Senate Democrats pledge to hold floor all night in protest against Trump’s budget pick – as it happened

At this hour, as we wrap our live coverage for the day, Senate Democrats are engaged on a 30-hour effort to hold the floor through the night to oppose Russell Vought, a Project 2025 author, as the director of the Office of Management and Budget. In between long speeches, the senators are appearing on a Pod Save America livestream. The effort comes two days after Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez urged her senate colleagues “to stop playing nice in the Senate and block every damn thing”.

Protesters rallied outside the Capitol earlier today to decry Donald Trump’s move to dismantle USAid, which implements much of Washington’s foreign aid.

Meanwhile, Republican members of Congress and cabinet members spent a large part of their day dodging questions about whether the US really plans to invade, occupy and ethnically cleanse Gaza, as the president said the day before.

We will return on Thursday to chronicle the Trump administration’s first frantic weeks.

Here are some of the day’s developments:

• Donald Trump made a show of signing an executive order aimed at preventing transgender women from competing in women’s sports, including, he said, the 2028 Olympic Games in Los Angeles.

• On Capitol Hill, Republican House speaker Mike Johnson said he would support dismantling the department of education, while the president of the largest federal employees union warned that Trump has launched “the biggest assault” on the government workforce in its history.

• Pam Bondi was sworn in as attorney general, and told Trump, “I will make you proud”.

• Trump’s attempt to end birthright citizenship lost for the second time in federal court, with a judge issuing an indefinite nationwide injunction on the president’s executive order.

• Emil Bove, a former Trump attorney who is now a top justice department official, attempted to assuage concerns over his request for the names of every FBI agent who worked on January 6 cases.

• Before a dozen Republican senators were against USAid, they were for it. “I have been on USAid’s case for years now,” Senator Joni Ernst told Fox News on Tuesday. But a review of two letters sent by Ernst in 2022, and signed by 11 of her current Republican Senate colleagues, shows that her main complaint was that the agency was not distributing funds quickly enough.

• The Office of Personnel Management’s chief financial officer resigned after a political appointee asked her if she was “loyal”. The CFO, Erica Roach, managed approximately $1 trillion in assets available for benefits and made monthly payments to almost 3 million people totaling more than $80 billion annually.

The Office of Personnel Management’s chief financial officer has resigned after she apparently failed to reassure a political appointee who asked her if she was “loyal” and was told that she would be reassigned.

CNN reports:

The CFO, Erica Roach, was asked last week in a meeting with a Trump political appointee if she was someone they could “trust” and if she was “loyal,” according to one of the sources.

The source said Roach responded that she “always” does “the right thing.” Roach was not given a reason for why she was removed from her role but rather offered another position that would have been a demotion, the source said. She chose to resign instead.

The OPM manages the Civil Service Retirement and Disability Fund, which has approximately $1 trillion in net assets available for benefits and makes monthly payments to almost 3 million annuitants and survivors which exceed $80 billion annually.

Republican senator subtweets Elon Musk.

A rare note of criticism of Elon Musk’s role in tearing through federal agencies under the guise of “government efficiency” appeared on the billionaire’s own social media platform, X, on Wednesday.

“Efficiency in government should be a goal for every administration, agency, and federal employee”, Senator Lisa Murkowski, a Republican from Alaska wrote in a carefully worded post. “But how we achieve it also matters. By circumventing proper channels and procedures, and creating the potential to compromise the sensitive data of Americans, we create a tremendous amount of unnecessary anxiety. That is wrong. Good governance is based on trust, not fear”.

Although Murkowski did not refer to Musk or his “department of government efficiency” by name, her reference to the billionaire’s assault on the federal agencies was clear.

Before Musk bought Twitter and changed the platform’s name to X, users referred to posts there that criticized people without alerting them to the criticism through tagging as “subtweets”. Murkowski, who voted to impeach Donald Trump for his role in the January 6 attack on the Capitol, won reelection in 2022 over a Trump-backed challenger.

