JD Vance Blatantly Admits Trump Will Ignore Republicans’ Budget

JD Vance is desperate to shore up support among House Republicans for a spending bill that will keep the government open for the next seven months—and to do so, he revealed that Donald Trump doesn’t actually intend to allow them to spend all of the money Congress allocates.

During a meeting with House Republicans Tuesday, just hours ahead of the vote on the bill, Vance warned that Republicans would take the blame if the government had to shut down, according to three people in the room who spoke to Politico.

Vance tried to make a desperate plea for unity. “We already lost one vote, we can’t lose another,” he said.

The holdout Vance is referring to is Republican Representative Thomas Massie from Kentucky.

Massie pledged Sunday that he wouldn’t support the continuing resolution. “Why would I vote to continue the waste fraud and abuse DOGE has found?” he wrote on X.

“We were told the CR in December would get us to March when we would fight. Here we are in March, punting again!” Massie added.

To be clear, the Department of Government Efficiency has yet to publish any actual evidence of fraud or abuse. Instead the group has claimed that they’ve canceled droves of government contracts—while a closer look reveals that many were already canceled or are worth a lot less than DOGE claims. But Massie’s conviction, even if mistaken, seems unshakeable. He was the only Republican who didn’t support a GOP budget resolution in February, which would necessitate massive cuts to social services, including the very popular Medicaid.

That bill had passed by a very slim margin of 217–215. Clearly, Vance is concerned about a repeat performance, this time with new defections. So, the vice president tried to meet concerns such as Massie’s by downplaying the actual utility of the government spending bill he hoped to rally Republicans behind.

Vance promised that Trump would “ensure allocations from Congress are not spent on things that harm the taxpayer,” according to Notus’s Reese Gorman.

Vance said Trump would do this under “Section II,” but it’s likely that he meant Article 2 of the Constitution, which the Trump administration has claimed gives the executive the power of impoundment, or a line-item veto of congressionally-appropriated spending.

But Vance’s promise is really a pipe dream: Congress legally retains power of the purse, granted by the Constitution, and the president’s purported powers are severely limited by the Impoundment Control Act of 1974.

If it seems a little outrageous that even with control of the House, Senate, and White House, the Republicans must openly admit that they are working to pass laws they have no intention of actually enforcing, that’s because it is. Rather than forge actual party unity behind his agenda, Trump wants the power to act unilaterally—leaving Vance to bully party members into saying “yes” to Trump doing whatever he wants when it comes to federal funding.

Health care professionals are torching Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s response to a slew of measles cases popping up across the country.

The health and human services secretary suggested Monday that a poor diet could have been behind the death of a West Texas child who contracted measles.

“It’s very, very difficult for measles to kill a healthy person,” Kennedy told The New York Times, adding that there is “a correlation between people who get hurt by measles and people who don’t have good nutrition or who don’t have a good exercise regimen.”

Kennedy’s comment, however, belied the fact that the most vulnerable populations to die from measles are unvaccinated children.

“To be crystal clear: 1. Measles is a nasty disease,” an epidemiologist under the handle @HealthNerd posted on BlueSky. “2. You cannot treat measles with antibiotics or cod liver oil. 3. The measles vaccine is very safe and highly effective, as shown by the ELIMINATION OF THE DISEASE IN THE US FOR 25 YEARS. 4. RFK Jr. is an ignorant fool.”

So far, two individuals who contracted measles were reported to have died this year. Both of them were unvaccinated.

New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie slammed Kennedy’s blasé attitude toward public health as “eugenicism.”

The highly contagious virus has no cure, so doctors say that the best way to remedy the disease is simply to get inoculated against it and never contract measles in the first place. But vaccination rates have dipped in several states due to conspiracy theories that vaccines are linked to autism.

In Gaines County—where the first victim lived—the measles vaccination rate among kindergartners is just 82 percent, reported The Atlantic. That’s far below the 95 percent threshold required to maintain herd immunity against pathogens.

And Kennedy—a virulent vaccine conspiracy theorist himself—has so far refused to encourage the public to receive the jab.

In an interview with Fox News last week, Kennedy claimed that local Texas doctors were “getting very, very good results” by treating their measles patients with steroids and cod liver oil.

As a reminder: Since their invention, vaccines have proven to be one of the greatest accomplishments of modern medicine. The medical shots are so effective at preventing illness that they have effectively eradicated some of the worst diseases from our collective culture, from rabies to polio and smallpox—a fact that has possibly fooled some into believing that the viruses and their complications aren’t a significant threat for the average, health-conscious individual.

Only 14 Democratic representatives signed a letter calling for the release of Mahmoud Khalil, a pro-Palestine activist and green card holder disappeared by the Trump administration for his organizing at Columbia University.

“We are horrified by the recent illegal abduction and now indefinite detention of Mahmoud Khalil—a U.S. legal permanent resident—by Department of Homeland Security agents, and we unequivocally demand his immediate release from DHS custody,” the letter reads, addressed to DHS Secretary Kristi Noem.

