Trump says he will sign order to pay all DHS employees
Donald Trump said he would sign an executive order to pay all Department of Homeland Security (DHS) employees. However, it’s unclear what funds he plans to use in order to fund the affected subagencies, which include the Coast Guard, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (Cisa), and whether this would include federal immigration enforcement –which has been largely insulated from ongoing shutdown thanks to a multi-billion dollar infusion in Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
Today’s announcement comes after the president signed an order last week to pay Transportation Security Administration (TSA).
On Truth Social, Trump also praised congressional Republicans, despite the fact the House did not take any action on the Senate-passed bill to end the historic partial shutdown.
House speaker Mike Johnson could now wait until lawmakers return from a two-week recess to advance legislation that his party previously rejected. A reminder this funding would withhold funding for ICE and border patrol. Republicans, instead, hope to underwrite federal immigration enforcement for three years through a reconciliation bill, that sidesteps the filibuster.
“Republicans are UNIFIED, and moving forward on a plan that will reload funding for our FANTASTIC Border Patrol and Immigration Enforcement Officers,” Trump wrote, while continuing to blame Democrats for the 48-day funding lapse.
Key events
Dan Sabbagh
Donald Trump has said the US will shortly achieve its objectives in its war against Iran, but it is not clear what exactly those objectives are.
The Guardian’s defense editor Dan Sabbagh has this analysis:
Eliminate Iran’s missile and drone threat:
In an eight-minute video released on 28 February, Trump promised that the US would “destroy their missiles and raze their missile industry to the ground”. Before the war Iran was estimated to have about 2,500 high-speed ballistic missiles and destroying the programme was a key goal for Israel too.
Iran’s missile launch rates have been reduced by about 90% and its long-term manufacturing capacity has been significantly degraded. However, Tehran has retained a continued, if modest, capacity to strike Israel and the Gulf, causing fear, damage and small numbers of casualties.
There have been seven to 19 waves of attacks a day on Israel by Iran since the fourth day of the war, according to the Israeli Institute for National Security Studies. The most heavily targeted Gulf state, the United Arab Emirates, said on Thursday its air defences had engaged 26 drones and 19 missiles from Iran.
However, sources told Reuters last week that the US could only determine with certainty that it had destroyed about a third of Iran’s missile arsenal. On Wednesday Trump said the US was “hurting their … missile programme at levels never seen before” and that Iran’s missiles and drone launches had been “dramatically curtailed” – a notable softening of his opening position.
For the full analysis, click here:
Chris Stein
A second Republican senator spoke out in defense of Nato on Thursday, joining Mitch McConnell and the Democrats, after Donald Trump said that he was “absolutely” considering withdrawing from the alliance after it refused to take part in the joint assault with Israel against Iran.
“Nato stood by America when we were under attack and came to our aid after the September 11th attacks. Their soldiers fought and died alongside our troops in Afghanistan,” said Thom Tillis, a Republican, and Jeanne Shaheen, a Democrat, who co-chair the Senate Nato observer group.
“Any president that contemplates attempting to withdraw from NATO is not only fulfilling Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping’s greatest dreams but would be undermining America’s own national security interests.”
On Wednesday, McConnell, former Senate Republican leader, along with Chris Coons, a Democrat, said in a joint statement: “Nato troops fought and died in Afghanistan and Iraq alongside American forces. The United States must not take this sacrifice – nor our allies’ commitment to make it again – lightly.
“Alliance disputes are as old as the alliance itself. Americans are safer when NATO is strong and united. It is in our interest for all allies to tend this unity with care.” McConnell and Coons are the top Republican and Democrat, respectively, on the Senate defense appropriations subcommittee.
Read the full report here:
The Senate’s top Democrat, Chuck Schumer, criticized the House Republicans today for not taking up a bill to fund key subagencies at the DHS, despite announcing an agreement yesterday to move forward with the Senate-passed legislation.
The minority leader said GOP lawmakers need “to get to work”, while laying blame for the historic shutdown at Republicans’ feet.
