North Carolina town hall erupts in boos as congressman escorted from building, angry constituents
A man shouts at Rep. Chuck Edwards during a congressional town hall meeting on March 13, 2025 in Asheville, North Carolina/Sean Rayford/Getty Images
(ASHEVILLE, N.C.) — Republican Congressman Chuck Edwards, R-N.C., was confronted by angry constituents during a town hall meeting on Thursday night about President Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s sweeping cuts across the government.
“How do you justify cuts to staff of the VA helping veterans, especially those with long term care needs,” asked one constituent who was met with a standing ovation from the raucous crowd in Asheville, North Carolina.
“So first of all, there have been no cuts to the staff at VA as of this point. Like him or not, Elon Musk has brought a lot of really smart people,” Edwards responded as he was met with a round of boos. Earlier this month, an internal VA memo indicated that the agency was preparing to lay off 80,000 from its workforce.
The interaction turned so contentious and hostile that Edwards had to be escorted out of the building.
“You don’t get to do this to us,” yelled another constituent.
Republican leadership has told their members to avoid in-person town halls like these after several members were grilled in their home districts.
Edwards, however, went against their advice on Thursday.
“”You see a lot of advice in Washington, D.C. from different folks saying, you know, ‘Republicans shouldn’t be out there doing town halls,’ and I’m thinking ‘why not?’ I love the people,” said Edwards.
The Trump administration is pushing forward with sweeping cuts with thousands of workers already having been laid off across the federal workforce – including Veteran Affairs, the IRS and the Department of Education.
Elon Musk split with the White House this week, suggesting that entitlement programs like Medicare and Social Security could be on the chopping block next.
“The waste and fraud in entitlement spending, which is all of the, which is most of the federal spending is entitlements, so that’s like the big one to eliminate,” Musk said earlier this week.
Those words have left some voters very concerned, with Edwards taking the brunt end of the attacks Thursday night.
“What are you doing to ensure the protection of our Social Security benefits,” asked on constituent to a round of applause.
Replied Edwards: “I’m not going to vote to dissolve your Social Security. I’m not looking to disrupt Social Security at all.”
(WASHINGTON) — After meeting with Senate Republicans on Capitol Hill Wednesday, President-elect Donald Trump appeared ambivalent about the debate over whether to craft two legislative attempts to reshape fiscal policy for his agenda or settle on one sweeping package in an “all-in” approach.
Trump told reporters that he had “a great meeting” with the senators, although it appeared that the closed-door meeting that lasted more than 90 minutes did not lock down an agreement on how to proceed.
“There’s great unity,” Trump said. “I think there’s a lot of talk about two [bills], and there’s a lot of talk about one, but it doesn’t matter. The end result is the same. We’re going to get something done that’s going to be reducing taxes and creating a lot of jobs and all of the other things that you know about.”
Despite Trump’s comments, senators in the room heard Trump loud and clear: His preference, though he’s open to alternative ideas, is one “big, beautiful bill” to deal with many of his legislative priorities in a single swoop.
But just because senators heard him doesn’t mean they agree with him.
There was hope going into tonight’s meeting with Trump, the Senate’s first since he won the presidential race in November, that it could bring the Senate, which has largely favored a two-bill approach, and the House, where Speaker Mike Johnson prefers a one-bill approach, into one line of thinking on the matter.
Senators leaving the room Wednesday night seemed unmoved.
“It’s no mystery we’re advocating for two,” Sen. Dan Sullivan, R-Alaska, said as he departed.
There were a number of senators, including Trump allies like Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., and Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, who forcefully made the case for a two-bill solution while in the room with Trump. Cruz and his allies want one bill to address border security, military spending and energy. A second bill addressing tax policy could come later, they said.
With little to no support expected from Democrats, Republicans plan to push forward through “reconciliation” — a fast-track process limited to spending and revenue legislation that needs only a majority rather than the 60-vote threshold in the Senate needed to pass legislation.
While the debate might seem in the weeds, it could have serious implications for Trump’s agenda. Bills passed through reconciliation give Republicans more wiggle room to pass certain measures that Democrats oppose. But these bills are cumbersome, bound by a number of rules about what may and may not be included, and will require the near-unanimous support of Republicans.
Senate Republicans continue to break with Trump and Johnson on the issue because they believe they can notch a win early in Trump’s presidency by breaking the package into two chunks.
“I expressed vigorously, as did numerous other people that the best path to success is winning two major victories rather than putting all the eggs in one basket and risking — a very real risk — of it not getting the votes to pass,” Cruz said. “I strongly believe the path that makes sense is to take up two bills. Why? Because that unifies Republicans. We can get that passed. We could have a major victory early on, and then to move to extending the tax cuts.”
