The Dictatorship
Republicans and Democrats are growing further apart on Homeland Security funding
When Donald Trump came before lawmakers Tuesday night during the first State of the Union to ever occur during a partial government shutdown, the president used the occasion to issue Democrats a schoolyard dare.
“If you agree with this statement, then stand up and show your support,” Trump said. “The first duty of the American government is to protect American citizens, not illegal aliens.”
When few Democrats stood, Trump made it clear he’s digging in for a fight over immigration.
“You should be ashamed of yourself for not standing up,” Trump told Democrats, who made a point most of the night not to engage with the president’s speech.
That exchange encapsulated the state of negotiations on reining in Immigration and Customs Enforcement and funding the Department of Homeland Security, Democrats said — a negotiation in which there’s been very little actual negotiating.
DHS has been shut down since Feb. 14, and it’s been more than a week since there were tangible developments in talks.
At no point in Trump’s speech Tuesday night did he mention the killing of two U.S. citizens in Minnesota, Renee Good and Alex Prettinor did he mention Democratic proposals to require federal agents to wear body cameras, to receive judicial warrants to enter people’s homes, and to stop wearing masks — among other things. Instead, Trump shifted to a Republican proposal to require proof of citizenship to register to vote.
“What I took away from his comments was a total misunderstanding and resistance to any reform of an agency that’s lawless and totally out of control,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., told MS NOW on Wednesday. “He has no concept of how brutal and violent DHS is in violating constitutional rights.”
Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., said Trump wanted to shift focus away from the public outcry over ICE’s actions.
“Donald Trump didn’t want to talk about what happened with ICE in Minneapolis,” Van Hollen told reporters Wednesday.
Since last Monday, when Democrats sent a DHS funding counteroffer to the White House, there haven’t been many real developments. The White House quickly rejected the Democratic proposal, and never sent back a counteroffer.
“We sent them a proposal a week ago Monday. We still haven’t heard back,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said. “Crickets.”
Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., the top Democrat on the Appropriations Committee, told reporters that the ball is in the GOP’s court. And when asked if the White House was negotiating in good faith, she didn’t have a very encouraging answer.
“Not yet,” she said.
“We have sent them what our priorities are,” Murray said Wednesday. “They responded with a very weak response. We sent back the other response and have heard nothing.”
But congressional Republicans say, despite the lack of progress, they’re negotiating in good faith. They expect Democrats to warm up to their positions as the effects of the shutdown intensify. And Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., told reporters Wednesday there are still “overtures and outreach being done by the White House.”
The question is, Thune suggested, how motivated are Democrats to compromise.
“These agencies that are not currently being funded, and these people who are not going to start not getting paid — in a couple of weeks, it’s going to become very real for them,” he said.
DHS employees are set to receive paychecks Thursday for half of their pay. Their first fully missed paycheck is scheduled for March 12. The White House is able to pay some employees during the shutdown, especially those with border security responsibilities, thanks to billions of dollars provided in last year’s tax-and-spending bill, which isn’t affected by the funding lapse.
Republicans have made offers for changes at ICE, but not the measures Democrats have asked for.
The gap between what Democrats want and what Republicans are willing to agree to is clearly wide. And the bad blood over negotiations is only getting worse over a Democratic refusal to agree to a continuing resolution to keep the agency running a bit longer.
“We’ve offered more training, body cams, those kinds of things,” Sen. John Hoeven, R-N.D., told reporters Wednesday. “Or a CR, if the Dems want to keep negotiating. At what point does them turning that down just say they want to not pay [Transportation Security Administration] and the others?”
Those offers from Republicans, however, have not addressed the specific demands from Democrats. Schumer told reporters on Tuesday that Republicans “have not budged on the key issues, like masks, like warrants, like oversight from state authorities.”
The lack of movement has left rank-and-file lawmakers confused.
“It’s been very quiet, so unusually quiet,” Sen. Cynthia Lummis, R-Wyo., told reporters Wednesday. “Last I knew that offers that went back and forth were dead on arrival in each other’s hands. So it didn’t sound very good.”