Trump says he will sign order to pay all DHS employees
Donald Trump said he would sign an executive order to pay all Department of Homeland Security (DHS) employees. However, it’s unclear what funds he plans to use in order to fund the affected subagencies, which include the Coast Guard, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (Cisa), and whether this would include federal immigration enforcement –which has been largely insulated from ongoing shutdown thanks to a multi-billion dollar infusion in Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
Today’s announcement comes after the president signed an order last week to pay Transportation Security Administration (TSA).
On Truth Social, Trump also praised congressional Republicans, despite the fact the House did not take any action on the Senate-passed bill to end the historic partial shutdown.
House speaker Mike Johnson could now wait until lawmakers return from a two-week recess to advance legislation that his party previously rejected. A reminder this funding would withhold funding for ICE and border patrol. Republicans, instead, hope to underwrite federal immigration enforcement for three years through a reconciliation bill, that sidesteps the filibuster.
“Republicans are UNIFIED, and moving forward on a plan that will reload funding for our FANTASTIC Border Patrol and Immigration Enforcement Officers,” Trump wrote, while continuing to blame Democrats for the 48-day funding lapse.
Civil rights groups sue Trump administration over executive order to limit mail-in voting
Sam Levine
A coalition of civil rights groups sued the Trump administration on Thursday, saying that a new executive order to limit mail-in voting is unconstitutional.
The order, which Trump signed on Tuesday, instructs the federal government to come up with a list of eligible citizens who can vote in each state. It also instructs the US Postal Service to only transmit mail-in ballots to people on that list.
“In effect, the Order seeks to interpose a federal screening regime between voters and the ballot box by empowering a federal mail carrier to withhold those voters’ ballots,” says the lawsuit, filed in federal court in Massachusetts.
“The Constitution forbids this attempted usurpation of power. The President’s role is to execute the laws enacted by Congress – not to create new ones. Because the Executive Order exceeds the President’s constitutional and statutory authority and intrudes upon powers reserved to Congress and the States, it is unlawful and must be set aside.”
Article I, section 4 of the constitution says that states have control over how elections are run, and authorizes Congress to pass laws for federal contests. The constitution gives the president no power over elections.
“We understand this order to be an illegal and unconstitutional attempt by the President to seize control of processes that are basically run by the states,” said Davin Rosborough, deputy director of the Voting Rights Project at the American Civil Liberties Union, and a lawyer representing the plaintiffs in the suit. “It’s a recipe for chaos and ultimately disenfranchisement.”
Read the full report here:
House takes no action on funding bill to end historic DHS shutdown
During its brief pro forma session today, the US House took no action on the funding bill to end the historic DHS shutdown, after the Senate-passed legislation was sent to the lower chamber earlier today.
The House’s next procedural meeting will be on Monday, meaning the lapse in funding for several subagencies will continue until at least next week. However, Republican House speaker Mike Johnson may even wait until lawmakers return from a two-week recess to ensure the measure, that his party rejected last week, can pass.
A reminder that my colleagues are covering the latest developments out of the Middle East at our dedicated live blog. This includes reaction to Donald Trump’s address to the nation on Wednesday about the ongoing war on Iran.
During his televised speech, the president repeated that the military campaign against Iran take another “two to three weeks”.
He also reiterated that allies ought to help the US secure and reopen the strait of Hormuz, as the price of oil continues to whipsaw.
Senate sends bill to end record-breaking DHS shutdown to the House
The Senate has sent a bill to end the record-breaking Department of Homeland Security (DHS) shutdown, which has lasted 48 days so far.
The measure would fund affected subagencies, including the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), the US Coast Guard, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (Cisa). Notably, the bill withholds funds from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and part of Customs and Border Protection (CBP).
House Republicans previously rejected the legislation last week. Now they’re hoping to pass it and then push through a separate budget bill to fund immigration enforcement operations through a maneuver that only requires a simple majority in the Senate.
One issue, however, is that Congress is on recess, so House speaker Mike Johnson would have to call the lower chamber back to Washington DC in order to have a full vote. Otherwise, during the procedural sessions they’re having in the break, it only takes one dissenting vote to sink the bill.