In federal court on Wednesday, a government lawyer was asked if Musk has access to sensitive personal information in a Treasury Department payments system like two members of his team. “No, to best of our knowledge, he does not” the Justice department lawyer, Bradley Humphreys, replied, according to Roger Parloff of Lawfare.

Humphreys said that the two people connected with Mr. Musk’s team who do have access, Tom Krause and Marko Elez, a 25-year-old engineer who reportedly worked for two of Musk’s companies.

“Every single Senate Democrat will vote against Russell Vought, the Trump nominee for OMB and chief architect of the ultra-right Project 2025,” Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer writes on Bluesky. “We are holding the floor of the United States Senate overnight to expose how Project 2025 is the Trump White House agenda.”

Pod Save America, the activist podcast run by former Obama aides, is running a live stream of interviews with Senate Democrats through the night.

The move comes two days after Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said in an Instagram live that although “the Senate loves their gentlemen’s agreements” and unwritten rules of decorum, Democrats “have to stop playing nice in the Senate and block every damn thing”.

The first Democrat to speak in the 30-hour marathon, Senator Jeff Merkley, spoke for nearly an hour.

Before a dozen Republican senators were against USAid, they were for it.

“I have been on USAid’s case for years now,” Senator Joni Ernst told Fox News on Tuesday. “Going back several years where I was trying to investigate the expenditures for humanitarian aid, primarily when it came to the war in Ukraine.”

But before Ernst, and several of her Republican colleagues in the Senate were against USAid, they were actually for it.

A review of two letters Ernst sent to Samantha Power, the administrator of the US Agency for International Development in 2022, co-signed by 11 current Republican senators, shows that their primary complaint was that the agency was not spending congressionally mandated funds quickly enough to support Ukraine and other countries that relied on Ukrainian grain shipments that had been disrupted.

In the first letter, sent on 12 July 2022, Ernst urged USAid to “expedite the delivery of the nearly $10bn in emergency assistance” both to Ukraine and to nations in Africa, the Middle East and elsewhere where “hundreds of millions of people facing food insecurity due to Russia’s blockade of the Black Sea”.

In the second letter, dated 9 September 2022, Ernst and her colleagues wrote that they were “worried” that “the American people’s generosity is not being properly and swiftly used to help Ukraine”.

Ernst is now head of the Senate “Doge Caucus”, formed to support what she calls the appropriately blunt “sledgehammer” Elon Musk’s “department of government efficiency” is using to dismantle USAid.

Despite a court order blocking Trump’s spending freeze, half of Virginia’s community health centers have been forced to stop providing certain services or close branches after being cut off from federal grant money.

Virginia Public Media reports:

The commonwealth has 31 federally qualified health centers with over 200 locations – a majority of which serve rural areas with limited access to medical care. Annually, about 400,000 Virginians rely on the care provided by these nonprofit, community-based centers, according to the Virginia Community Healthcare Association.

They provide primary health, dental, behavioral health, and pharmaceutical and substance abuse services to people with Medicaid or Medicare, the underinsured and the uninsured. They also treat those with private insurance on a sliding fee scale.

Since 28 January, 16 of the state’s FQHCs have been unable to access federal funding that allows them to pay employees, according to Joe Stevens, a VCHA spokesperson.

At a signing ceremony in the East Room of the White House, the president just signed an executive order directing government officials to take steps to bar transgender women from competing in women’s sports competitions.

After making remarks to invited guests, including female athletes such as Riley Gaines, a former University of Kentucky swimmer who sued the NCAA for allowing transgender women to participate in college sports, Trump sat at a table surrounded by a group of young girls.

“I want to make this a really good signature, because this is a big one.” Trump told the children. “Oh, we have a 10,” he said, praising his own signature. “We have a 10!”

In his earlier remarks, Trump had praised the attractiveness of the female athletes in the room, referred to what h called “transgender lunacy” as “this absolutely ridiculous subject”, and said that the US would not stand by and “watch men beat and batter women” by allowing transgender women to compete.

