Congress
GOP Senators rail at FDA after closed-door briefing on abortion drug
Some Senate Republicans emerged disappointed from a closed-door briefing Tuesday with FDA Commissioner Marty Makary, saying the agency is not taking a safety review of the abortion pill mifepristone seriously and calling for congressional action to curb access to the drug.
Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) said in an interview Makary failed to give a timeline for completion of the review, explain what the audit will involve and disclose whether it was even underway.
“I think that this safety study is a dead end,” Hawley said. “I just think that FDA is not serious about it. I don’t think that they’re proceeding with any sense of urgency whatsoever. If they’re really proceeding at all. I frankly, can’t tell.”
Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), the chair of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee who organized the briefing for select GOP senators, in a statement also blasted “the lack of progress on HHS and FDA’s promised safety study on these dangerous drugs” as “disappointing,” and complained the review was “moving too slowly.”
It’s not clear what comes next. Republicans have previously tried and failed to impose restrictions on mifepristone, which is used in more than two-thirds of abortions, through government funding legislation. Hawley said he has not yet decided whether to attempt to place guardrails on the drug as part of the next appropriations process or introduce standalone a standalone bill but that he will roll out his plans in the coming weeks.
“I don’t have confidence [the FDA review] is going to amount to anything,” he said. “My view is Congress now needs to get involved.”
Reached for comment, HHS spokesperson Andrew Nixon referred Blue Light News to a previous agency statement asserting the FDA “is taking care to do this study properly and in the right way.”
“We are planning to complete the study as soon as possible while ensuring we are not cutting any corners from a scientific research standpoint,” the statement reads, adding that such reviews “often take approximately a year or more to conduct.”
Conservative anger with the Trump administration has boiled over in recent months over its decision to leave in place Biden-era rules that expanded access to abortion pills via mail and telemedicine, and for approving a new generic version of the drug. Administration officials took narrower steps in January to roll back access to mifepristone at retail pharmacies, but the anti-abortion movement and their allies in Congress are pressuring the FDA to abolish telemedicine prescription of the pills or ban them altogether.
At the same time, several GOP states are suing the agency, including Cassidy’s Louisiana and Hawley’s Missouri. The Trump administration has tried to rebuff these lawsuits, asking judges to wait until FDA’s ongoing study is completed before issuing a ruling. Anti-abortion activists, tired of waiting, have threatened to withhold resources from the GOP in the upcoming midterm elections if they don’t see action on the drugs.
Democrat Aaron Ford won Nevada’s gubernatorial race, ousting Republican incumbent Joe Lombardo and becoming the first Black person elected to lead the battleground state.
Ford’s victory gives Democrats a key pickup and elevates the two-term attorney general, who made his working-class upbringing and ties to organized labor central to his campaign. He joins a growing list of Black governors-elect, following earlier victories by Democrat Keisha Lance Bottoms in Georgia and Republican Rep. Byron Donalds in Florida.
Ford, a native of Dallas, campaigned on building more affordable housing, expanding union apprenticeship programs and repealing the state’s right-to-work law, with backing from the powerful Culinary Union.
His win returns the governor’s office to Democratic control four years after Lombardo defeated Democratic Gov. Steve Sisolak. Ford overcame the incumbent’s substantial financial advantage in a race that tested Democrats’ efforts to win over working-class voters.
The result is a turnaround for Democrats in a state Donald Trump carried by 3 percentage points in 2024, and it gives the party an opening to rebuild support in a major battleground state ahead of 2028.
The conservative movement to bar transgender athletes from women’s sports showed its message could resonate beyond Republican strongholds.
Voters in Arizona — a state with a Democratic governor and senators — approved a ballot initiative further restricting transgender students from participating on sports teams that align with their gender identity.
The measure expands the state’s existing ban on trans athletes participating on women’s school sports teams, adds restrictions on locker-room use and defines a person’s sex based on their original birth certificate.
Similar measures in Colorado and Washington are leading in early results, though votes are still being counted. In Nebraska, voters also added a ban to their state constitution.
The issue has found a champion in President Donald Trump, who has pushed a suite of anti-trans federal policies since returning to the White House.
But conservatives had made little progress outside the red states that swiftly passed bans in recent years. The measures on the ballot this year marked the first time voters had the chance to weigh in on the issue. The measures’ success could fuel similar campaigns to bypass resistant legislatures in more states.
Donald Trump awakens Wednesday boxed in. Already in the pincer grip of federal courts that have slowed his agenda, he now faces a historically powerful incoming Democratic majority in Congress, eager to turn their gavels and subpoena power on their longtime tormentor.
And he’ll face them down while a new crop of Republicans seeks to eclipse him as the leader of their party.
This is how the last chapter of the Trump era in Washington begins.
For Trump, it’s an unfamiliar position. He has spent a decade seeking to project invincibility and has spent the first two years of his second term asserting unprecedented executive power with little pushback from a Republican-controlled Congress. He sought to salvage that reputation with a social media post as Republican losses piled up.
“I wasn’t on the Ballot and if I was, we would have won IN A LANDSLIDE!” he wrote Tuesday night.
Not exactly a salve for a party in crisis.
Democrats also face a choice: how much of their investigative muscle and political capital are they willing to spend investigating a weakened Trump. The party continues to see Trump as a useful, unifying foil. Some of their incoming members have flirted with seeking to impeach him a third time, though Democratic leaders have not committed to that course.
If there was any doubt about the House’s intent, however, Rep. Robert Garcia — expected to lead the House Oversight Committee — erased it quickly.
“LAWYER UP,” Garcia posted on X Tuesday night, just as news outlets began calling the House for Democrats. Garcia and other House allies have projected a muscular investigative agenda aimed at what they have described as Trump’s corruption and alleged self-enrichment, his abuses of executive power, his misuse of pardons for the politically and financially connected and his decision to empower ICE to lead a mass deportation campaign.
Trump has never willingly ceded the spotlight — and has never needed to. Before Tuesday, he was at his weakest point in 2021, shortly after a mob of his supporters attacked the Capitol and Republican leaders seemed poised to abandon him. But because he remained politically viable, those leaders quickly returned to the fold, helping engineer his return to power and beat back impeachment and a fusillade of criminal charges.
Now, though, there is no political future for Trump, who is in his final two years of elected office. And it was in that context that he signaled a rare conciliatory approach Tuesday.
“We’re going to work with the Democrats to make sure things go well for our country,” he said in an interview with Blue Light News’s Dasha Burns on Blue Light News Elections Live. “I don’t want to sit here for two years just vetoing everything.”
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