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Trump to nominate Republican donor to serve as UK ambassador

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President-elect Donald Trump has nominated investment banker Warren Stephens to be his ambassador to the United Kingdom.

Stephens, a financial backer of Trump’s campaign, would be among at least five other billionaires selected for major roles by the president-elect.

“Warren has always dreamed of serving the United States full time,” Trump said Monday in a Truth Social post. “I am thrilled that he will now have that opportunity as the top Diplomat, representing the U.S.A. to one of America’s most cherished and beloved Allies.”

Stephens donated $1 million to Trump’s campaign over the summer after supporting other Republican presidential candidates, including former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott.

In 2016, Stephens gave a combined $5.9 million to a pair of super PACs that spent heavily to prevent Trump from winning the Republican nomination.

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Trump’s FBI pick one step closer to confirmation

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Kash Patel, the controversial nominee to lead the FBI, cleared another key procedural hurdle Tuesday.

The Senate voted 48-45 to move forward with Patel’s nomination, setting up his confirmation vote in the coming days to helm the agency for a 10-year term.

Patel, if confirmed, is set to be a central figure in President Donald Trump’s efforts to leverage his powers against perceived enemies. A former House staffer who worked to discredit the congressional inquiry into Russian interference in the 2016 election, Patel has promised to go after Trump’s adversaries and shut down the FBI’s Washington headquarters on Day 1 of his tenure to create “a museum” of the “deep state.”

Senate Judiciary Committee Democrats have argued that Patel would put fealty to the president ahead of his duties as FBI director and accused the nominee of helping from outside the federal government to orchestrate the agency’s recent leadership shakeup. They asked for a second hearingto question Patel on that matter and others — a request swiftly denied by Chair Chuck Grassley, who argued the request amounted to an attempt to undermine the 2024 election results giving Trump the prerogative to staff his own administration.

In his first, and only, confirmation hearing, Patel distanced himself from his work with the “J6 prison choir,” formed by a group of people incarcerated for participating in the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021. He failed to provide a definitive answer on whether Trump lost the 2020 election and declined to provide details on his testimony as part of the investigation into Trump’s retention of classified documents.

Trump announced Patel’s nomination in December, moving to oust then-FBI Director Christopher Wray, whom Trump selected in his first administration before souring on him. In departing his post last month, Wray — who Trump accused of weaponizing the agency — said in a parting message to colleagues they should remain independent and stay away from politics.

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Ways and Means eyeing limits to corporate tax deductions

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The House Ways and Means Committee is looking at limiting corporate state and local tax deductions as one way to offset the costs of a large party-line tax bill, according to two people familiar with the discussions.

The panel, which oversees all tax policy, is considering the limit among other potential offsets for the bill, according to the people, who were granted anonymity to share private deliberations. Companies currently can deduct an unlimited amount of state income, property and sales taxes from their federal tax bill.

The discussions signal that a proposal to limit corporate SALT, as the deduction is called, may have enough support among Republicans to make it into a party-line tax bill. The far-right House Freedom Caucus had previously raised the idea of putting a cap on the deduction to pay for raising the current cap on the amount of state and local taxes that individuals can deduct, but it was unclear how much buy-in the proposal had with the rest of the conference.

The discussions come as tax writers scramble to find ways to contain and offset the costs of both extending expiring tax cuts and enacting President Donald Trump’s tax priorities. House Republicans adopted a budget plan last week that set the upper limit on the size of tax cuts at $4.5 trillion, which leaves very little wiggle room for the conference to enact all of their ideas.

Extending the expiring provisions of Trump’s 2017 tax cuts for ten years would cost roughly $4 trillion without interest, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Republicans have also committed to restoring business write-offs like bonus depreciation, which would cost $378 billion over a ten-year window, according to CBO.

Those policies alone would leave little room for some of Trump’s campaign promises to eliminate income taxes on tips and overtime work, which could add hundreds of billions more in red ink.

