Morning Report — Firestorm swirls over Trump funding freeze

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In today’s issue:

Trump’s funding freeze blocked amid protests
Kash Patel’s loyalty to Trump raises worry
2024: How Harris sought Joe Rogan interview
Trump vs. foreign aid

The White House triggered a national eruption of panic over the future of federal loans and grants Tuesday, followed by a federal judge’s injunction ordering a halt until Feb. 3 to provide more time to sort out the resulting mess.

The lessons for the new administration were many. Answers and clarity were absent for hours as the administration defended its implementation of President Trump’s campaign for efficiency and savings.

And the episode underscores what’s ahead for a president and House Republicans who spent the past few days mulling options to slash a potential $1 trillion or more in spending on thousands of federal programs they oppose — but which are each guaranteed to affect vocal constituencies and beneficiaries nationwide.

The president is willing to test the outer bounds of presidential authority over the federal budget. The Constitution gives Congress the power of the purse, but Trump has signaled he could try to circumvent lawmakers, potentially terminating entire categories of spending lawmakers appropriated but which he opposes.

Republican and Democratic governors, whose budgets are built around federal funding for thousands of programs, will also demand a say. The funding freeze uproar served to unite Democrats in Congress as the White House scrambled behind the scenes to get GOP lawmakers to holster public criticisms.

▪ The Hill: The White House rallies behind the sweeping pause on grants and loans.

▪ The Hill: Trump’s spending freeze roils Capitol Hill.

Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) defended the president’s efforts to halt disbursements on grants and loans until each is reviewed. The White House, using a two-page Office of Management and Budget memo late Monday, took aim at diversity, equity and inclusion programs and initiatives to battle climate change, among many others.

“It is a temporary pause. For some programs, it could be an hours-long pause,” Johnson told The Hill’s Emily Brooks during an interview Tuesday.

“This is, I believe, an application of common sense,” he added during Republicans’ multiday Florida retreat to strategize about budgeting. “I think these will be quick reviews. I don’t think this is a big, major interruption of programming or anything.”

Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry, a Trump ally, on Tuesday issued a joint statement with top state officials asking the administration “to develop a responsible runway to untangle us from any unnecessary and egregious policies without jeopardizing the financial stability of the state.”

The White House order left many agencies and departments unprepared.

▪ The Hill: States lost access Tuesday to the Medicaid payment portal.

▪ The Associated Press: What Trump’s funding freeze could mean for universities, nonprofits and more.

News accounts of the upheaval and lingering questions swamped state officials and members of Congress, who described calls from anxious parents worried about federal education grants, individuals and state governments nervous about continued federal support for Medicaid, and international organizations lobbying for continued U.S. support to combat malnutrition and diseases such as AIDS.

▪ The Hill: Johnson floats possibility of working with Democrats on the debt ceiling.

▪ The Hill: The president’s demands for the legislative agenda squeeze the House GOP.

SMART TAKE with NewsNation’s BLAKE BURMAN:

As Republicans begin to build a tax package that will renew the 2017 Trump tax cuts and likely add more cuts, here’s something I’ve noticed: The president keeps referencing the days before federal income tax.

“Instead of taxing our citizens to enrich foreign nations, we should be taxing foreign nations to enrich our citizens," President Trump told congressional Republicans on Monday.

While Trump could be laying the groundwork for his upcoming tax package and arguing that tariffs could make up for revenue cuts, consider what House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) told The Hill's Emily Brooks at that same Republican gathering. “The No. 1 threat to our nation right now is our debt," he said.

Tax cuts, tariff hikes and debt worries. These are just part of the conversations we will hear play out, publicly and privately, among Republicans in the coming months.

Burman hosts “The Hill” weeknights, 6p/5c on NewsNation.

3 THINGS TO KNOW TODAY:

▪ The Office of Personnel Management on Tuesday offered roughly 2 million federal workers the option to resign but be paid through the end of September in a dramatic but legally questionable effort to reduce the size of the federal civilian workforce. Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine (D) warned his constituents that Trump “doesn’t have any authority to do this.”

▪ Want to monitor Trump’s continuing pileup of executive actions? Trackers can be found at The White House, American Presidency Project, CNN, Federal Register and Akin Gump.

▪ A Vatican document released Tuesday offers artificial intelligence guidelines from warfare to healthcare.

LEADING THE DAY

© The Hill | Greg Nash

CABINET CONFIRMATIONS: Senate Republicans are under growing pressure from prominent former Republican officials to reject Trump's pick to head the FBI, Kash Patel. The Hill’s Alexander Bolton reports that while most of the focus has been on Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Trump’s director of national intelligence designee, former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (Hawaii), Patel has drawn the strongest opposition from former Republican national security and law enforcement leaders such as former national security adviser John Bolton and former Attorney General William Barr. The criticism sets the stage for a battle in the Judiciary Committee on Thursday morning.

