandatory in any diplomatic resolution, claiming Zelenskiy is “down at 4% approval rating,” another clear Russian talking point. In reality, Zelenskiy holds a narrow 52 percent approval rating among Ukrainians.

Years of U.S., Ukrainian, and greater European allyship and cooperation are collapsing just one month into Trump’s second term. His love for Putin and his dismissiveness towards Ukraine is a far cry from the American foreign policy of old. Instead of millions of dollars of military aid to Ukraine or sanctions against Russia Trump is holding aid hostage unless Ukraine forks over valuable rare earths, while Putin continues to acquire Ukrainian territory.

Inflation is up, but Donald Trump would sooner find any other scapegoat than deal with the critical economic issue.

“Inflation is back,” Trump said passively during an interview Tuesday night with Fox News’ Sean Hannity. “I’m only here for two and a half weeks.”

“Inflation is back and they said Trump—I had nothing to do with it,” Trump said. “These people that run the country, they spent money like no one’s ever spent it.”

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 Americans’ wallets.

U.S. inflation was up in January—the consumer price index indicated that prices rose by 3 percent that month compared to a year earlier, according to data released last week 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 Foods and CTown amid a nationwide egg shortage.

Earlier this month, 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.

Regardless of whether Trump is willing to take the blame for the economic churn, the nation is still pointing its finger his way. A Reuters/Ipsos poll released Wednesday found that Trump’s approval rating sank, while the share of Americans who felt the economy is on the wrong track rose to 53 percent. That was 10 percent higher than was reported during a January 24–26 poll, when 43 percent of Americans felt the same way.

Just 32 percent of polled Americans approved of Trump’s performance on inflation, according to the Reuters poll.

Elon Musk won’t stop showing just how little he understands about the U.S. government.

The billionaire technocrat joined President Donald Trump Tuesday night in an interview on Fox News’ Hannity, to attempt to justify the Department of Government Efficiency’s invasion into the sensitive files of government agencies and the Trump administrations’ efforts to gut the federal government.

Musk falsely reasoned that he could do whatever he wanted because of a mandate from U.S. voters.

“All we’re really trying to do here is restore the will of the people through the president. And what we’re finding is an unelected bureaucracy,” said Musk, who himself is unelected and increasingly unpopular among voters.

“There is a vast federal bureaucracy that is implacably opposed to the president and Cabinet. You look at D.C. voting and it’s 92 percent Kamala,” Musk noted.

“If the will of the president is not implemented, and the president is representative of the people, that means the will of the people is not being implemented. And that means we don’t live in a democracy, we live in a bureaucracy,” he said. “And so I think what we’re seeing here is sort of the thrashing of the bureaucracy as we try to restore the will of the people.”

“Is this making sense?” Musk asked.

No, it isn’t, and it’s because of Musk’s ironic disposition toward the founding document that is the U.S. Constitution, which sought to establish three branches of government that act as checks and balances on each other.

Neither Musk nor Trump care about the actual structure of the government, or that it was created in direct response to the tyranny of monarchy. That’s why they so openly attempt to skirt the rules about destroying federal agencies such as USAID, which can only be done by an act of Congress, and float impeaching judges who say things they don’t like. To them, there is only the executive branch, the reins of which Musk seems to have happily taken off of Trump’s hands.

Trump on Tuesday announced he would unveil an aggressive set of tariffs, confirming the worst fears of manufacturers across the auto, semiconductor, and pharmaceutical industries.

“It’ll be in the neighborhood of 25 percent,” the president said, when asked about the specific rate he’d be placing on foreign automobile imports. When asked about semiconductors and pharmaceuticals, he noted they’d be “25 percent and higher, and it’ll go very substantially higher over the course of a year.”

Trump told reporters at Mar-a-Lago that the tariffs on automobiles could come as soon as April 2.

In Trump’s telling, the tariffs are designed to strong-arm companies into bringing their manufacturing onto U.S. soil. About 20 percent of car sales in the United States last year were imports from Canada and Mexico. But 25 percent tariff on those sales would upend the auto supply chain and likely cause costs to rise dramatically, which would then of course lead prices for consumers to rise as well.

“Whether it’s auto tariffs that he comes up with on the fly or a general tariff, the net result is closures of plants all over the U.S. at the same time as Canada and Mexico,” Canada’s Automotive Parts Manufacturers’ Association president Flavio Volpe told Politico.

Time will only tell how Trump plans to convince American consumers that they should keep footing the bill—while the price of everything from automobiles to gaming consoles to Ozempic skyrockets.