The president also noted that the 2028 Summer Olympics will be held in Los Angeles, and said he had directed homeland security secretary Kristi Noem to deny entry to any trans women trying to enter the United States to compete in the games.

In his somewhat meandering comments, Trump also discussed his plan to build a ballroom in the White House modeled on the one at Mar-a-Lago, and welcomed representatives of Trump thanks Moms for Liberty – a conservative group that was forced to apologize in 2023 when one of their chapters sent out a newsletter that quoted a remark made by Adolf Hitler at a Nazi rally in 1935: “He alone, who OWNS the youth, GAINS the future.”

Democratic lawmakers have seized on Donald Trump’s dismantling of USAid as a way to rally their base after a disappointing performance in the November presidential election.

But, Politico reports, not all in the party think the agency’s sudden destruction is the issue on which Democrats should make their stand:

When I asked veteran strategist David Axelrod whether Democrats were “walking into a trap” on defending foreign aid, he literally finished my sentence.

“My heart is with the people out on the street outside USAID, but my head tells me: ‘Man, Trump will be well-satisfied to have this fight,’” he said. “When you talk about cuts, the first thing people say is: Cut foreign aid.”

Rahm Emanuel – the former House leader, Chicago mayor and diplomat – told me much the same: “You don’t fight every fight. You don’t swing at every pitch. And my view is – while I care about the USAID as a former ambassador – that’s not the hill I’m going to die on,” he said.

Indeed, the president seems happy with the outrage generated by USAid’s closure, Politico added:

Musk himself spent the following 24 hours posting videos of Democrats protesting the move.

“The federal bureaucracy is very unpopular. … It’s a pretty widely held, majority position – if you poll it, people think the government is wasting money. And, very simply, that’s the battle that we’re fighting,” one senior Trump administration official told me Tuesday. “The Democrats are now taking the opposite position: ‘Everything’s perfect.’ ‘Nothing to look at here.’ ‘No money is wasted.’ ‘All your tax dollars are being spent well.’”

“Not a very politically tenable position,” the person added.

Democratic senator Brian Schatz, however, disagreed, saying that what’s happening at USAid is a prelude of worse to come under Trump, Politico went on:

“People empowered by the president are violating federal law in multiple ways, taking over federal payments, illegally shutting down whole departments, freezing Head Start and Medicaid, and the best these podcasters can muster is that we should wait for a more popular program to defend? Spare me,” said Schatz, the top Democrat on the Senate Appropriations subcommittee overseeing USAID.

“The emergency is now. We need to act like it,” he added. “This isn’t about any particular program or the theater criticism that substitutes for strategy. This is about making sure these billionaires are not able to loot the federal government and strip it for parts.”

Protesters convened outside the Capitol earlier today to decry Donald Trump’s move to dismantle USAid, which implements much of Washington’s foreign aid.

Democratic lawmakers addressed the crowd, including representative John Garamendi, who said:

He has absolutely no right in shutting down USAid. We cannot allow that. We’ve got to take to the streets. We’ve got to take to the rallies. We’ve got to fight back and we must resist every motion, every action by Musk and Trump to shut down this government.

Top officials in Donald Trump’s administration have walked back the president’s comments yesterday that US troops should deploy to the Gaza Strip and its residents should be dispersed to other countries.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said that Trump “has not committed to putting boots on the grounds in Gaza”, while the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, said the president only wanted to offer US help to clean up war-ravaged parts of the territory.

We have a live blog covering the fallout from the president’s controversial comments, as well as the wider crisis in the Middle East, and you can follow it here:

There’s a Trump in the White House, and, soon, there will be a Trump on Fox News.

The New York Times reports that the president’s daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, is getting her own show on the right-leaning network. Trump has brought several personalities from Fox News into his administration, notably defense secretary Pete Hegseth, but the relative of a sitting president having their own show on a major television channel is unheard of.

