Congress

Jodey Arrington has 2 days to save the House budget

Published

1 year ago

February 12, 2025

This is the moment Jodey Arrington has been waiting for: The Texas Republican and longtime fiscal hawk has a GOP trifecta, the House Budget Committee gavel and an opportunity to make the enormous cuts to federal spending he’s always wanted.

But Arrington’s now at risk of being outmaneuvered by fellow chairs, senior leaders and the Senate as frustration gives way to full-blown anger among House Republicans over how he has struggled to advance President Donald Trump’s vast policy agenda.

A plan blessed by Arrington’s close personal friend, Speaker Mike Johnson, has stalled for weeks in the Budget Committee. Arrington and fellow Texas hard-liner Chip Roy have battled Ways and Means Chair Jason Smith (R-Mo.) and other senior Republicans over the fiscal parameters for the sweeping border, energy and tax bill.

Arrington on Tuesday called a Thursday meeting of his committee to settle those vast differences and advance a budget blueprint, and he now has less than 48 hours to figure out how to make it all work.

“We’ll soon find out if Jodey is in over his head,” one GOP lawmaker, granted anonymity to speak candidly, texted shortly after Arrington announced the Thursday markup.

It is, to be sure, a staggeringly difficult task to bridge the deficit-minded politics of the hard right with the more pragmatic concerns of swing-district Republicans who are wary of political blowback, and top House leaders are ratcheting up the pressure as they try to swiftly deliver Trump’s legislative agenda. His own struggles reflect just how difficult it will be for Republicans to deliver on Trump’s promises with their narrow majorities in both chambers.

Still, Arrington has struggled to get even the 20 other Republicans on his committee on the same page. He has made clear that his heart lies with the panel’s most conservative members, who see the present moment as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to get the nation’s fiscal trajectory on track. He’s long agitated for Republicans to get control of skyrocketing spending on the mandatory programs — including Medicare and Medicaid — that largely drive federal budget deficits.

But as a committee chair, Arrington is a de facto member of GOP leadership who is expected to fall in line behind more senior Republicans who have to balance ideology and agenda with protecting their majority — and protecting the jurisdiction of other chairs with different priorities.

Budget hawk

Arrington has allies and defenders among the small cadre of Capitol Hill budget hawks who have frequently battled Republican leaders as they push for deeper cuts than many in the GOP find politically palatable.

“I appreciate what Jodey’s trying to do over there. You know, he’s serious about bringing us back to some pre-pandemic level spending,” said Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, a member of the Senate Budget Committee and a longtime advocate for spending austerity. “Unfortunately, others in his conference aren’t.”

“He’s listened,” added Rep. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.), a member of both the Budget Committee and the hard-right Freedom Caucus. “He is doing a good job.”

But Arrington has openly warred at times with fellow chairs and other senior Republicans who believe he isn’t a reliable team player. For instance, in a private meeting Tuesday, he rebuffed Smith’s efforts to expand the scale of the tax cuts that could be embedded in the package.

Arrington and fellow Texas hard-liner Chip Roy have battled Jason Smith, pictured, and other senior Republicans over the fiscal parameters for the sweeping border, energy and tax bill.

Smith afterward took a public shot at him, telling reporters that the figures Arrington put forward could not accommodate both a permanent extension of Trump’s 2017 tax cuts plus other campaign priorities the president ran on last year.

“Anything less would be saying that President Trump is wrong on tax policy,” Smith said.

A senior Republican aide made a similar point, saying Arrington’s priorities do not necessarily align with those of the country’s most powerful Republican: “Everyone wants to cut spending. The problem is President Trump didn’t run on cutting spending. … Jodey just isn’t playing ball.”

The irony is that Arrington hardly cuts the profile of a hardcore conservative ideologue. Rather than emerge from the tea party politics of the late 2000s like many House members on the hard right, he’s a veteran of the Texas GOP establishment — an alumnus of George W. Bush’s gubernatorial administration and White House who later served as an executive for his alma mater Texas Tech.