Republicans suspect Democrats will keep playing hardball, knowing it benefits them to fight Trump as the 2026 midterm elections draw near, Sen. Jim Justice, R-W.Va., told MS NOW.
“I don’t think this has a thing in the world to do with DHS,” Justice said Wednesday. “I don’t think it’s anything to do with Homeland. I think this is all one thing, a midterm play, 100%. And the Democrats, really and truly, are really good at playing that hand, and the Republicans are probably not so good at playing that hand.”
So far, Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., is the lone Democrat to agree with that analysis.
He told MS NOW he agrees with his party’s push for policy changes to rein in ICE, but that he doesn’t think the shutdown will yield results.
“Yeah, you can want reforms, but if you want those changes, then do something that could produce those things,” Fetterman said. “Shutting down the entire part of DHS won’t do that. We all know that.”
Kevin Frey, Nora McKee and Peggy Helman contributed reporting.
Jack Fitzpatrick covers Congress for MS NOW. He previously reported for Bloomberg Government, Morning Consult and National Journal. He has bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Arizona State University.
NEW YORK (AP) — President Donald Trump’s administration this week acknowledged it made a significant error in figures it used to help justify a fraud probe into New York’s Medicaid program, a glaring mistake that undercuts a federal campaign to tackle waste, mostly in Democratic-led states.
The error, which the administration admitted first to The Associated Press, prompted health analysts to question how many of the Republican administration’s sweeping anti-fraud efforts around the country were based on faulty findings. One of a few mischaracterizations it made about New York’s Medicaid program, it also reflected a common criticism that’s been made of Trump’s second administration — that it tends to attack first and confirm the facts later.
“These numbers could have been cleared up in a phone call, so it’s really slapdash,” said Fiscal Policy Institute senior health policy adviser Michael Kinnucan, whose recent analysis called attention to the Trump administration’s inaccurate claim.
The mistake appeared in comments made last month by Dr. Mehmet Ozthe administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, in a social media video and in a letter to New York’s Democratic governor announcing the fraud investigation.
Oz claimed that New York’s Medicaid program last year provided some 5 million people with personal care services, which assist people in need with basic activities like bathing, grooming and meal preparation. That would add up to nearly three-fourths of the state’s 6.8 million Medicaid enrollees.
“That level of utilization is unheard of,” Oz said in the video, adding in his post that New York needs to “come clean about its Medicaid program.”
But the real number of New Yorkers who used those services last year was about 450,000, or between 6% and 7% of total enrollees, CMS spokesman Chris Krepich told the AP this week. He said the agency misidentified New York’s approach to applying billing codes and had since refined its methodology.
“CMS is committed to ensuring its analyses fully reflect state-specific billing practices and will continue to work closely with New York to validate data and strengthen program integrity oversight,” he said in an emailed statement.
Krepich said the probe was ongoing as the administration still has concerns with New York’s oversight of personal care services and the Medicaid program and is reviewing the state’s response to last month’s letter. CMS had raised other flags about New York’s program, including that it spends more per beneficiary and per resident than the average state, has high personal care spending and employs so many personal care aides that the job category is now the largest in the state.
Health analysts said the state’s high spending reflected both high costs for services in New York and a policy choice to provide robust at-home care. Cadence Acquaviva, senior public information officer for the New York Department of Health, called Oz’s initial mischaracterizations “a targeted attempt to obscure the facts.”
“New York State remains committed to protecting and preserving vital Medicaid programs that deliver high-quality services to New Yorkers who depend on them,” she said.
In a statement, a spokesperson for Gov. Kathy Hochul said, “The initial claim by CMS was patently false, and we are glad they now admit it.”
“Governor Hochul has been clear that New York has zero tolerance for waste, fraud and abuse in Medicaid, or any other state programs, and will continue her efforts to root out bad actors, protect taxpayer dollars, and safeguard the critical programs that New Yorkers rely on,” spokesperson Nicolette Simmonds said.
New York probe is part of a larger crackdown
The Trump administration’s investigation into New York comes as it has similarly approached at least four other states, including California, FloridaMaine and Minnesota, with investigations into potential health care fraud. The anti-fraud effort appears to be expanding as voters in the upcoming midterm elections say they’re concerned about affordability.
