Congress
Senate Finance Republicans to huddle with Trump on taxes
Senate Finance Committee Republicans will meet with President Donald Trump at the White House on Thursday to discuss the path forward for crafting legislation to enact broad swaths of the administration’s domestic agenda.
“The president has invited us to join him tomorrow at the White House,” Senate Majority Whip John Barrasso, who sits on the panel, told reporters Wednesday.
One Republican granted anonymity to discuss the agenda for a private meeting said one topic of the conversation will be on whether to use the so-called current policy baseline to extend Trump’s 2017 tax cuts. That accounting method would make it appear as though extending those tax cuts costs nothing. But it’s a controversial tactic among fiscal conservatives who worry that leadership is using it to hide the cost of the party-line bill they want to pass through budget reconciliation — and reduce the need for steep spending cuts to finance that bill.
The meeting also will focus on larger tax policy priorities, the Republican said. Senate Republicans, after initially favoring a two-track approach through reconciliation that would front-load border security, defense and energy policies in one bill before focusing on tax cuts in the next, are now moving towards embracing the House GOP’s approach, which would roll those policies with tax cuts into a single piece of legislation.
Leaders of both chambers are expected to discuss how to resolve differences between their budget resolutions in the coming weeks. The House and Senate each needs to pass the same resolution before the reconciliation process can begin in earnest.
Republican members of the House Ways and Means Committee are holding another all-day meeting Wednesday to determine what will go into the tax portion of the reconciliation bill. The tax writers kicked off deliberations on Monday with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.
Congress
Anthropic, OpenAI back Warner-Budd workforce data bill
A bipartisan Senate bill that would create a federal framework to track how artificial intelligence is reshaping the U.S. workforce has won backing from Silicon Valley tech giants including Anthropic, Google, Microsoft and OpenAI.
Sens. Mark Warner (D-Va.) and Ted Budd (R-N.C.) introduced the Workforce Transparency Act on Thursday, which intends to give Washington the real-time information needed to develop policy solutions for economic disruption and job losses associated with the technology.
The legislation would direct the Labor Department to collect and publish anonymized data on AI adoption across the public and private sectors. Data collected would include how workers use the technology and how that usage evolves over time.
The proposal comes as anxiety rises in Washington about the long-term effects of AI on the labor market and as both political parties craft messaging to respond to public concerns about the technology.
It would also establish a voluntary reporting system where companies and agencies can submit AI adoption data, and would then make anonymized versions of the data available to businesses, researchers and agencies.
Microsoft’s Corporate Vice President of U.S. Government Affairs Fred Humphries said the framework is helpful for “understanding AI deployment, productivity gains, and the creation of new jobs.”
“We know AI is beginning to transform work, but we don’t have enough data to understand how,” said Joshua New, director of policy at SeedAI, a nonprofit focused on American AI readiness that’s backing the bill.
The proposal is also supported by Alliance for Secure AI, Business Software Alliance, SCSP Action Program and Erik Brynjolfsson, a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI.
Warner has made this issue a cornerstone of his reelection campaign, launching an ad in December highlighting how the rise in AI adoption is coinciding with steep job losses and an affordability crisis in the U.S.
CLARIFICATION: Updates to clarify Fred Humphries’ job title.
Congress
Trump signs DHS legislation, ending record-breaking shutdown
President Donald Trump signed bipartisan legislation on Thursday to fund key agencies at the Department of Homeland Security, officially concluding the record-breaking shutdown.
After more than 10 weeks, the president’s signature restores funding to the Coast Guard, TSA, Secret Service, FEMA and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, along with other sub-agencies that don’t touch immigration enforcement. Congressional Republicans are separately working to enact tens of billions of dollars for Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement through a party-line reconciliation package, a process that progressed this week with the adoption of a framework to unlock a special budget authority to bypass the Senate filibuster.
House Republicans pushed past internal divisions as the White House and DHS warned stopgap funds to cover missed paychecks — pulled from the One Big Beautiful Bill — would run out within days. Agencies were bracing for additional furloughs as soon as next week, as DHS staffers were expected to get their final paychecks on May 8, according to an administration official, granted anonymity to share the timing.
While some immigration agencies have yet to be funded, enforcement operations were already paid for under last year’s GOP megabill. ICE and Border Patrol agents never missed a paycheck.
Still, the DHS shutdown dragged on for 76 days, leaving the agency in limbo at a critical moment on a number of fronts — from national security concerns to hurricane preparedness and lingering impacts on U.S. travel. During that time, Secretary Kristi Noem was fired and Sen. Markwayne Mullin confirmed as the new head of the agency, while the lengthy shutdown left staff dejected at a time when the department was trying to regain its footing after months of turmoil.
The agency, which oversees ICE and CBP, has been at the center of the monthslong funding fight on Capitol Hill. In the wake of the Trump administration’s deadly operation in Minneapolis, Democrats stayed united in resisting additional funding for those agencies without additional guardrails placed on immigration enforcement. Democrats ultimately failed to gain significant policy concessions from the Trump administration, and have questioned why the White House needs more funding for immigration agencies when it has billions remaining for border security and deportations from last year’s GOP megalaw.
Congress
‘Just go to Hell’: Ed Martin, Thom Tillis squabble amid Tillis’ anti-Jan. 6 litmus test
Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) and pardon attorney Ed Martin traded personal insults Thursday on social media, a remarkably public feud between a sitting Republican senator and member of the administration.
Tuesday’s sparring comes after Tillis, who helped sink Martin’s nomination to be U.S. attorney in Washington and is leaving the Senate at the end of his term next January, incorrectly asserted in a POLITICO interview Thursday that Martin was no longer employed by the Justice Department.
Martin responded in a now-deleted post on X: “Hey @SenThomTillis: are you ok? Having memory issues for retirement? You called me on my cellphone recently to block a pardon for one of your constituents. Remember?”
He fumed in another post: “Deranged. Instead back to North Carolina, just go to Hell. Good riddance. #DrainTheSwamp Btw, the TILLIS Standard: MAGA doesn’t forget losers!”
“Being hated by idiots is the price you pay for not being one of them,” Tillis fired back on X.
The pair have a history.
The North Carolina Republican dealt a crushing blow to Martin’s nomination to be the U.S. attorney for Washington, D.C., last March because of Martin’s advocacy on behalf of multiple Jan. 6 defendants.
Tillis told POLITICO he’d employ that same standard for whomever Trump nominates to replace Pam Bondi as attorney general.
“Hopefully, they’ll take me at my word when I say anybody who equivocated on the Jan. 6 rioters, I just can’t support,” he said.
Later Thursday morning, Tillis said he had called Martin to stave off the pardon of a billionaire North Carolina financier who owes more than $500 million in restitution payments to insurers.
“Ed Martin is correct about one thing,” Tillis wrote. “The ‘constituent’ I opposed pardoning was Greg Lindberg, who was convicted of defrauding North Carolinians to the tune of billions of dollars and attempting to bribe public officials. Keep up the great work, Ed.”
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