His brand of fiscal conservatism has soft edges, much like Arrington himself — a dimpled, eager and jovial politician who has sought to rally fellow Republicans behind his “Reverse the Curse” fiscal plan.

That has been a struggle at times — one that has prompted some unusually personal clashes with fellow Republican leaders.

In early 2023, after he first assumed the gavel, then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy blocked Arrington from releasing a budget that included spending cuts so drastic that some centrists worried it would hurt them politically. With Democrats in control of the Senate and White House and no chance of any budget getting adopted, McCarthy saw no point in exposing his vulnerable members to blowback over the document.

“These budget resolutions are not easy,” Arrington said in an interview that year, not long after The New York Times reported that McCarthy considered Arrington “incompetent.” (Notably, Arrington was and remains close to Majority Leader Steve Scalise, McCarthy’s chief internal rival.)

Opportunity of a lifetime

Now Arrington’s job has suddenly gone from nuisance to necessary for House Republicans. The GOP wants to use budget reconciliation procedures to overcome a Democratic filibuster in the Senate, and that requires both chambers first adopting a budget resolution — a fiscal outline for the legislation to follow.

It’s Arrington who is supposed to play the leading role in drafting that outline, and people close with him say he’s reluctant to pass up the opportunity to institute serious spending reductions while also keeping tax cuts in check to finally wrangle out-of-control deficits.

But as the plan has taken shape in recent months, senior Republicans have privately complained that Arrington has dragged his feet on making difficult decisions and have questioned whether he is more loyal to the conference’s elected leadership or the Freedom Caucus hard-liners they’re trying to corral.

The tensions have been inflamed by Arrington’s internal campaign to get fellow committee chairs to cough up increasing levels of spending cuts — or, in Smith’s case, curbing his tax-cut plans — in order to keep the overall package’s deficit impact in line.

Things came to a head Monday night on the House floor, where Arrington held a tense conversation with Johnson and several other senior Republicans. The upshot was that Johnson would be shopping around a budget plan of his own — one that guarantees more modest spending cuts than what Arrington and the hard-liners have been pushing for while also reining in potential tax cuts.

After a POLITICO story Monday described it as Johnson “snatching the pen” from the Budget chair, Arrington rose inside a closed-door GOP conference meeting Tuesday morning to deny any such thing. And then, after weeks of waiting, he announced to his colleagues that his panel would finally schedule a markup later in the coming days.

Senior Republicans are still concerned that a deal won’t come together in time for the Thursday meeting, especially with the Senate Budget Committee set to move Wednesday on its own competing blueprint — one that some House hard-liners continue to prefer.

“I like Jodey quite a bit, personally — I don’t envy the position he’s in,” observed Rep. Brendan Boyle of Pennsylvania, the top Budget Committee Democrat. “It’s very interesting to me that there’s suddenly a markup on Thursday, because I did not realize that somehow, suddenly there is agreement on the House Republican side.”

Mia McCarthy and Jennifer Scholtes contributed to this report.

Congress

Mamdani boosts congressional slate ahead of primary election

Published

9 hours ago

June 19, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

NEW YORK — With just five days to go until the primary election in New York, Mayor Zohran Mamdani issued a stark warning to members of Congress who believe “incumbency is a substitute for action”: Watch out.

“People often ask me what I think of the state of the Democratic Party,” Mamdani said to the crowd at the Kings Theatre in Brooklyn as he boosted his endorsed congressional candidates. “This slate here today is our answer. The Democratic Party must change.”

The democratic socialist framed Tuesday’s election as much more than what that means for New York, though. In recounting how people also ask him about the 2028 presidential election, he put it bluntly: “It starts now. It starts on Tuesday.”

“For far too long, our party has seen its job as managing decline instead of delivering material change for working people,” Mamdani said. “That old way of thinking will lose on Tuesday. And frankly, it will lose in South Carolina and New Hampshire. It will fall short of 270 electoral votes, because the party of the past will not be what leads us into the future.”