Trump last month signed an executive order to create an anti-fraud task force across federal benefit programs led by Vice President JD Vance. As part of that project, Vance announced the administration would temporarily halt $243 million in Medicaid funding to Minnesota over fraud concerns, a move over which the state has since sued.
Kinnucan, the analyst with expertise in New York’s Medicaid program, said he’s concerned that the Trump administration’s adversarial approach to targeting fraud in some states “politicizes” a conversation that should be a team effort.
“We want to think collaboratively among all the stakeholders in the program about how we can actually fix it,” Kinnucan said. “We don’t want to have fraud be this political football.”
Oz made other claims New York advocates say are inaccurate
In his video, Oz made at least two other claims about New York that Medicaid advocates and beneficiaries say distorted the facts.
In one instance, he said the state recently made its screening for personal care eligibility “more lenient by allowing problems like being ‘easily distracted’ to qualify for a personal care assistant.”
Rebecca Antar, director of the health law unit at the Legal Aid Society, said the opposite was true — that the state in a rule change that went into effect last September instead made its program requirements more stringent. She said being “easily distracted” doesn’t appear anywhere among them.
Krepich said the administrator was referring to whether New York’s standard for personal care services was “sufficiently rigorous.”
“When standards are overly permissive, it risks diverting resources away from individuals with the highest levels of need and placing long-term pressure on the sustainability of the Medicaid program,” he said.
Oz in the video also referred to personal care services as “something that our families would normally do for us, like carrying groceries.”
Kathleen Downes, a 33-year-old who has quadriplegic cerebral palsy and uses personal care services in New York’s Nassau County, said she was offended by the notion that all Medicaid beneficiaries have family members who are willing and able to help.
Downes, who has been disabled since birth and needs personal care help for things like showering, using the toilet and eating, said she hires both her mother and outside assistants for personal care services, so her aging mother doesn’t have to take on those tasks full time. She said her mother did the labor unpaid for years, precluding her from pursuing other career opportunities.
“He’s assuming that everybody wants to and can just do it for free forever,” Downes said. “And that’s not feasible for a lot of people.”
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Associated Press writer Anthony Izaguirre contributed to this story.
Friday’s splashdown of the Artemis II crew, the first to travel to the moon since the Apollo program ended in 1972, is a moment of celebration for all of us on Earth.
But it’s also an important reminder that, despite this success, the current administration’s Office of Management and Budget is proposing budget cuts that will all but dismantle much of NASA. It’s surprising, illogical and very troubling.
The proposed cuts would terminate 53 NASA Science missions, throwing away more than $13 billion in taxpayer investment.
The proposed cuts would terminate 53 NASA Science missions, throwing away more than $13 billion in taxpayer investment and halting the development of nearly every future NASA Science mission.
These cuts would be an insult to our astronauts and entire NASA workforce. Astronauts and their colleagues are civil servants who work hard, accomplish nearly impossible things and represent our country to the world.
It’s an odd choice from an administration that has pledged to put America first, to be sure. But stranger still, and quite personal to me, is the OMB’s proposal to completely end NASA’s STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) outreach program, which supports students and teachers nationwide. Programs like this have helped the United States be a world leader in science and technology.
We cannot allow this.
The U.S. has many great institutions, but NASA is a unique part of the American story. NASA is the best brand our nation has. When people around the world think of the U.S. at its best, they think of astronauts exploring the moon, telescopes opening new windows on the cosmos and spacecraft making profound discoveries on other worlds. NASA is who we are when we’re curious, bold and united.
There is also a growing consensus in Washington that we are in a new space race, this time, with the China National Space Administration, which, by the way, is planning to have taikonauts walk on the Moon in 2030. If the race is on, why abandon so much? Why cede the lead? The U.S. cannot be first in space if it is second in science and technology.
The administration proposed almost the same draconian cuts to NASA last year. When it did, we the people fought back. The Planetary Society, along with more than 300 advocates and 19 other partner organizations, went to Washington and organized the largest grassroots advocacy outreach for space science in history. Tens of thousands of citizens from every state and congressional district wrote, called and made their case to their elected officials. Together, we successfully saved NASA.