The Ways and Means Committee has also been considering other ways to cut down the impact of a tax bill on the federal deficit. Those include strengthening work requirements for the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program and repealing a nursing home staffing mandate implemented under the Biden administration.

According to a joint analysis by the Bipartisan Policy Center and the Tax Foundation, repealing corporate deductions for state income taxes could raise around $192 billion in revenue.

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The House GOP budget resolution is in trouble

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Speaker Mike Johnson is staring down at least a dozen Republican holdouts on the budget blueprint he wants to put on the House floor in the coming days — and he can only afford to lose one member and still approve the resolution along party lines.

Johnson and his whip team are using the current week-long recess to ramp up engagement with undecided Republicans, including seven members — if not more — who have raised serious concerns about deep cuts to Medicaid in the House GOP budget resolution. Several other members are wary of a move to raise the debt limit as part of the plan.

In private meetings and calls with these members over the last few days, Republican leaders have argued that adopting the budget blueprint is simply the first step toward being able to craft the massive legislative package to enact President Donald Trump’s domestic agenda through the filibuster-skirting budget reconciliation process.

According to four people granted anonymity to share private conversations, GOP leaders are assuring members they can still debate the specifics of that package in the weeks ahead — appealing to them not to stand in the way of delivering Trump’s biggest priorities.

But the fiscal blueprint adopted by the House Budget Committee last week, to which GOP leaders negotiated a last-minute addition to appease hard-liners, would now require panels to reach a new target of $2 trillion in spending cuts to pay for the bill. The House Energy and Commerce Committee will need to cut $880 billion from programs under its purview, including Medicaid.

Many lawmakers aren’t convinced their colleagues will be able to achieve necessary savings without “significantly cutting” the safety net program, according to two Republicans aware of internal party conversations. The GOP plan to enact work requirements for Medicaid would only net about $100 billion in savings over 10 years.

The vulnerable incumbents wary of slashing Medicaid services include Reps. David Valadao of California, Nicole Malliotakis of New York, Don Bacon of Nebraska, Rob Bresnahan of Pennsylvania and others from redder districts. They were generally blindsided by the deeper level of proposed cuts, a Republican said, as that possibility never came up in earlier discussions with GOP leaders.

Now, the members want GOP leaders to explain how they’re going to cut $880 billion across Energy and Commerce programs “and not undermine the basic care provided by Medicaid as the President requested,” said another Republican aware of conversations.

Leaders are attending to concerns from other corners of their conference, too — for instance, a slice of lawmakers in high tax blue states remain wary that the budget plan doesn’t include enough room to increase the cap on a key deduction for state and local taxes in blue states.

The House GOP whip team on Monday evening called Rep. Tim Burchett of Tennessee, along with several other remaining holdouts, to stave off opposition based on leadership’s plans to use the reconciliation bill to raise the debt limit, according to the four people familiar with the conversations. GOP leaders have said debt limit concerns among members have softened in recent weeks.

Burchett and Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky, who also opposes raising the debt ceiling, want even deeper spending cuts across the board. Burchett is still undecided on the resolution and Massie has privately told other Republicans that he’s a “no” — though he’s pushing to include in the final bill his legislation that exempts Social Security benefits from income taxes and some Republicans feel he could be persuaded.

GOP leaders are also watching Rep. Victoria Spartz of Indiana, who has also pressed for more spending cuts. Rep. Kat Cammack of Florida has also pushed for the reconciliation package to include her “REINS Act” that would curtail federal rule-making.

Another complication to the House GOP whip operation is that Senate Republicans are speeding ahead this week to adopt their own budget resolution. For the time being, however, fiscal hard-liners in the House appear to be standing by their promise to support Johnson’s plan on the floor rather than jump ship for the Senate’s alternative.

Some White House officials and senior House GOP aides are even quietly hoping that the added pressure of Senate action forces House Republicans to fall in line on their side of the Capitol, according to two people aware of party strategy. Trump has yet to call key holdouts in order to secure their support.

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