HOUSE BUDGET: A key House panel took another step Monday toward anchoring Trump's ambitious agenda in legislation. The House Rules Committee voted 9-4 along party lines to send to the full chamber the Republican budget framework. But its fate remains uncertain, and GOP Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) responded, "We'll see," when asked if his plan for a House floor vote tonight remained in place.
Two "no" votes today could sink the budget resolution if all Democrats are in attendance. Johnson's math looks challenging.
As of Monday night, he did not have sufficient support in his party to adopt the measure, raising the possibility of a delay. The Speaker says he's not changing the budget resolution. The biggest challenge remains that conservatives want to see deeper spending reductions and deficit reduction, while moderates balk at proposed cuts to Medicaid.
The budget resolution calls for a floor of $1.5 trillion in spending cuts with a target of $2 trillion and places a $4.5 trillion ceiling on the deficit impact of any GOP plan to extend Trump's 2017 tax cuts. It includes $300 billion in additional spending for the border and defense and a $4 trillion debt limit increase.
Meanwhile, Sen. Steve Daines (R-Mont.) and Senate Finance Committee Chair Mike Crapo (R-Idaho) met with the president Monday in the Oval Office to focus on making permanent the expiring tax cuts that Trump and the GOP enacted in 2017.
The president and key members of his Cabinet back permanent rather than short-term tax cuts, despite the budgetary costs, Daines told Punchbowl News.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who spoke with Daines and Crapo by phone, will begin weekly meetings with lawmakers as Republicans craft a tax cut package.
The Hill: Under budget plans weighed by House Republicans, student loan borrowers could see their payment obligations increase.
REQUIRED AND VOLUNTARY: Federal workers on Monday struggled to unscramble whether to heed the warnings of the president and Elon Musk, or perhaps put their faith in their department secretaries (absent consensus among Cabinet leaders) or take as gospel the late-breaking guidance of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) that they can basically ignore Musk.
On the one hand, mandatory compliance by 11:59 p.m. Monday could mean keeping their jobs, according to Trump and Musk. But on the other hand, OPM said cooperation was voluntary.
"I thought it was great," Trump told reporters in reaction to an emailed demand sent to 2.3 million federal workers over the weekend requiring that they reply with bulleted summaries of work they did last week.
The president said Musk's "genius" effort sought to determine, "are you actually working? … Because we have people who don't show up to work and nobody even knows if they work for the government."
"If you don't answer, you're sort of semi-fired, or you're fired, because a lot of people are not answering because they don't even exist," Trump said in the Oval Office.
Trump told reporters that DOGE's endeavors will reveal "hundreds of billions of dollars of waste and fraud and abuse" in the bureaucracy. Musk began the project with ambitions to save $2 trillion, later reduced to an estimated $1 trillion.
In the corporate world, "ghost employees" are a part of some fraud schemes. The administration offered no evidence that large numbers of ghost civil servants are receiving federal compensation erroneously or fraudulently.
Cabinet secretaries on Sunday countermanded Musk's instructions. FBI Director Kash Patel, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard ordered their respective coworkers to hold off on responding. In some cases, security and intelligence requirements prohibit employees from sharing such information with any third party without prior approval from their supervisors.
The confusion persisted. The Treasury Department on Monday told IRS workers they were required to respond by Monday night. Republican senators voiced criticisms of Musk's weekend messages.
▪ NBC News reported that DOGE planned to use artificial intelligence (AI) to assess federal workers' responses to the what-did-you-do-last-week emailed instructions.
▪ The New York Times: Is the U.S. DOGE Service constitutional as structured and administered? Federal District Court Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly repeatedly asked a government lawyer on Monday to identify the service's administrator. He was unable to answer her. "Based on the limited record I have before me, I have some concerns about the constitutionality of USDS's structure and operations," she said. Musk is a special government employee described by the White House as an adviser with no independent authority who does not require Senate confirmation.
▪ The Hill: The Veterans Affairs Department fired another 1,400 employees Monday, identifying them as probationary and "non-mission critical."
▪ Defense One: Conservative podcaster Graham Allen started a new job at the Pentagon on Monday, as the Defense Department's digital media director.
▪ The Hill's Niall Stanage in The Memo: GOP divides emerge over Trump's handling of Musk, Ukraine.
▪ The Associated Press: Federal workers nationwide showed up to their offices Monday in compliance with Trump's return-to-the-office order.
Trade policy: Trump said Monday he expects planned tariffs on Canada and Mexico to move forward next month, although a U.S. official cautioned the schedule could be less certain. And questions abound about the fate of a "de minimis" trade rule exemption Trump appeared to believe he ended.
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