Now, this year, we have no choice but to fight back. On April 20, we will return to Washington, where people can join in person or join our Save NASA Science campaign online.
Science is not a luxury. It is a responsibility. Our founders knew it; you will find “Science” cited in Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution. Only a public space agency can sustain decades-long investments in the kind of science that tells us whether life ever existed on Mars, that tracks the asteroids that could threaten every living thing on Earth and that reveals the story of our origin.
NASA’s science program is a bargain for Americans. It accounted for one-tenth of 1% of the nation’s expenditures last year, a tenth of a penny of every tax dollar.
Cutting science would not just delay discovery; it would destroy it. It would shatter our STEM talent pipeline. It would abandon our international partners. And, it would cede U.S. leadership in space science to China and other nations.
NASA’s science program is a bargain for Americans. It accounted for one-tenth of 1% of the nation’s expenditures last year, a tenth of a penny of every tax dollar. And for every dollar spent, three come back into the economy. Every year, NASA generates $75 billion of economic growth and supports over 300,000 jobs in all 50 states.
Members of Congress and the Senate agree: NASA is a remarkable investment. I’ve met with both Republicans and Democrats, all of whom support space science. And last year, an overwhelming bipartisan majority rejected these same cuts.
NASA is what makes America great. It represents our best values: curiosity, determination, tenacity, and global cooperation. It proves that we are capable of extraordinary things. When we invest in scientific exploration, we invest in ourselves — in our economy, security and future.
If we concede and retreat from the frontier of space after a half century of leadership, it would be an unworthy choice. If Artemis II has showed us anything, it’s that the public, across the political spectrum, strongly supports space exploration, scientific discovery and a deeper understanding of the universe and our place within it.
Bill Nye is the chief ambassador at The Planetary Society, the world’s largest space interest organization.
After making history as the farthest journey into space humans have ever made, NASA’s Artemis II mission returned to Earth on Friday, splashing down off the coast southwest of San Diego.
The Artemis II crew splashed down successfully at 5:07:47 p.m. PT. The Orion spacecraft launched last weekfrom the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, the first crewed flight to the moon in more than 50 years. The entire mission from liftoff took a total of nine days, one hour, 31 minutes and 35 seconds, which NASA rounds up, to call it a 10-day mission.
In the buildup to the mission, questions about the craft’s heat shield led to concerns among some experts about whether Orion would hold up on reentry to the Earth’s atmosphere, the most perilous part of any crewed mission. A NASA-commissioned panel ultimately deemed the ship safewith the astronauts themselves endorsing it ahead of time.
The four-member crew — NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch, along with Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen — embarked on the 10-day mission to fly around the moon, setting the stage for future missions aimed at establishing a permanent lunar base.
After splashdown, NASA administrator Jared Isaacman praised the crew, calling them “wonderful communicators, almost poets,” during an interview Friday evening.
“These were the ambassadors from humanity to the starts that we sent out there,” Isaacman said.
He also emphasized that this mission set the stage for a future moon landing — and base.
“This is not a once in a lifetime … This is just the beginning,” he said during the interview. “We are going to get back into doing this with frequency, sending missions to the moon, until we land on it in 2028 and start building our base.”
On April 6, the spacecraft reached 252,756 miles from Earth, the farthest distance traveled by humans. Artemis II broke the Apollo 13crew’s record of 248,655 miles, set in 1970.
The crew conducted a seven-hour lunar flyby, coming within about 4,000 miles of the moon’s surface and seeing areas of the moon never before seen by the naked eye. In addition to testing the spacecraft, the astronauts studied the far side of the moon during a solar eclipse and observed lunar geological features and color variations.
Now back on Earth, the astronauts will undergo medical evaluations before heading to shore and traveling to NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston.
The next such mission, Artemis IIIis expected to launch next year.
Erum Salam is a breaking news reporter for MS NOW, with a focus on how global events and foreign policy shape U.S. politics. She previously was a breaking news reporter for The Guardian.
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