Mamdani, joined by Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, urged his supporters to show up for his endorsed candidates “the way you showed up for me.” They include former New York City Comptroller Brad Lander, who’s challenging two-term Rep. Dan Goldman; state Assemblymember Claire Valdez, who’s vying for retiring Rep. Nydia Velázquez’s seat; and community organizer Darializa Avila Chevalier, who’s trying to unseat five-term Rep. Adriano Espaillat, the chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus.

Mamdani’s endorsed slate of legislative candidates were at the rally, too.

The rally featured standard stump speeches from the candidates, highlighting the need to support working class New Yorkers and immigrants. Speakers called out the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the pro-Israel group that has loomed over many of these primaries — despite no evident spending from its independent expenditure arm. Sanders also emphasized his call to ban super PACs, which have reshaped primaries across the city.

Taking place just hours after the massive ticker-tape parade celebrating the Knicks’ historic championship, there were also Knicks references galore.

“I hate to break it to you, but OG Anunoby is not here to save the day,” said Mamdani, who was wearing a Knicks jersey under his suit. “The only hands we can count on are ours.”

Sen. Bernie Sanders speaks during a get out the vote rally ahead of New York's primary election on June 18, 2026, in Brooklyn.

Sanders, who is wildly popular in New York, previously endorsed Valdez and Lander. Both Valdez and Avila Chevalier are members of the Democratic Socialists of America and are backed by the city chapter in their bids. Sanders had not officially endorsed Avila Chevalier prior to the rally.

“Why are progressives and socialist candidates winning elections all across this country?” Sanders asked. “The answer in my view is not complicated. The working class of America understands that our current economic system is rigged, that it is designed to benefit the wealthy and the powerful.”

Polling has shown Lander with a lead over Goldman, and a tight race for Velázquez’s seat. Public polling is scarce in the Espaillat race, but recent internal surveys suggest Avila Chevalier is posing a real challenge to the incumbent. Mamdani endorsed her just weeks ago, much later than Lander and Valdez, but his engagement in the race has significantly elevated its profile.

“Six months ago, they told us this race was over before it started,” Avila Chevalier said at the rally. “They told us Adriano was untouchable, that he was an institution, that you don’t run against someone like him and win. That this district was his, and that we should wait our turn. And they said it with such confidence, like the outcome had already been written. Look around. Look at what we’ve built.”

Mamdani’s decision to get involved in congressional races is stress-testing how the new mayor navigates relations with powerful, well-respected party figures — many of whom he’s on the opposite side of.

Mamdani’s endorsement is expected to be a significant asset for his picks; he had dominant performances across these districts in last year’s mayoral primary. And that shine doesn’t seem to have dulled. Recent polling has shown that Mamdani has high approval ratings.

Goldman did not support Mamdani during last year’s mayoral primary or the general election, as Lander has often pointed out. Espaillat backed former Gov. Andrew Cuomo in the primary, but supported Mamdani in the general election. Valdez’s opponents, Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso and city Council Member Julie Won, both supported Mamdani in the primary.

The mayor has been active on the trail for his congressional candidates of choice in the closing stretch of the campaign. And he touted them all in an advertisement that ran during the first game of the Knicks’ finals run.

Still, Lander has tried to keep some distance. When asked at a recent press conference why he would appear in that ad with Avila Chevalier, who attended a pro-Palestinian rally the day after Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack in 2023 — the same rally Lander said he left the DSA over — he said it was an “opportunity to show New Yorkers that politics can be a team sport.” He also clarified that he has not endorsed candidates in any other congressional primaries.

Avila Chevalier told reporters that she went to that rally to “stand against” Israel engaging in “a response that is often disproportionate and creates a greater loss of life.” She added that she has “condemned Hamas” and does “not believe that celebrating the loss of anybody’s life is OK.”

Kings Theatre isn’t located in any of the districts these congressional hopefuls are trying to represent — though it neighbors the seats that Lander and Valdez have their eyes on.

