May. 1, 2026, 7:02 AM EDT

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Trump administration is arguing that the war in Iranhas already ended because of the ceasefire that began in early April, an interpretation that would allow the White House to avoid the need to seek congressional approval.

The statement furthers an argumentDefense Secretary Pete Hegseth laid out during testimony before the Senate earlier Thursday, when he said the ceasefire effectively paused the war. Under that rationale, the administration has not yet met the requirement mandated by a 1973 law to seek formal approval from Congress for military action that extends beyond 60 days.

A senior administration official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the administration’s position, said for purposes of that law, “the hostilities that began on Saturday, Feb. 28 have terminated.” The official said the U.S. military and Iran have not exchanged fire since the two-week ceasefire that began April 7.

An administration official did not immediately respond to MS NOW’s question about what would happen if either side breaks the ceasefire.

While the ceasefire has since been extended, Iran maintains its chokehold on the Strait of Hormuz, and the U.S. Navy is maintaining a blockadeto prevent Iran’s oil tankers from getting out to sea.

Under the War Powers Resolution, the law that sought to constrain a president’s military powers, President Donald Trump had until Friday to seek congressional authorization or cease fighting. The law also allows an administration to extend that deadline by 30 days.

Democrats have pushed the administrationfor formal approval of the Iran war, and the 60-day mark would likely have been a turning point for a swath of Republican lawmakers who backed temporary action against Tehran but insisted on congressional input for something longer.

“That deadline is not a suggestion; it is a requirement,” said Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, who voted Thursday in favor of a measure that would end military action in Iran since Congress hadn’t given its approval. She added that “further military action against Iran must have a clear mission, achievable goals, and a defined strategy for bringing the conflict to a close.”

Richard Goldberg, who served as director for countering Iranian weapons of mass destruction for the National Security Council during Trump’s first term, said he has recommended to administration officials that they simply transition to a new operation, which he suggested could be called “Epic Passage,” a sequel to Operation Epic Fury.

That new mission, he said, “would inherently be a mission of self-defense focused on reopening the strait while reserving the right to offensive action in support of restoring freedom of navigation.”

“That to me solves it all,” added Goldberg, who is now a senior adviser at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a hawkish Washington think tank.

During testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee on Thursday, Hegseth said it was the administration’s “understanding” that the 60-day clock was on pause while the two countries were in a ceasefire. Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., who had asked Hegseth about the timeline, later told reporters that the defense secretary “advanced a very novel argument that I’ve never heard before” and “certainly has no legal support.”

Katherine Yon Ebright, counsel at the Brennan Center’s Liberty and National Security Program and an expert on war powers, said that interpretation would be a “sizeable extension of previous legal gamesmanship” related to the 1973 law.

“To be very, very clear and unambiguous, nothing in the text or design of the War Powers Resolution suggests that the 60-day clock can be paused or terminated,” she said.

Other presidents have argued that the military action they’ve taken was not intense enough or was too intermittent to qualify under the War Powers Resolution. But Trump’s war in Iran would certainly not be such a case, Ebright said, adding that lawmakers need to push back against the administration on that kind of argument.

Emily Hung is an associate White House producer for MS NOW.

May. 1, 2026, 6:00 AM EDT

ByDavid M. Perry

I have been writing about the politics and policies around disability in the United States for almost 20 years. My wife is the board chair for a Minnesota disability nonprofit organization. So when it comes to disability policy, I usually feel like I know what’s going on — in the abstract, that is.

And yet, when it comes to my son, a disabled adult, I often feel at sea. I never really know what he should apply for, what the process will be like or whether he’s likely to get the support he needs without a fight. And here’s the bigger problem: You’re not supposed to know what you or your loved ones qualify for. Otherwise, you might get what you are actually owed.

On Tuesday, ProPublica revealed that the Trump White House is about to make this terrible system even worse, “according to four federal officials, internal emails and a federal regulatory listing.” More specifically, the administration is trying to shrink supplementary security income payments by changing two rules that benefit disabled adults who live with their families. My son lives with his family, i.e. me, my wife and his brother, and despite all the qualifications we bring to table, I really can’t say what these changes would mean for us. But I can say this: The confusion is a feature, not a bug.

Nico, my son, is autistic and has Down syndrome. He’s “functionally non-verbal,” which means that although he talks all the time, he does not communicate in a way that lends itself to truly independent living or working. He has considerable agency in his life, but he is vulnerable and always needs a responsible adult nearby. Not so long ago, government support for him likely would have required placing him in a large residential facility. But recent decades have brought landmark disability civil rights lawsregulations and court decisions. We entered an era where, for a minute, there was a pretty broad bipartisan consensus around providing resources to adults like Nico that allowed them to choose where to livewho to live with and find the support they needed.

But to Republicans today, that seems intolerable.

Here’s what the administration is proposing (or at least what I think it is proposing): First, the value of disabled people’s bedrooms will now be deducted from the monthly payments under SSI. So if I let my son live in his bedroom for free, that will now be considered an asset that reduces his SSI payment. It’s possible that I can charge him rent to avoid this, but the whole goal of SSI (for me) is to give him a small steady income that lets him be independent. And to figure it out how to comply with this change, I can hire a lawyer, but most people don’t have those means. It’s not the first time some new disability services rule was designed to most impact people who can’t afford lawyers.

