Congress

Shutdown threatens ‘chaos’ for Trump’s transition and inauguration

Published

2 years ago

December 19, 2024

The collapse of Congress’ spending negotiations is throwing the presidential transition and preparations for President-elect Donald Trump’s second inauguration into chaos as Washington stares down the prospect of a government shutdown just after midnight Friday.

Federal agencies only this week began briefing the Trump transition’s “landing teams,” which began their work more than a month later than their predecessors. Now, if Congress can’t cut a deal in the next couple days, those agencies could be forced to furlough much of the staff doing that work and shut down the government offices where it’s taking place — impeding the incoming officials’ access to documents and further slowing down already-delayed preparations to take over the federal government next month.

Trump and his team are already in the “danger zone” on transition and inauguration planning because they opted to use private emails and devices, rejected federal cybersecurity support, and are working out of Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s Florida club, said Ann O’Leary, who led Hillary Clinton’s 2016 transition preparations.

“At a minimum, a shutdown of the government is going to certainly add to the chaos and the vulnerability to the U.S. government,” she added.

An OMB spokesperson warned Blue Light News that such a lapse “would disrupt a wide range of activities associated with the orderly transition of power,” but declined to specify what programs and personnel would be impacted.

Agency staff are similarly in the dark. Federal staff received guidance from their leadership Thursday on what the shutdown would entail but it did not include information about how it would impact their work with the Trump transition, one State Department official, not authorized to speak on the record, told Blue Light News.

The Trump transition did not respond to a request for comment.

Congress this week appeared poised to avert a shutdown with passage of a bipartisan continuing resolution that extended government funding into next year and reauthorized an array of lapsed health, agriculture and other programs. But Trump’s team, led by Elon Musk, derailed the negotiations in the past 48 hours, announcing their opposition to the bill on social media and pushing GOP leaders to demand more concessions — including a temporary or permanent lifting of the debt ceiling. That has thrown Republican congressional leadership into a tailspin as Friday’s deadline to fund the government draws near.

In the event of a government shutdown, most federal workers would not only be barred from meeting with Trump transition officials in-person but also from communicating with them via phone or email from home. Some workers can avoid such furloughs by being designated “essential” under the Antideficiency Act. But Seth Harris, a former acting Labor Secretary who has worked on three Democratic presidential transitions, told Blue Light News that most transition activities likely wouldn’t qualify, other than some staff who work on national security.

“It creates yet another barrier to a smooth transition,” said Democratic health policy consultant Chris Jennings, who served on transition teams for Presidents Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and Joe Biden. “It delays their ability to effectively evaluate the dynamics on the ground, and it probably slows them down, in terms of both policy and personnel reviews, right before they’re trying to make their final high level appointments and develop their first series of executive orders and actions that they wish to take.”

Few expect a shutdown — if it happens — to stretch until Inauguration Day on Jan. 20, but lawmakers and veterans of past transitions say even a short-term disruption could impact prep work that has already begun.

On Capitol Hill on Thursday, Reps. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) and Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.) were among those raising concerns that a shutdown would impact the ability of the federal government to adequately staff Trump’s swearing in at the Capitol next month.

“There was money in there for planning the inauguration,” DeLauro said of the derailed bipartisan package that would have extended government funding until March. “Now money may not be there.”

Adrienne Elrod, the head of talent and external relations for Biden’s 2021 Presidential Inaugural Committee, said furloughs could stymie nearly every facet of the massive event.

“Who’s going to hand out the tickets to the inauguration to congressional offices? Who in the congressional offices are going to hand out tickets to the inauguration to constituents?” she asked. “The people escorting individuals who will be on the stage for the swearing in — who will be doing that, who will be facilitating that process? … Are there going to be enough Capitol Police officers there to provide the ample security that will be necessary for the swearing in? Will there be people there to work with their performers, and who’s speaking?”

John Goheen, the spokesperson for the National Guard Association, told Blue Light News that while the “full-time uniformed people” who typically help provide security at the inauguration are usually not impacted by government shutdowns, the staff who work on logistics behind the scenes could be.

“The National Guard is already very involved in putting together plans,” he said. “That includes deciding which units to deploy to secure the inauguration, reaching out to particular states and saying, ‘We need this and this and this’ — that all started weeks ago. You need to give states and individual soldiers and airmen adequate warning.”

Beyond the inauguration, O’Leary said the delays in the transition due to a potential shutdown and lack of cooperation with the federal government could pose grave security risks to the nation. The 9/11 Commission report, she noted, found that delays in the 2000 presidential transition due to the Bush v. Gore Supreme Court case “delayed the national security appointments and national security information being shared in a timely manner.”

The national security risk is “not just speculation,” O’Leary said. “It is documented that this has happened in the past and we need to make sure it doesn’t happen again.”

Myah Ward, Adam Cancryn and Nick Niedzwiadek contributed to this report.