“Khalil has not been charged or convicted of any crime,” the letter continues. “As the Trump administration proudly admits, he was targeted solely for his activism and organizing.... We must be extremely clear: this is an attempt to criminalize political protest and is a direct assault on the freedom of speech of everyone in this country.”

Representatives Rashida Tlaib, Mark Pocan, Nydia Velázquez, Delia Ramirez, lhan Omar, Jasmine Crockett, Summer Lee, Ayanna Pressley, Lateefah Simon, Al Green, Gwen Moore, André Carson, Nikema Williams, and James McGovern signed the letter.

The absence of Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was noted given her previous criticism of Khalil’s arrest, but her chief of staff said she was waiting on one detail from Khalil’s legal team, when signing for the letter was closed. He added that she would sign the letter if it was still open.*

In the end, only 14 congressional Democrats felt compelled enough to publicly support Khalil.

*This piece was updated to reflect Ocasio-Cortez’s stance on the letter.

House Speaker Mike Johnson has joined the attacks on Mahmoud Khalil, the pro-Palestine Columbia University activist detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, but can’t name any crimes allegedly committed by Khalil.

At a press conference Tuesday morning, Johnson was directly asked what crimes Khalil committed to warrant his arrest, and gave a meandering answer calling the protest organizer a terrorist and attacking university officials for “refusing to take control” of the campus.

“If you are on a student visa and you’re an American, and you’re an aspiring young terrorist who wants to prey upon your Jewish classmates, you’re going home. We’re gonna arrest your—tail, and we’re gonna send you home where you belong,” Johnson said.

There’s just one big problem with that explanation: Khalil doesn’t have a student visa, he has a green card. It’s telling that Johnson couldn’t name a law that was broken but gave a full-throated defense of ICE’s detention of Khalil and President Trump’s decision to target a legal permanent resident of the United States (with a pregnant, U.S. citizen wife) for deportation. It’s an attack on the First Amendment to the Constitution and the right to free speech.

Only a select few Democrats have come out to condemn Khalil’s detention, such as Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, New York Attorney General Letitia James, Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee, and some members of the House Progressive Caucus. Considering that Trump promises to conduct more arrests and further infringe on a basic American right, with the full support of his fellow Republicans, the entire Democratic Party should be sounding the alarm and pulling out all of the stops.

Just two weeks after insisting that Donald Trump’s budget resolution wouldn’t touch entitlement programs, Republicans have opted to completely give up the game on slashing Medicare and Medicaid.

In an interview with Fox News on Monday, Elon Musk used lies and deceit to try to convince the American public that they should hack the popular social programs—along with food stamps, Social Security, and unemployment—by hundreds of billions of dollars. By Tuesday, Republican lawmakers had already fallen in line.

“If he moves to largely eliminate entitlement programs, are you OK with it?” pressed CNN’s Kate Bolduan.

“I think when he talks about elimination, we’re talking about waste, abuse, and fraud, and it is true that the Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security make up about 75 percent of our budget. It’s mandatory spending,” Missouri Representative Mark Alford said. “We’ve got to find the savings there. We will do that.”

“The budget director was speaking to our whip team last night in a meeting, and he pointed out that there are savings to be made in the Medicaid program,” Alford added.

But Alford’s fealty to the Trump administration might come at the cost of his reelection, as even his own supporters have expressed their malcontent with the destructive White House agenda.

Alford was practically shut down at his own town hall last month after he expressed support for Musk’s sweeping federal layoff plan. At one point, while suggesting to the crowd that they could vote for someone else in the next election if they didn’t approve of Musk’s appointment, one person shouted back, “We didn’t elect Elon!”

Alford seemed to take a page out of Trump’s own playbook in the immediate aftermath, refusing to chalk up the local frustration to his own inaction. In an interview with CNN, Alford referred to his own constituents as “outside agitators.”

The House GOP passed a budget resolution in late February that would gut major social services, including Medicaid, which provides health insurance to more than 72 million Americans. The $880 billion cut is a trade-off for conservatives whom Trump tasked to extend his 2017 tax plan, which will overwhelmingly benefit corporations and is projected to add as much as $15 trillion to the national deficit.

The party practically lied about the contents of the resolution, misdirecting Americans into believing that the bill did not task the House Energy and Commerce Committee to find, at minimum, $880 billion in savings from programs that fall under its jurisdiction, a seismic order that left the committee with practically no other option than to cut away at Medicaid.

In the days immediately following the vote, House Speaker Mike Johnson “ruled out” the largest cuts to the health insurance program, though he failed to offer any specifics as to how his party would make them without affecting Americans’ benefits.

Conservatives are teeing up a vote on the budget measure this week, though they can only spare one party vote without bipartisan support. Johnson has effectively dared Democrats to oppose the effort, hurtling the government toward a potential shutdown come Friday.