Trump’s blizzard of orders gets pushback, questions from GOP lawmakers
President Trump’s blizzard of executive orders during the first few days of his presidency has sent Republican lawmakers scrambling to make sense of what impact they’ll have on the country, and some GOP senators are already raising questions and concerns.
Republicans were surprised by Trump’s order to immediately pause the disbursement of funds under the Inflation Reduction Act and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which they feared would stop funding to key projects in their home states.
“Some of it is not helpful,” said a senior Republican aide, who said Trump’s team would have been wise to provide more detail about the scope of the orders or could have waited until some of his nominees cleared Senate committees before taking actions that were likely to prompt legislative pushback.
Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.), the chair of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, said her staff reached out to the Trump administration immediately to find out whether the order would affect funding formulas for her home state, which Trump carried with 70 percent of the vote in November.
“We’ve been seeking clarification,” she told The Hill.
Trump’s budget office later clarified the order would not freeze funding for roads and bridges, transportation and drinking water projects.
A Senate staffer said Trump’s team had to “clean up” what initially appeared to be an overly broad order to freeze funding.
Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), the chair of the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies, is concerned that Trump’s federal hiring freeze could negatively impact his administration’s ability to dramatically expand energy drilling permits in Alaska.
“It’s something I tasked my team with,” she said of her efforts to find out whether a federal hiring order would clash with Trump’s executive order to dramatically expand drilling in her home state, which she supports.
“I’ve got interior appropriations, we’ve got all these [Bureau of Land Management] people,” she said. “We’ve got to have the people in the agencies that are going to be doing this permitting, and we need more. We don’t need less.
“Our challenge has been to try to find these able-bodied, smart people to go into the agency in the first place. A hiring freeze, for instance, on just this aspect of it could be very problematic to the implementation of what the president’s trying to do,” she said.
Other Republican senators have scrambled to find out whether Trump’s federal hiring moratorium would impact air traffic controllers, which could gum up travel around the country.
Trump ordered “a freeze on the hiring of federal civilian employees, to be applied throughout the executive branch” but exempted military personnel or positions related to immigration enforcement, national security or public safety.
Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), a senior member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, expressed her concern about the importance of background checks when asked about Trump’s plan to grant six-month security clearances without background checks to individuals handpicked by the White House.
Collins said she had not read the memo but reiterated her support for carefully vetting people given access to top-secret information.
“I think it depends on whether the individual has had [a security clearance] in the past, what level it is. Certainly, if we’re talking about the highest level, no, a background check is clearly required,” she said. “It may be at the sensitive level, not secret but sensitive, for someone who’s previously had one that you could do the background check concurrently.”
Sen. Mark Warner (Va.), the Democratic vice chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, called Trump’s plan to grant temporary security clearances without background checks “irresponsible.”
“There’s a reason we keep things secret,” he said. “Suddenly we’re going to get rid of any of those background checks."
Trump’s plan to send 1,500 troops to the border is a potential concern for libertarian-leaning conservatives. While conservatives want to secure the U.S.-Mexico border, deploying soldiers for what are arguably domestic law-enforcement operations is a sensitive topic.
“We’re still looking at exactly what that means,” said Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), the chair of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.
“I do think we need to secure our southern border. I’m for that,” he said.
Paul told CBS News's “Face the Nation” in November he would oppose using the military to deport migrants living in the country illegally.
“It’s not that I oppose removing people, I just oppose to what has been against the law for over 100 years, and that’s using the Army,” he said.
Murkowski and fellow Alaska Sen. Dan Sullivan (R) weren’t happy with Trump’s order to rename Denali, the tallest mountain in their home state — and the Northern Hemisphere — to Mount McKinley.
Murkowski said the towering peak should keep the name that Alaska’s native Koyukon Athabascans gave it thousands of years ago, Denali.
The Alaska senator said the mountain was called McKinley “for a brief moment in time” only because a “prospector” who was a fan of the president named it after him.
“It’s important to note that President McKinley, either as president or as a private citizen, never stepped foot in the state of Alaska. It’s only fitting and just that Denali, which means the Great One, remain the Great One. And I’m going to work to ensure that that happens,” she vowed.
Sullivan said his “preference has been keeping the name that the native people, the patriotic Athabascan people, gave thousands of years ago.”
He noted the executive order keeps Denali as the name of the surrounding park.
Some Republican senators are asking how Trump will effectively secure the border and begin his plan to detain and deport thousands of migrants around the country without more funding from Congress.
“I think new money sooner is better. They tell me it takes $100 billion to implement their plan,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said of the administration’s huge funding needs. “They have some money, but I’ve talked with the border people. They need more bed space, they need to hire more agents, and you’re not just going to be able to do that substantially moving money around” between existing accounts.
Senate Republicans have pressed Trump to move quickly on a budget reconciliation package that would provide funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection.
Trump has instead sided with Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), who wants to hold off on the border security package until congressional negotiators have finished work on a complex to extend Trump’s expiring tax cuts and slash federal spending.
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