It’s especially far from Espaillat’s district, which includes parts of upper Manhattan and the Bronx.

While handing out campaign literature to people walking out of the subway in Hamilton Heights, Blue Light News asked Espaillat if he had thoughts about Avila Chevalier appearing at the rally.

“I’m rallying right here in my district with my constituents — not in Brooklyn,” he replied.

Jason Beeferman contributed to this report.

Congress

Meta faces calls for Congress to probe scam ads targeting seniors

Published

13 hours ago

June 18, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Retirement groups are calling on Congress to investigate Meta over a wave of social media scams targeting older Americans.

In a letter sent Thursday to House Homeland Security Committee Chair Andrew Garbarino (R-N.Y.) and ranking member Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), the groups alleged Meta has been slow to take down fraudulent ads, leaving seniors vulnerable to financial loss. The letter, shared exclusively with POLITICO, was signed by the Alliance for Retired Americans, the American Postal Workers Union Retirees and the American Federation of Teachers, among others.

“Fraudulent Medicare ads have proliferated on Meta platforms and too many seniors are getting scammed while Meta profits,” said Richard Fiesta, executive director of the Alliance for Retired Americans. “We are calling on Congress to investigate how these scams are allowed to spread, what Meta knew about them, and why stronger protections are not in place. Seniors should not be left vulnerable while scammers and tech companies cash in.”

The letter’s demands follow a report published last month by the Center for Countering Digital Hate, a nonprofit advocacy group, which alleged that Meta has profited by leaving up fraudulent ads, many of which target Medicare recipients.

“Scammers are determined criminals who use increasingly sophisticated tactics to defraud people and evade detection,” Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said in a statement. “We aggressively fight scams on and off our platforms because they’re not good for us or the people and businesses that rely on our services and for years we’ve been one of law enforcement’s strongest partners in the fight against this type of online crime — identifying criminals, disrupting their crimes and helping bring them to justice.”

Stone pointed to several examples of Meta’s efforts to combat scams on its platform, including a recent collaboration with U.S. and Thai law enforcement to disrupt online scams.

It’s not the first time Meta has faced scrutiny over the scams: Sens. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) and Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) urged the Federal Trade Commission and the Securities Exchange Commission to open an investigation into the company in November after Reuters reported that Meta in internal documents projected 10 percent of its 2024 revenue would come from fraudulent ads. And in February, a group of bipartisan lawmakers pressed Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg over its plans to prevent and combat fraud on its platforms.

Reps. Dan Meuser (R-Pa.) and Lou Correa (D-Calif.) also introduced bipartisan legislation earlier this year to combat predatory scam ads.

Congress

Congress lays out path for final passage of housing bill

Published

13 hours ago

June 18, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Congress is expected to send a landmark, bipartisan housing affordability bill to President Donald Trump’s desk by the end of next week as the Senate and House schedule action on the legislation in the coming days.

The Senate has teed up the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act for final passage on Monday, after completing all its necessary procedural votes this week.

The legislation will then move on to the House where GOP leadership plans to open debate on Wednesday, with a vote expected as early as the same day, according to six people familiar with the vote granted anonymity to discuss plans.

House leadership plans to suspend the rules, requiring a two-thirds majority vote, to speed up the bill’s path to Trump’s desk. Final passage could be pushed to Thursday depending on timing, the people said.

The housing bill aims to tackle housing affordability and boost homeownership and supply ahead of a midterm election dominated by cost-of-living concerns.

The four lawmakers leading the negotiations over the legislation — Senate Banking Chair Tim Scott (R-S.C.), ranking member Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), House Financial Services Chair French Hill (R-Ark.) and ranking member Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) — came to an agreement Tuesday afternoon after months of back and forth on the bill’s contents.

The housing affordability legislation, which the White House supports, contains a provision limiting the role of large institutional investors in the single-family housing market, which was a key condition for Trump to sign the bill.