Here’s more, from the Times:

“My View with Lara Trump,” expected to air on Saturdays at 9 p.m. Eastern, will include a mix of analysis and interviews with influential figures. The network is describing the show as focused on “the return of common sense to all corners of American life,” echoing a phrase, “common sense,” that the Trump administration has frequently deployed.

Ms. Trump, 42, who is married to the president’s son Eric, is no stranger to a television studio. She worked for several years as a producer on “Inside Edition,” and served as an on-air contributor to Fox News from March 2021 to December 2022.

“Lara was a total professional and a natural when she was with us years ago,” Suzanne Scott, the chief executive of Fox News Media, told The New York Times in a message on Wednesday. “She is very talented and is a strong, effective communicator with great potential as a host.”

Last year, at the urging of her father-in-law, Ms. Trump ran for and was elected co-chair of the Republican National Committee. She helped oversee the party’s finances, electoral operations and the nominating convention in Milwaukee. She stepped down from the role last month.

Donald Trump ordered the withdrawal of the security detail of Mark Esper, his former defense secretary during his first term, the New York Times reports.

Esper has since faced threats from Iran over the 2020 assassination of general Qassem Suleimani. Despite that, Trump ordered the withdrawal of security details from a small number of his former administration officials after he was sworn in again last month, including Esper.

Here’s more, from the Times:

It was not immediately clear when Mr. Esper’s security detail was called off. A White House spokesman and a Pentagon official did not immediately comment. Mr. Esper declined to comment.

Mr. Esper is the latest former senior U.S. official to have his security detail pulled since Mr. Trump, who has also faced threats from Iran, took office. Pentagon officials last week removed Mr. Esper’s portrait as secretary of the Army.

Within hours of his inauguration, Mr. Trump began to systematically pull security details from nearly a half-dozen people who had served in his first term. The U.S. intelligence community has said Iran has sought revenge against American officials involved in the drone strike that killed Iran’s Gen. Qassim Suleimani in early January 2020.

Mr. Esper was protected by federal officials because of ongoing threats from Iran. Four other officials from Mr. Trump’s first administration facing Iranian threats also had their details pulled. The others are: John R. Bolton, Mr. Trump’s third national security adviser; Mike Pompeo, the former secretary of state; Brian Hook, one of Mr. Pompeo’s top aides and a specialist on Iran; and the retired Gen. Mark A. Milley, who Mr. Trump picked to be chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Those security details were provided by the Biden administration based on assessments from the intelligence community that the threats from Iran were ongoing and credible. The Biden administration had briefed the incoming Trump administration about the threats.

Mr. Trump also pulled protection from Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the infectious diseases doctor who had advised the White House on its response to the coronavirus pandemic, and who has become a target among Mr. Trump’s supporters.

Donald Trump’s shocking proposal to put the United States in charge of the Gaza Strip has managed to rattle even some of his staunchest supporters in Congress, the Guardian’s Richard Luscombe reports:

From “problematic” to “a couple of kinks in that Slinky” to “a bit of a stretch”, reaction from Republicans who weighed in on Donald Trump’s proposal to “own” Gaza was mixed on Wednesday, while some senior party leaders gave their blessing.

Some of the strongest criticism came from Rand Paul, the Kentucky senator who posted his opposition to the president’s plan on X on Wednesday morning.

“The pursuit for peace should be that of the Israelis and the Palestinians. I thought we voted for America First,” Paul wrote.

“We have no business contemplating yet another occupation to doom our treasure and spill our soldiers’ blood.”

His comments contradicted those of Mike Johnson, the House speaker, who said he was backing Trump’s proposal.

“We’re trying to get the details of it but I think this is a good development,” he told Manu Raju, CNN’s chief congressional congressional correspondent.

“We have to back Israel 100%. So whatever form that takes, we’re interested in having that discussion. It’s a surprising development, but I think it’s one that we’ll applaud.”

Paul’s critical comments were an outlier among Republicans, although Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina senator, said he foresaw issues if Trump moved ahead with his declared intention of making Gaza “the Riviera of the Middle East”, and sending US troops to secure the war-torn territory “if it’s necessary”.