Donald Trump is in Washington today. According to the White House, the president doesn’t have any events or meetings open to the press.
At 2pm ET he’s set to sign executive orders. We’ll let you know if that opens up and bring you the latest.
French president Emmanuel Macron has said that US president Donald Trump was undermining Nato by creating “daily doubt about his commitment” to the North Atlantic alliance.
“If you create daily doubt about your commitment, you hollow it out,” Macron said during a state visit to Seoul, adding that there is “too much talk… going off in all directions”.
The US has lifted sanctions on Venezuela’s acting president, Delcy Rodríguez, in the latest step towards normalising relations between the two countries after US forces abducted her predecessor, Nicolás Maduro, and his wife.
The couple have since been taken to New York to face drug trafficking charges where both have pleaded not guilty.
The move to lift sanctions on Rodríguez, which was announced by the US Treasury Department on Wednesday, allows her to work more freely with US companies and investors. Without explicitly mentioning the sanctions targeting her, Rodríguez, in a statement, expressed hope for US-Venezuelan relations.
“We value President Donald Trump’s decision as a step toward normalising and strengthening relations between our countries,” she said on her Telegram channel after the Treasury’s announcement. “We trust that this progress will allow for the lifting of current sanctions against our country, enabling us to build and guarantee an effective bilateral cooperation agenda for the benefit of our people.”
Rodríguez and her brother, Jorge Rodríguez, were hit with sanctions during Trump’s first term over their role in allegedly undermining Venezuelan democracy.
Trump polled advisers about replacing Tulsi Gabbard as intelligence chief
Hugo Lowell
Donald Trump has privately asked cabinet officials in recent weeks whether he should replace his director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, venting frustration that she shielded a former deputy who undercut his rationale for war with Iran, according to two people briefed on the discussions.
It is not clear that Trump will actually fire Gabbard over the episode. Currently, there is no standout candidate to take the job, and advisers have cautioned that creating a high-profile vacancy before a successor is ready could cause unhelpful political distractions.
But Trump’s discussions marks an ominous development for Gabbard, given the president tends to poll his advisers when he starts to seriously consider whether a personnel change is necessary. The two people spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations.
Trump’s doubts about Gabbard followed her testimony at the world wide threats hearing on Capitol Hill last month where she declined to condemn Joe Kent, who had resigned days earlier after arguing that Iran did not pose an imminent threat to the United States, the people said.
The nature of Kent’s departure and his criticism of the war had already angered Trump, but he expressed particular frustration about Gabbard seemingly defending Kent and appearing reluctant to defend the administration’s position to attack Iran, the people said.
Asked on Sunday whether he still had confidence in Gabbard’s leadership, Trump offered a mixed endorsement. “Yeah, sure,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One. “I mean, she’s a little bit different in her thought process than me, but that doesn’t make somebody not available to serve.”
Republican plan to fund DHS could get first test vote later today
The Senate is expected to try quickly passing a measure later today that would fund most of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), though it’s unclear how soon the House will follow to largely end the longest partial government shutdown in history.
House speaker Mike Johnson and Senate majority leader John Thune announced a plan yesterday to fully fund the DHS as part of a “two-step process”.
The agreement puts the leaders on the same page for ending the impasse after they pursued separate plans that resulted in Congress leaving Washington last week without a fix.
Johnson and Thune announced a return to the bipartisan Senate plan worked out with Democrats that funds most of the department, with the exception of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and US Border Patrol.
Republicans would then try later to fund those agencies on their own through party-line spending legislation that could take months to finish.
Neither outcome is guaranteed, and the strategy could potentially still face opposition from the GOP’s own ranks even though president Donald Trump has given his support.
Phillip Inman
Before Donald Trump declared “liberation day” on 2 April 2025 and shocked the world by raising import tariffs on nearly every country the US did business with, he had spent almost three months causing chaos in Washington.