Patel’s deep loyalty to the president will also be a flashpoint; the two men share a conviction that the FBI has been weaponized against conservatives. They argue it is politicized and the only way to fix it is to install an outsider willing to execute the Trump agenda — a sharp divergence from the bureau’s historical norms and the decades-long practice of directors’ limiting contact with presidents.

CNN: Intel officials spent years battling Patel. Now he’s poised to take over a key agency.

Meanwhile, Caroline Kennedy, former President John F. Kennedy’s daughter, told senators in a letter that her cousin, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s nominee to serve as secretary of Health and Human Services, is a “predator” who has lied and cheated his way through life. With Kennedy Jr. set to appear before the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee this week, Caroline Kennedy said she felt “an obligation to speak out.”

She said that her cousin “lacks any relevant government, financial, management or medical experience” to qualify him to lead the nation’s health agencies — and added that his “personal qualities” pose “even greater concern.”

Additionally, she criticized him for making money from his “crusade against vaccinations” and warned that “he will keep his financial stake in a lawsuit against an HPV vaccine.”

“In other words, he is willing to enrich himself by denying access to a vaccine that can prevent almost all forms of cervical cancer and which has been safely administered to millions of boys and girls,” she wrote.

▪ The Hill: The Senate on Tuesday confirmed former Rep. Sean Duffy (R-Wis.) to be the next Transportation secretary, putting him in place to lead a sprawling agency that oversees air travel, highways, pipelines and railroads.

▪ The Hill: Senate Democrats are trying to avoid a repeat of the Laken Riley Act as Republicans try to give them headaches on a package to sanction the International Criminal Court and take advantage of a conference that is divided on the politically-charged issue.

WHERE AND WHEN

The House convenes for a pro forma session Friday at 10 a.m.
The Senate meets at noon.
The president will sign the Laken Riley Act at the White House.
The Federal Reserve concludes a two-day meeting with a written statement at 2 p.m. and a press conference by Chair Jerome Powell at 2:30 p.m.

ZOOM IN

© The Associated Press | Susan Walsh

📘 NEW This Morning: Dive into “FIGHT: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House,” by The Hill’s Amie Parnes and Jonathan Allen of NBC News, to be published April 1 by William Morrow.

As former Vice President Kamala Harris ran her 107-day, breakneck presidential campaign, she made a substantial effort to get on Joe Rogan’s popular podcast amid concerns about her traction with male voters — going so far as to plan a Houston rally while hoping to gain a stop at Rogan’s Austin studio, according to the upcoming book.

“Harris had less than zero reason to be in Texas. It was not a swing state. Her campaign was flush with cash — so it made no sense to take her off the trail to raise money. She was in battleground-or-bust mode. Plus, a detour to Texas might smell like desperation to the press and a waste of money to donors,” according to an excerpt from “FIGHT.” So the Harris team planned to fly the Democratic nominee to Houston for an Oct. 25, 2024, rally, “under the cover of visiting a state with one of the nation’s most restrictive abortion laws — to put her in proximity to Austin.”

The Hill’s Julia Mueller reports on why Harris and her team wanted a sit-down with Rogan. But it was Trump who landed a three-hour conversation with the podcast giant in Texas.

POLITICS: Trump on Tuesday signed a broad executive order targeting transition-related medical care for minors.

Polling since Inauguration Day indicates mixed public appraisals of the president’s array of executive orders and a net job approval rating that’s lower than any newly elected president since World War II.

NEW YORK progressive Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D) is embracing her role as one of her party’s fiercest Trump critics even as other Democrats soften their approach. Her actions come as Democrats appear to be struggling to form a unified message in reaction to the president.

“She understands the importance of being seen doing and saying something,” said one progressive Democratic commentator. “The alternative is letting Trump suck up all the media oxygen again, and that has proven disastrous for Dems.”

CALIFORNIA Gov. Gavin Newsom (D), long a vocal Trump critic, decided Friday to greet Trump in his state. The president, who has frequently referred to the governor as “Newscum,” found the governor at the foot of Air Force One in Los Angeles although he had not been invited to meet Trump amid the president’s tour of wildfire disaster areas. Allies said the governor’s move was bold, reports The Hill’s Parnes.

“It enhanced Newsom’s standing as someone who can stand up to Trump,” said Garry South, a Los Angeles-based political strategist who served as a senior adviser to Newsom in his first bid for governor.

