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Trump wants less spending. RFK Jr.’s ‘not happy’ about it.

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Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. sounded less enthusiastic about cutting his department’s budget during the first of several hearings Thursday than he did a year ago.

Then, Kennedy told lawmakers a proposed 25 percent cut to the Department of Health and Human Services was needed to rein in a bloated bureaucracy plagued with reckless spending, telling House appropriators a year ago: “We intend to do more, a lot more with less.

Congress rejected the cuts and increased the HHS budget in a February spending bill. In front of the Ways and Means Committee on Thursday, Kennedy struck a different tone about President Donald Trump’s latest budget plan, saying administration officials had reluctantly proposed a 12 percent cut to cope with the federal debt.

He said that $2 billion in cuts to substance use and mental health grants his department issued and quickly reversed earlier this year, before the White House released its fiscal 2027 budget plan, had been a “mistake.”

And he said he’d sought again, as he did last year, to protect funding for the government’s nutrition and education program for low-income toddlers, Head Start. “It’s getting no cuts,” Kennedy said.

Kennedy did note several times that certain departments and functions at HHS are duplicative but said efforts to consolidate functions should not be seen as cost-cutting. “There was tremendous duplication of departments, we have 42 different maternal services in our department,” he said.

Addressing cuts proposed to a government nutrition assistance program for low-income people — the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children — which falls under the Agriculture Department, Kennedy told Rep. Gwen Moore (D-Wis.), he was “not happy about the cuts” and that he wasn’t the only administration official to feel that way.

The White House’s proposal calls for a $1.4 billion cut to the program.

“Nobody wants to make the cuts,” Kennedy said. “Russ Vought doesn’t want to make the cuts, President Trump doesn’t, but there’s a $39 trillion debt.”

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Congress

GOP, Democrats blast Vought for holding back cash: ‘You don’t have the authority to impound’

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Senators from both parties chided the Trump administration Thursday for continuing to withhold funding Congress has approved, more than a year after the White House first froze billions of dollars for temporary “review.”

During White House budget director Russ Vought’s testimony before the Senate Budget Committee, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) scolded the OMB chief for not sending hundreds of millions of dollars the Trump administration is supposed to give states throughout the year to support community services aimed at reducing poverty.

“Congress has appropriated money, and you don’t have the authority to impound it,” Grassley said about the more than $810 million Congress appropriated this year for the Community Services Block Grant program.

That program helps states fund anti-poverty services such as transportation, education and nutrition assistance that serve more than 9 million people each year.

Grassley told Vought that lawmakers “are not getting any answers” as to why the Trump administration hasn’t sent states their quarterly funding from the program. “I want those quarterly allotments released,” Grassley said.

While Vought did not directly address Grassley’s comments, he said at a different point during the hearing that “we have not impounded a single thing.”

Other senators, including Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), lamented federal dollars being withheld for the fund that provides capital to small banks and credit unions in underserved areas. For months lawmakers from both parties have pushed back against Trump’s plans to eliminate that program, the Treasury Department’s Community Development Financial Institutions Fund.

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Congress

FISA extension vote delayed

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House GOP leaders are pushing back the planned 3:15 p.m. procedural vote related to the bill extending a key spy power due to expire in four days.

Leaders are continuing to negotiate with hard-liners to come up with a deal that can pass the chamber.

No new time has been set for the rule vote.

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Senate Republicans ‘syncing’ immigration funding plan with House GOP

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Senate Majority Leader John Thune said Thursday that GOP leaders want to make sure Republicans in both chambers are aligned as they move ahead with a party-line plan for immigration enforcement funding.

The South Dakota Republican told reporters he hopes the Senate will adopt a budget framework “by middle-to-the-end of next week,” the first step to unlocking the filibuster-skirting power to clear a package of up to $75 billion for ICE and Border Patrol.

Then ideally the House would adopt the Senate budget measure without changes, Thune said, allowing Republicans to move on to passage votes on a final bill to fund the immigration enforcement agencies.

“We’re communicating as much as we can, making sure that we’re syncing this up and doing it in the way that meets the requirements that both bodies have,” Thune said Thursday, following a meeting Wednesday with Speaker Mike Johnson for a routine check-in.

The attempt at GOP unity comes after House Republicans hotly rejected the Senate’s proposal last month to fund most of the Department of Homeland Security, where funding lapsed more than two months ago. Now several House GOP lawmakers are also insisting Republicans fund all of the department through the party-line budget reconciliation process — not just the immigration agencies Democrats won’t support without new rules on the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement tactics.

Senate Budget Chair Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) told reporters Thursday afternoon that he hopes to release text of the budget framework in short order.

“We’re working on all that. Hopefully we’ll find consensus here soon. But I think we’re getting close,” he said.

“I hope we can get moving on it as early as next week,” Graham added.

Senate Republicans have started talking to their chamber’s parliamentarian as they seek to enact the party-line package — one piece of their two-part plan to end the DHS shutdown that began in mid-February.

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