Cruz said there was “complete consensus” among the senators on a two-part solution. “Not a single senator disagreed.”
Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, R-W. Va., who told reporters she served as the moderator for the meeting, said Trump was listening intently to their suggestions but she believes two bills provide the most viable path to victory.
“The two-bill approach that [Senate Majority Leader John] Thune had liked, I think is generally the direction the Senate has been wanting to go to get that quick victory,” Capito said. “I think there’s a lot of discussion that’s going to go on. What can the House pass? What does the Speaker think? So he [Trump] heard from us and from our leader that a two-bill strategy is very much alive over here and something we’re still very interested in. So no decisions were made.”.
Capito seemed uncertain if there would be cohesion with Trump moving forward.
“I don’t know — we’ll see,” she said, adding, “I think, you know, the leaders will get together with the president and they’ll make those decisions.”
Republican Whip John Barrasso will be a key part of rounding up votes for whatever package is ultimately advanced and he also sees two bills as the right direction to go.
“We think there’s a lot of advantages to get an early win and to focus immediately on the border, on energy and on the strong military,” Barrasso said.
Barrasso said he was there when the Senate used this same fast-track budget tool to implement the Trump tax cuts in 2017. That took time, he said.
“There’s a lot of detail to be done with that, and so that’s going to take awhile” he said. “I think we can much more quickly deal with the border, energy, and military funding.”
Still, Trump continues to prefer the one-bill approach backed by Johnson, senators said.
“I think he’s still open to whatever can work. I think there seems to be movement from the House to do one, and so I think that’s the way he leans,” Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., said.
Another option that was floated was holding a “horse race” which would see the House originating a sweeping proposal that includes tax policy as its base while the Senate originates a more narrowly tailored bill that just includes border and energy reform then see which package gains more momentum.
“I said, ‘Well, Mister President, you love a horse race, why don’t you set it up as a horse race? And then whatever works best is great,'” said Sen. John Hoeven, R-N.D. “HIs preference is one bill, but I think he’s open to it.”
Trump reiterated his preference for one bill when he spoke to reporters on Tuesday, but said he could live with two.
“Well, I like one big, beautiful bill, and I always have, I always will, he said. But if two is more certain [to pass], it does go a little bit quicker because you can do the immigration stuff early,” he said.
Johnson said he hopes to have a bill ready by the first week in April, but it remains to be seen if he can get fiscal conservatives in his conference, who have long opposed all-in-one bills like the one Johnson is proposing, on board.
The speaker pushed back on Wednesday about the one-bill approach being a kitchen sink approach.
“This is not an omnibus spending bill, but appropriation,” Johnson said. “This is reducing spending, which is an objective we talked about. I’ll keep reiterating this: that just because the debt limit is raised, to give stability the bond markets and to send a message around the world that we will pay the nation’s debt. We are doggedly determined to decrease the size of scope of government and to limit spending, cut spending so you can you’ll see both of those things happen simultaneously.”
Johnson also intends to handle the debt limit in the reconciliation bill — without Democratic support.
“That way, as the Republican Party, the party in charge of both chambers, we again get to determine the details of that. If it runs through the regular order, regular process… then you have to have both parties negotiating. And we feel like we are in better stead to do it ourselves,” he said Tuesday.
But it remains to be seen whether Johnson can sell the fiscal conservatives in his conference on that idea. They nearly derailed the short-term government funding bill to avert a shutdown last month after Trump demanded that it dealt with the debt ceiling.
Trump will meet with groups of House Republicans at his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida this weekend.
“He’s bringing in big groups of House Republicans to Mar-a-Lago over the weekend three days in a row to meet with and talk with all of our team members about what’s ahead of us and the challenges and how we can accomplish all this together,” Johnson said, though the speaker is not expected to attend.
(WASHINGTON) — David Sacks, the White House crypto czar, said Friday that taxpayers have lost out on “over $17 billion of value” because earlier administrations never took advantage of bitcoin already in the U.S. government’s possession.
“Over the past decade or so, the federal government has come into the possession of roughly 400,000 bitcoin through civil or criminal asset forfeitures,” Sacks said in an interview with ABC News’ Senior White House Correspondent Selina Wang on Friday. “We’ve had this very ad hoc strategy where we just would sell the bitcoin, sort of almost willy-nilly, and we sold about half of it. We only made about $400 million. Today, that bitcoin would have been worth over $17 billion, so the American taxpayer lost out on over $17 billion of value.”
Sacks’ comments follow President Donald Trump signing an executive order on Thursday that creates a strategic bitcoin reserve and U.S. digital assets stockpile. Senior White House officials said bitcoin is being treated differently from other cryptocurrencies because it is the “original” cryptocurrency and there is a finite amount.
