Congress
What we’re watching: CR slog a preview of fights to come
🗓️ What we’re watching
- Speaker Mike Johnson has less than four days to get his caucus to agree on a short-term spending bill. The fight highlights the challenges he will face trying to pass President-elect Donald Trump’s ambitious agenda with a razor-thin majority next year.
- Tech leaders are lining up to give to Trump’s inauguration fund, evidence of the the already apparent differences from his first term. “This term, everybody wants to be my friend,” Trump told reporters on Monday.
- Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) is asking Trump to come up with conflict-of-interest rules for Elon Musk, who will run the president-elect’s “Department of Government Efficiency,” The Washington Post reported Tuesday morning.
- Some public health leaders are quietly optimistic about Trump’s pick for HHS, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. While they are fearful of his conspiracies around vaccines, they see promise in some of his plans to address chronic disease.
👀 What’s Trump up to?
- Trump told reporters Monday that he plans on meeting with Amazon founder Jeff Bezos later this week. It comes after a parade of tech executives have met with Trump in the last week.
🚨What’s up with the nominees?
- Trump said Monday that RFK Jr. wouldn’t be “radical” in his health policies and that he would have an “open mind.” Meanwhile, opponents of Kennedy’s selection are buying tens of thousands of dollars in ads across the states of key Republican senators that the secretary-designate plans to meet with this week.
📝ICYMI: Here are the latest administration picks
- Trump announced picks for five ambassador positions: George Glass as ambassador to Japan; Leah Francis Campos as ambassador to the Dominican Republic; Arthur Graham Fisher as ambassador to Austria; Stacey Feinberg as ambassador to Luxembourg; and Lou Rinaldi to be ambassador to Uruguay.