The wholesale slashing of government jobs under Doge (the “department of government efficiency”) and the defunding of US aid agencies had shown White House watchers that the US president was in a hurry to upset institutions he considered profligate or useless.
Investors quickly understood that chaos was an essential tool in Trump’s armoury. Almost as soon as he was inaugurated, there was a steady decline in the value of the dollar against other currencies. Investors sold assets denominated in dollars and bought assets elsewhere: Europe, Asia, South America.
“If you think that discouraging investors from buying assets in the US is a victory, then you don’t believe in a growing economy,” said Dario Perkins, the head of global research at the consultancy TS Lombard. “If it was possible for Trump to have spent the last 14 months on the golf course, we would be in a better place.”
Russ Mould, the investment director of the British stockbroker AJ Bell, said:
double quotation mark America is still home to the world’s largest economy and its reserve currency, as well as the globe’s largest equity and bond markets, but investors continue to reassess their exposure one year on from liberation day.
The economy has either gone sideways or declined, depending on the preferred measure. Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that US companies, which were supposed to be the victors in Trump’s new tariff war, stopped hiring almost as soon as liberation day was announced.
Significant revisions in February to data covering 2025 pushed payroll employment down by 403,000 jobs, resulting in the addition of 181,000 jobs last year. This small boost is set against the 163 million people who are employed in the US.
Commission to vote on Trump’s White House $400m ballroom project after injunction granted
Hello and welcome to the US politics live blog.
The National Capital Planning Commission will meet this afternoon to decide on Donald Trump’s White House $400m ballroom project, after a federal judge halted construction earlier this week.
Although the order did not take place with immediate effect, judge Richard Leon’s injunction prompted the president to claim, in a Truth Social post, that his administration did not in fact require “express authorization from Congress” to proceed. The government is appealing against the decision.
Trump’s fellow Republicans have up until now not felt the need to weigh in on the project, Politico reported. One exception was Lexi Hamel, a spokesperson for representative Mike Simpson, who said in a statement on Wednesday the Idaho Republican “believes the ruling is stupid” and that “nobody raised hell when Roosevelt or Truman renovated the White House (at taxpayer expense).”
The federal panel postponed an expected vote on the project last month, after receiving thousands of negative public comments. Before meeting, the commission released more than 9,000 pages of public comments it received about the project.
The commission has said that more than 35,000 people had submitted written comments, with the majority opposing Trump’s plans to build a 90,000 sq ft ballroom where the East Wing of the White House once stood, and condemning the demolition of the East Wing, which began in October.
The Commission of Fine Arts, which is also tasked with reviewing the ballroom plans and where Trump has also installed loyalists, voted to approve the ballroom project last month.
Historic preservationist groups have sued and attempted to halt the project. In December, the National Trust for Historic Preservation filed a federal lawsuit, seeking to block the construction of the new ballroom, arguing that the administration violated laws by tearing parts of the White House “without any review whatsoever”.
In other developments:
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House Republicans announced that they will pass a bill, advanced by the Senate last week, to end the record-breaking partial Department of Homeland Security (DHS) shutdown after previously rejecting the measure.
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Democrats quickly celebrated the win with Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer saying “House Republicans caved” after previously “[derailing] a bipartisan agreement, making American families pay the price for their dysfunction”.
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Nasa’s lunar rocket successfully launched and the astronauts on the first crewed lunar rocket in more than 50 years received praise from across the US.
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Attorney general Pam Bondi’s job with the Trump administration is reportedly at risk. The president is said to be unhappy with Bondi’s performance as the head of the justice department and the controversy surrounding the Epstein files, according to a New York Times report.
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Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida signed legislation on Wednesday to require documented proof of citizenship to register to vote and to begin a process that will eventually unenroll voters who have not provided citizenship documentation.
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Supreme court justices appeared skeptical of the Trump administration’s argument to restrict birthright citizenship for hundreds of thousands of children born to undocumented immigrants of temporary foreign nationals. Trump himself attended the hearing, widely considered to be the first time a sitting president has attended arguments at the supreme court.
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