▪ The Hill: Sen. Gary Peters (D-Mich.) announced he will not seek reelection in a state Trump won in 2024. He served as the chair of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee for the last two election cycles.

▪ The Hill: The victor on Saturday chosen to lead the Democratic National Committee will inherit one of the most challenging and potentially thankless jobs in Washington as Democrats scramble to chart a path forward in a second Trump term.

▪ The Associated Press: Trump-endorsed candidates Jimmy Patronis and Randy Fine won their Republican primaries in the special elections to replace former Florida Reps. Matt Gaetz and Mike Waltz, notching wins in reliably conservative districts.

It has become the norm for the government to shift positions in a handful of cases when a new party takes the White House. The Hill’s Ella Lee and Zach Schonfeld break down the cases to watch under Trump, who could potentially alter the trajectory of high-profile appeals before the justices. The new administration has already begun moving to halt several pending cases that have not yet been fully briefed, and the Department of Justice could still shake up disputes further along.

ELSEWHERE

WASHINGTON VISIT: Trump invited Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to the White House on Feb. 4, the prime minister’s office said, which would make him the first foreign leader to visit Washington in Trump's second term. The visit would come as the U.S. continues to pressure Israel and Hamas to uphold a ceasefire that has paused fighting in Gaza. Ahead of the trip, Steve Witkoff, the president's Middle East envoy who played a critical role in the negotiations, met Netanyahu in Israel on Tuesday.

As Palestinians returned to the north of Gaza, mediators began preliminary work on the second stage of ceasefire negotiations — due to begin next week. If those talks succeed, a full end to the war could follow. It would also open the way to talks on reconstructing Gaza, now largely destroyed.

▪ The Wall Street Journal: Some of the Israeli women released by Hamas over the past two weeks still had shrapnel in their bodies from untreated wounds they suffered in the attack on Oct. 7, 2023.

▪ The Washington Post: Wealthy Arab nations consider bankrolling Gaza’s reconstruction, but they want assurances Palestinians will lead in the postwar period.

TRUMP VS. THE WORLD: Trump’s decision to clean house at the U.S. Agency for International Development and freeze all foreign assistance is fueling chaos and uncertainty in Washington and across the world. The groups must freeze nearly all programs that have received any of the $70 billion of annual aid budget approved by Congress through bipartisan negotiations. This includes programs that provide medicine, shelter and clean water in dire conditions and often make the difference between life and death.

“This 90-day stop-work is a gift to our enemies and competitors — with effects that go beyond the immediate harms to people,” said Atul Gawande, the assistant administrator at USAID in the Biden administration. “It trashes our alliances with scores of countries built over half a century, trashes our world-leading expertise and capacity and threatens our security.”

▪ The Washington Post: How Trump’s foreign aid shutdown affects the world, in three graphs.

▪ The Hill: Denmark this week announced a $2 billion security package for Greenland, making another large commitment to the defense of the Arctic nation as Trump repeatedly calls to acquire the island.

▪ Politico: Europe’s leaders plot to stop Trump from taking Greenland.

▪ The Hill: Trump will have to overcome what many expect to be a high price to field his proposed “Iron Dome for America” and surmount serious questions about the feasibility of deploying a shield across the entire continental United States.

▪ Axios: The U.S. military transferred around 90 Patriot air defense interceptors from storage in Israel to Poland this week in order to deliver them to Ukraine.

OPINION

■ So much for not taking Trump literally, by Thomas B. Edsall, columnist, The New York Times.

■ We fought back against Trump’s Muslim ban. We’ll fight his new assault on immigrant rights, too, by Becca Heller, opinion contributor, The Hill.

THE CLOSER

And finally … 👀 Here’s an update for eagle-eyed readers: A few weeks ago, Morning Report wrote that in Bend, Ore., googly eyes appeared on public sculptures throughout the town. The internet made the pictures go viral. Residents found the practice amusing. City officials? Not so much.

Now, the googly eyes “culprit” is stepping forward. Jeff Keith, founder of a Bend-based nonprofit called Guardian Group that works to combat human trafficking, told The Associated Press that he used duct tape to attach googly eyes to two sculptures.

Keith said he carried out similar pranks on other sculptures before — such as adorning them with hula skirts and leis — to serve as a respite from the emotional toll of his work. He added he didn’t expect his exploits to receive that much attention, and that he went to city offices to offer to pay for any damage.

“I think the biggest thing is, for me, just to get a laugh,” he said. “When I come up on these roundabouts and I see families laughing, like hysterically laughing at these, it makes for a good time.”

Stay Engaged

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