Sacks brushed off repeated questions about whether this could pose a conflict of interest since President Donald Trump has a personal financial stake in the success of the industry after launching his own cryptocurrency company, World Liberty Financial, days before the inauguration.
“It’s not an issue,” Sacks told Wang.
When asked about Bloomberg News’ reporting that World Liberty Financial appears to have bought more than $20 million in cryptocurrency two days before the White House’s Digital Assets Summit on Friday, Sacks said: “You should talk to them about that. That’s a private company. I’m not a regulator. I’m a policy adviser for innovation. I don’t keep tabs on what individual companies are doing.”
Sacks stressed that the government is not buying any cryptocurrency, just using the cryptocurrency that has already been accumulated through criminal or civil asset forfeitures.
“Any further accumulation of bitcoin by the government has to be done in a completely budget-neutral way. It cannot add to the deficit, it cannot add to the debt, it cannot tax the American people,” Sacks said. “So this is about maximizing the value of assets that we already have on our balance sheet.”
When asked by ABC News how the government could “accumulate” more bitcoin in a budget-neutral way, Sacks said those programs don’t exist, noting the administration is still in the planning phase and that the executive order calls on the secretaries of the Department of Commerce and the Department of Treasury to “think about that.”
“It won’t cost the taxpayer dimes, but if the secretaries can figure out how to accumulate more bitcoin without costing taxpayers anything, then they are authorized to do that,” the senior White House officials added.
Sacks repeatedly compared bitcoin to U.S. holdings of gold, explaining that the U.S. won’t be selling it, unless Trump changes his mind down the road.
“We’ve got about a trillion dollars of gold in Fort Knox and our other depositories,” he said. “We don’t sell that gold, even though we could use it to pay off a trillion dollars of national debt. The reason why we don’t sell it, liquidate it all today is because we believe it’s strategic for the United States to have a stockpile or reserve of that asset.
“In a similar way, we believe it’s in the long term interest the United States to hold on to this bitcoin,” he added. “Look, if the president changes his mind at some point in the future, he could issue a new executive order and say, the secretary of the treasury, get rid of it, sell it. But we don’t want to do that.”
White House officials also noted that an official audit of the government’s digital asset holdings has never been completed but will be following the president’s executive order, allowing the administration to get a more concrete understanding of what the U.S. possesses.
(WASHINGTON) — Migrants allowed into the U.S. temporarily under certain Biden administration programs can be quickly expelled, according to a memo sent by the Trump administration’s acting secretary of homeland security.
The memo, sent out Thursday night by Acting Department of Homeland Security Secretary Benjamine Huffman and obtained by ABC News, says that a migrant who has “been granted parole under a policy that may be paused, modified, or terminated” could be subject to expedited removal.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has the freedom to deport migrants covered by such “parole” programs — used to grant entrance to migrants under which for urgent humanitarian reasons.
The Cuban, Haitian, Nicaraguan, Venezuela (CHNV) parole program allowed for certain migrants from those counties to apply for parole status into U.S. for up to two years. There were, however, conditions on the applicants, for example they needed to have a sponsor in the U.S. and be able to pass security vetting.
Both programs were swiftly done away with when President Donald Trump came into office earlier this week.
“The Biden-Harris Administration abused the humanitarian parole program to indiscriminately allow 1.5 million migrants to enter our country,” a DHS spokesperson said on Tuesday. “This was all stopped on day one of the Trump administration. This action will return the humanitarian parole program to its original purpose of looking at migrants on a case-by-case basis.”
The memo, first reported by The New York Times, says it is up to an ICE agent to review an individual case and determine what enforcement is necessary.
“Take all steps necessary to review the alien’s case and consider, in exercising your enforcement discretion, whether any such alien should be placed in removal proceedings; and Review the alien’s parole status to determine, in exercising your enforcement discretion, whether parole remains appropriate in light of any changed legal or factual circumstances,” according to the memo.
The memo says for any person in the country legally who ICE is “aware of,” agents should take “all necessary steps to determine if they should be in the country
“Take all steps necessary to review the alien’s case and consider, in exercising your enforcement discretion, whether to apply expedited removal. This may include steps to terminate any ongoing removal proceeding and/or any active parole status.”
The administration expanded its expedited removal authority to its “statutory maximum” — meaning someone who is in the country for less than two years can be removed without an immigration hearing — an interpretation of the law that immigration advocates say has never been used before.
“To maximize efficiency in the short term, DHS components may wish to prioritize aliens eligible for expedited removal who failed to apply for asylum within the statutory deadline,” the DHS memo said.