The second rule involves SNAP. Basically, if your family went through the process of qualifying for food assistance, then the federal government would also assume your family could not provide meaningful support to a disabled adult, thus ensuring they received the full possible SSI payment. The Trump administration is proposing changing this, making it harder for a household to qualify for aid, in the name of what the program listing calls “program integrity.” (A spokesperson for the Office of Management and Budget told ProPublica that its report was “false because it speculates about policies that have not yet been decided.”)

All of this falls under the rubric of what scholars Pamela Herd and Donald Moynihan long ago coined as “administrative burdens.” Complicated administrative systems, by their very complexity, do the work of shrinking social programs and promoting an anti-safety-net agenda, while avoiding the politically unpopular route of telling Americans that their benefits are being cut.

At times, Democrats have created administrative burdens out of a misguided sense of fairness (such as means-tested benefits). But what’s coming from Republicans right now is much more cynical — cut programs in the name of “integrity.” By this, the administration means the change is being done to protect against unspecified fraud — a favorite tactic of this White House. It’s possible the administration will reverse course now that this proposal has been noticed, just as happened last fall with planned changes for aging workers’ disability benefits. But the confusion has already been sown, leaving families such as mine scrambling to figure out what’s actually happening.

We applied for SSI for our son about a year ago, not long after he turned 18. As chance would have it, the day I started drafting this essay, we got a call from the Minnesota Department of Human Services. The department said a decision had been reached and we would be contacted soon. I don’t know what that decision was. I do know that I should be able to reliably predict what my son’s financial, medical, housing, educational, employment and social opportunities will look like in the next phase of our lives. I want to be able to plan. Instead, I just wait for the next bad news to come from the White House.

May. 1, 2026, 6:00 AM EDT

ByRep. Delia RamirezandAndy Kang

As workers prepare to march in the streets on May Day, congressional Republicans are moving to use a budget reconciliation process to add $70 billion in new funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection. No legitimate reform is attached. No oversight is required. And many of the people in the crosshairs of this expanded deportation machine are among the workers we march for on May Day.

This term, the Trump administration restarted worksite raids — enforcement actions the Biden administration had mostly paused — and aimed those raids at workers, not the employers exploiting them. Indeed, companies exploiting such workers are almost never held accountable. Thus, workers who fear deportation don’t report wage theft. They don’t report unsafe conditions. They don’t organize. Research on previous enforcement surges found that when immigration raids increase, the willingness of workers to make workplace injury complaints falls, and minimum wage violations rise — not only among immigrant workers but also among everyone working alongside them. The suppression spreads. The terror and its associated chilling effect are not a side effect; it’s the intended effect.

The $70 billion request is outrageous if for no other reason than we have already seen what the Trump administration does when it has unlimited resources and no accountability:  masked agents smashing car windows and grabbing parents in front of their children. The administration wants no guardrails against racial profiling. It wants no accountability for the deaths of Renee Good and Alex Prettitwo U.S. citizens shot dead during this year’s federal paramilitary surge in Minnesota. Republicans want to give ICE billions of dollars more even as it makes no effort to rein in White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, the architect of the administration’s mass deportation operation.

All the reasons above are why Rep. Delia Ramirez helped introduce the Melt ICE Actand they’re why we should see this May Day as not just another protest but as a reckoning. The bill would begin dismantling Trump’s expanded deportation machine. Not reform it. Not alter who oversees it. Dismantle it. Because the problem is not that ICE lacks accountability. It’s that an agency with so much money, so much power and so little oversight is designed for impunity. ICE is designed to be a vehicle for terror, not safety.

ICE’s total funding is already larger than the combined budgets of the FBI; the Drug Enforcement Administration; the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives; and the U.S. Marshals. The administration has requested enough new funding to support the removal of one million people per year. That is not security. The administration is pushing for a domestic enforcement apparatus operating at a scale our country has never attempted, and $70 billion more would lock in such outrageous and disproportionate spending  for three more years.

To give the funding cover, Republicans will begin to advocate for any number of “immigration reform” bills that fail to meet the moment. Don’t be fooled. Republican efforts to advance these bills are not earnest. They are designed to give members facing competitive races something to point to while big corporations, profiteers and private interests rake in record profits from building out the enforcement machinery and exploiting workers fearing deportation. You fund the machine to hurt immigrants. You hold a press conference about reform to lie to workers.

On May Day, FIRM members in more than 30 states will march alongside labor unions and community organizations that understand what is at stake. They are marching while Republicans’ additional $70 billion hangs over their heads. They are marching because the same Congress that funds the raids and cuts working people’s programs and services also refuses to pass a real pathway to citizenship, which would give workers the legal standing to report abuse, organize and participate fully in the economy.

A true pathway to citizenship advanced in bills like the American Dream and Promise Act and the Renewing Immigration Provisions of the Immigration Act of 1929paired with the Melt ICE Act, is what would actually bring about change — not performative bills that are designed to fail. And not press conferences timed to election cycles. We need legislation that meets the scale of what is being built against immigrant communities and starts tearing it down. To pass immigration reform that truly meets the moment will require the power of the people and legislation endorsed by people-powered movements.

Immigrant workers helped build our country. They are still building our country. This May Day, they are marching for the right to stay in it, and we are introducing legislation to make sure they can.