Congress

Rand Paul’s about to get his chance to settle his feud with Anthony Fauci

Published

7 hours ago

July 28, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Sen. Rand Paul’s said Anthony Fauci belongs in prison. The Kentucky Republican will get his chance to make the case Wednesday when the former Covid czar is slated to appear under subpoena before the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee that Paul chairs.

Paul reiterated his objective on X Monday, saying the pardon President Joe Biden gave Fauci — Biden said to shield him from a vindictive Trump administration prosecution — would not protect Fauci if he lies to Congress.

The two have a feud dating to the pandemic, when Paul accused Fauci of lying to Congress about funding risky research in China that Paul believes unleashed Covid-19. Fauci responded to Paul by accusing him of lying. Now 85, Fauci retired from federal service at the end of 2022.

In April, a federal grand jury indicted Fauci’s former senior adviser, David Morens, on three felony charges for allegedly circumventing federal public records laws by concealing Covid-related communications. Federal agents arrested Morens at his home in Maryland, reportedly putting him in handcuffs and making him disrobe.

Paul’s goals go beyond incriminating Fauci. He also wants to show that Fauci funded risky virus research in China.

“The goal is the truth,” Paul told reporters on Monday about Fauci. “I’d like to hear him say he’s sorry.”

The origin of Covid remains a fraught debate, with no scientific consensus on whether it was a lab accident or whether an animal infected a human. But most Republicans and President Donald Trump have embraced the lab leak theory.

Fauci has rejected Paul’s accusations and defended himself vigorously, including in some of the five previous hearings in which they’ve faced off.

He declined to comment.

The debate over Fauci’s legacy has long broken on party lines, and Democrats are expected to defend him against GOP attacks on Wednesday.

“They got a longstanding vendetta against Fauci. He seems to be almost obsessed,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), a Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee member, said of Paul on Monday.

Both Paul and Democrats on the committee have supported stricter oversight of gain-of-function research, which aims to make viruses more virulent or more transmissible in order to devise defenses against them. The panel has twice approved Paul’s Risky Research Review Act, which would take funding decisions away from Fauci’s old agency, the National Institutes of Health, and give them to a new Life Sciences Research Security Board appointed by the president. The White House also released Tuesday a new policy stopping high-risk biological research.

Congress

Big Ten, SEC are on the clock as new college athletics bill is circulated

Published

8 hours ago

July 28, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

The bipartisan leaders of the Senate Commerce Committee are making changes to their big college sports overhaul in a bid to garner support from the nation’s two most powerful athletic conferences as they look to build Republican support ahead of a potential vote on the Senate floor.

Chair Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), the ranking member, made several concessions to the Big Ten and Southeastern Conferences in the latest draft of their Protect College Sports Act. They include protections against certain legal challenges and a new $20 million pool of funds that schools can use for retaining athletes, according to three people close to the negotiations.

It’s unclear whether the changes will be good enough to win over the two conferences. A senior Commerce Committee staffer asked the conferences to schedule a call with their general counsels and staff “ASAP” to discuss the text and gave them a 9 a.m. Wednesday deadline to decide whether they support the latest version of the bill, according to an email reviewed by Blue Light News.

Two lobbyists directly engaged on the bill said Tuesday that weeks of negotiations had not meaningfully addressed a litany of concerns the SEC and the Big Ten had with earlier versions of the bill.

The conferences demanded, for instance, that a provision allowing universities to jointly negotiate their media rights make clear that schools cannot be coerced into participating. The updated text includes a provision shielding schools who do not participate in media pooling from potential litigation, according to a copy of the draft obtained by Blue Light News.

The bill, however, leaves out another key demand of the conferences: a provision clarifying that postseason tournaments and contests would be excluded from media pooling.

It also retains a prohibition on conferences with over $700 million in revenue participating in mergers and acquisitions, which would impact both power conferences along with the Atlantic Coast Conference. That threshold was brought down from an earlier $1 billion limit, but the SEC and the Big Ten had hoped to see it stripped from the bill altogether.

The new text also includes a newly added section titled the “Ignite HBCUs Sports and Media Act.”

That section, which is still in flux, deals with “extraneous topics of broadband,” per the email sent to the conferences on Tuesday. The $20 million athlete retention pool also remains subject to change “as we discuss how to align the proper incentive for spending on women’s NIL,” according to the email.

Cruz remains determined to get the bill onto the floor before the Senate heads out of town for a scheduled recess next week. But time is running short, and he and Cantwell still need to win over wary senators on both sides of the aisle.

Congress

VA secretary’s role in failed vets bill stokes new round of White House, GOP frustration

Published

8 hours ago

July 28, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

White House officials and House GOP leaders are increasingly frustrated with Veterans Affairs Secretary Doug Collins, after they say he undermined a major veterans measure championed by Republicans, according to five people with direct knowledge of the matter.