“We’ll see what our Arab friends say about that,” Graham said, reported by Politico.

“I think most South Carolinians would probably not be excited about sending Americans to take over Gaza. I think that might be problematic, but I’ll keep an open mind.”

He said Gaza “would be a tough place to be stationed as an American”.

A US judge has blocked federal prisons from transferring transgender women to men’s facilities, halting one of Trump’s first executive orders seeking to erode trans rights behind bars.

In a lawsuit filed by three incarcerated trans women challenging Trump’s anti-trans order, US district judge Royce Lamberth in Washington ruled late Tuesday that the US Bureau of Prisons must “maintain and continue the plaintiffs’ housing status and medical care as they existed immediately prior to January 20”. The president’s day-one order had also directed federal prisons and detention centers to deny gender-affirming healthcare to trans people in custody.

The judge said the trans women had “straightforwardly demonstrated that irreparable harm will follow” if they are denied healthcare and forced into men’s institutions. US officials “have not so much as alleged that the plaintiffs in this particular suit present any threat to the female inmates housed with them”, the judge added. The family of one plaintiff said her life would be threatened if she was moved.

The judge said there were only sixteen trans women housed in women’s facilities, and the ruling applies to all of them. Last week, trans women across US prisons shared accounts of a brutal crackdown following Trump’s order, reporting that they were placed in solitary confinement awaiting transfers, losing access to healthcare and being harassed and taunted by guards:

Donald Trump will this afternoon again turn the focus of his barrage of executive orders towards LGBTQ rights, with the signing of a decree intended to prevent transgender athletes from playing in women’s sports. His administration is also looking at reviewing transgender visa applicants for “fraud”, while the Human Rights Campaign advocacy group warns the new order threatens young people with “harassment and discrimination”. On Capitol Hill, Republican House speaker Mike Johnson said he would support dismantling the department of education, while the president of the largest federal employees union warned that Trump has launched “the biggest assault” on the government workforce in its history.

Here’s what else has happened today:

• Pam Bondi was sworn in as attorney general, and told Trump, “I will make you proud”.

• Trump’s attempt to end birthright citizenship lost for the second time in federal court, with a judge issuing an indefinite nationwide injunction on the president’s executive order.

• Emil Bove, a former Trump attorney who is now a top justice department official, attempted to assuage concerns over his request for the names of every FBI agent who worked on January 6 cases.

A top justice department official has tempered a memo perceived as launching a retaliation campaign against FBI agents who worked on January 6 cases, saying only those who “acted with corrupt or partisan intent” could face penalties.

Emil Bove, a former lawyer for Donald Trump who is now the acting deputy attorney general, last week asked the FBI to compile a list of all agents who worked on the prosecutions of rioters who stormed the Capitol. The request prompted lawsuits from two groups of bureau employees to attempt to stop the sharing of the information.

In an email today, Bove said he requested the full list of employees because the FBI’s leadership refused his request to identify “the core team in Washington DC” who handled the prosecutions.

“The purpose of the requests was to permit the Justice Department to conduct a review of those particular agents’ conduct pursuant to President Trump’s Executive Order concerning weaponization in the prior administration,” Bove said, adding that because of “that insubordination”, he opted to request a list of all FBI agents who worked on January 6 related cases.

Bove then said:

Let me be clear: No FBI employee who simply followed orders and carried out their duties in an ethical manner with respect to January 6 investigations is at risk of termination or other penalties. The only individuals who should be concerned about the process initiated by my January 31, 2025 memo are those who acted with corrupt or partisan intent, who blatantly defied orders from Department leadership, or who exercised discretion in weaponizing the FBI.

However, he did not specify what “weaponizing” means, and it is unclear at this time whether FBI agents who were zealous or aggressive with their January 6 cases will run afoul of that criteria. Bove’s email was supposed to calm anxiety but instead provided few answers.