The bill, which would expand benefits for tens of thousands of veterans, was abruptly pulled off the House floor earlier this month after a group of Republicans privately warned they would tank it. They were concerned they would end up being blamed for cutting benefits because of the way the bill proposed paying for the increase — and said that Collins’ VA hadn’t done enough to alleviate their worries.

“A self-inflicted loss at the hands of the VA secretary,” said one White House official after the vote.

The floor meltdown cost Republicans a legislative win just before the House departed for its summer recess — and scuttled a positive campaign issue ahead of the November elections. Johnson will now have to burn precious floor time in September if he wants to make another attempt.

And it’s just the latest move by Collins that has stoked backlash on Capitol Hill and inside the White House, after he irritated lawmakers by failing to give them advance warning about several high-profile changes, including staffing cuts and management reforms at the department.

Speaker Mike Johnson was so unhappy with the VA’s handling of the situation ahead of the veterans bill vote that he called the White House to press for a clarification from the VA about how it would change its rules to pay for the benefits expansion, according to three of the people, who, like others, were granted anonymity to discuss sensitive legislative dynamics.

Top Republicans involved said that the VA under Collins helped fuel opposition to the bill by issuing conflicting guidance about its own plans for veterans benefits. The VA ultimately issued a new statement to POLITICO just hours before the scheduled vote in an attempt to quell resistance. But it wasn’t enough.

Inside private meetings with GOP leaders ahead of the failed vote, key House Republicans said they had spoken with Collins about their concerns and he had at least in part agreed with them, according to three other people involved in the conversations.

Administration officials pushed back on the friction. White House assistant press secretary Olivia Wales said in a statement that Collins “is doing a great job and works tirelessly to deliver for our heroic veterans.”

VA press secretary Quinn Slaven said that officials have clearly outlined support for the measure in a statement of administration policy and in public statements. “Under the leadership of President [Donald] Trump, Secretary Collins is proud to work every day to make VA benefits better, faster and easier to use than ever before,” he said in a statement.

Senior House Republicans have relayed concerns to the White House about how both Collins and Don Bergin, the VA’s assistant secretary for congressional and legislative affairs, handled the matter.

Democrats and some veterans groups have strongly opposed the measure. Money for the expansion of aid for disabled veterans would be funded by cuts in future disability claims for tinnitus and sleep apnea cases, a rule change that has been planned since the Biden administration.

But officials from the Veterans of Foreign Wars and Disabled American Veterans have attacked the plan as a dangerous precedent. Supporters, including House Veterans’ Affairs Committee Chair Mike Bost (R-Ill.), have argued the savings will be returned to the U.S. Treasury if not used for other programs.

In the lead-up to the vote, VA officials had suggested that they may not go ahead with the changes, jeopardizing about $13 billion over the next decade that was slated to pay for the measure. Just hours before the House vote was pulled, department officials clarified that the sleep apnea and tinnitus revisions will move ahead in coming months regardless of the bill’s fate.

But several GOP members still expressed concerns about the uncertainty surrounding the bill. And after a blowup between the speaker, his allies and the GOP holdouts in his ceremonial office just off the House floor, Johnson had to pull the bill from the floor.

The normally even-keeled Johnson, deeply frustrated after the failed vote, said he and Republican supporters of the measure were battling “misinformation” swirling about the legislation.

Senior Republicans were especially upset that Collins appeared to be working against them even after the VA had a seat at the table to craft the legislation.

House Republicans who spoke with Collins about the legislation said he never directly told them to vote against the bill, but he discussed their and his concerns about the legislation in a way they felt okay remaining opposed to it, according to the three other people involved in the conversations.

But anything less than 100 percent endorsement from Collins was seen as a major blow to the bill — which GOP leadership and White House officials struggled to get to the floor and whip for weeks.

It was just the latest move from Collins, a former chair of the House Judiciary Committee who helped defend Trump through his first impeachment, that has rankled Capitol Hill leaders and officials inside the White House.

His reorganization of the VA, including an initial mass layoff proposal for 80,000 more firings across a roughly 480,000-person department drew fierce opposition from bipartisan lawmakers on Capitol Hill earlier this year, including from the late Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), who said he was blindsided by the move.

“We don’t need to be reading memos in the paper about 20 percent cut at the VA,” Graham said at the time.

Senate Veterans’ Affairs Chair Jerry Moran (R-Kan.) also said at that time that while the massive department is “in need of reform,” efforts to downsize “must be done in a more responsible manner,” Moran, who had been in close contact with VA, Collins and White House staff about personnel issues for weeks, added that lawmakers “need information” and that the numbers need to be “justifiable.”

Collins has also triggered the anger of Republican appropriators on Capitol Hill — he agreed to testify before House appropriators in May only after lawmakers voted to withhold funding for the agency if he didn’t. A VA spokesperson at the time denied GOP lawmakers had to pressure Collins to appear.

Collins’ handling of the veterans’ bill has also shaken his relationship with some White House officials — who are tracking how many days a week Collins is in Washington versus his home state of Georgia, according to two of the people involved in the conversations.