Commerce Department seeks to secure drone technology, supply chain from China, Russia

(WASHINGTON) — Democrats have a plan to take back power in Washington back from Republicans in two years: work with them now.

Democrats, who are already planning their comeback after being swept out of power in Washington last month, have said they’ll oppose President-elect Donald Trump and his allies when their values collide but are open to cooperation on a range of issues, including immigration, federal spending and entitlements.

The strategy marks a turnaround from 2017, when “resistance” to Trump was Democrats’ rallying cry. But, some lawmakers and operatives said, it also marks a challenge to Republicans for bipartisanship at a time when narrow GOP congressional majorities will likely mandate some level of cooperation.

“People want to see government work, and we’re going to hold Republicans accountable for whether they’re willing to help move things forward for the American people. So, if they aren’t, then absolutely, that will impact them at the ballot box,” said Rep. Suzan DelBene, D-Wash., who led House Democrats’ campaign arm this year and will do so again for the 2026 midterms.

“I think we are telling them that we’re here to govern,” DelBene added. “And I guess the question is, are they serious about governing?”

Republicans are cobbling together an aggressive agenda that would extend Trump-era tax cuts, implement strict border measures and more once they take office next month. The efforts will either be split into two measures or combined into one — but Republicans’ intention is to pass them in a way that wouldn’t need to meet the 60-vote Senate filibuster rule.

However, for the rest of the upcoming 119th Congress, Republicans will have a 220-215 House majority, once vacancies are filled and barring any absences, and only 53 seats in the Senate, short of the 60 needed to unilaterally pass most legislation.

Democrats have already proposed potential areas of cooperation, even as they lick their wounds from a disappointing election and view Trump as anathema to many of their core beliefs.

“To win in 2026 and beyond, Democrats must focus on building an economic message centered on good-paying jobs and revitalizing manufacturing,” California Rep. Ro Khanna said. “But we have a responsibility now to try and find areas of common ground where we can deliver for Americans. I believe that starts with reducing the Pentagon’s oversized defense budget while strongly opposing any cuts to programs like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.”

“We are very open to working with the Trump administration,” added Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly, the Democratic Governors Association chair. “But no doubt if there are things that they push us to do that that we think are wrong, legal, anything like that, we’ll draw the line.”

That attitude will leave Democrats, especially in purple states and districts, with some leverage — either to shape legislation, as they say they plan, or to hammer Republicans as obstinate, operatives said.

It’s very possible battleground Democrats are at times taken up on offers for bipartisanship or are made themselves to accept offers. Both chambers have their share of moderate Republicans, too, including Reps. Mike Lawler New York and David Valadao of California, and Sens. Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska.

But each chamber also boasts some Republican hardliners who view bipartisanship as a four-letter word and a sign that a piece of legislation isn’t conservative enough.

“This is how these battleground Democrats are anyway, but I think it will manifest itself in, ‘Take me up on this offer, let’s go.’ And if you don’t, then, ‘OK, I can work with that, too,'” said one Democratic strategist working on House races. “I think for a battleground Democrat, it’s a win-win approach. You have the possibility of working on a bill and a law which you can say, ‘I delivered,’ or you create receipts to bring back to voters to say, ‘I kept on trying.'”

However, some Democrats warned, the party must balance cooperation, even if just offering it, with attacks.

The base still finds Trump — and Republicans in Congress with similar brands — abhorrent, and the results in 2026 will be largely fueled by voter attitudes about the GOP’s control in Washington.

In 2018, Democrats took back the House in a wave largely fueled among their voters by antipathy for Trump. Capitalizing on that frustration could be key again, strategists told ABC News.

“The opportunity to work in a bipartisan way, to increase your own bipartisan credentials becomes very important,” said Dan Sena, the executive director of House Democrats’ campaign arm in 2018. “I just think it’s important at large for the caucus to pay attention to the fact that ultimately, in two years from now, the Republican trifecta is going to get a thumb up or a thumb down from the country, and that’s ultimately going to dictate who has control of House.”

“If I were the Democrats at large,” Sena added, “I would be pretty aggressive in holding the Republicans and then the Trump administration accountable.”

Still, nearly all Democrats agreed that the party should wage a two-pronged strategy, including both cooperation and criticism, and that each will go hand in hand when Democrats find themselves either in congressional majorities next month or having to deal with a Republican president even as they lead their states as governors.

“I think this openness to working with them is less that you are going to see actual collaboration, I think it’s that people are trying to set themselves up to have some credibility in other spaces to be against stuff that they’re doing,” said one former Democratic House aide. “It carries more weight and legitimacy if you’re someone who’s open minded to working with them, and then they take a hard right and you speak out.”

Either way, Democrats are ready to pounce heading into 2026, when both chambers of Congress and 36 governorships will be up for grabs.

“In politics, it’s always the right move to extend a hand,” said Jared Leopold, a Democratic strategist and former DGA staffer. “And if somebody chooses to slap you in the face instead, you better make sure you catch it on camera.”

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(WASHINGTON) — Sen.-elect Elissa Slotkin, D-Mich., expressed concern Sunday that some of President-elect Donald Trump’s selections of national security Cabinet positions could be beholden to his political preferences rather than an objective interpreting of intelligence.

Slotkin, a current U.S. representative and former CIA officer and Pentagon official, told “This Week” co-anchor Martha Raddatz that selections like Fox News host Pete Hegseth for Defense secretary and former Democratic Rep. Tulsi Gabbard to head national intelligence should tell Trump precisely what they’re seeing in the world rather than what they think the incoming president “wants to hear.”

“I just need to know that the people who are in these jobs are not going to be guided by politics and what someone tells them they think they should be seeing in the intelligence or in the defense picture, but what is actually the truth on the ground,” Slotkin said.

“Speaking truth to power is one of the most important things the intelligence community does, and if you have someone in there who feels more beholden to telling the president what he wants to hear, I got a real problem with that.”

Slotkin’s remarks come as Trump moves at a rapid pace to announce his Cabinet picks. Among the more controversial nominees have been Hegseth, Gabbard, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead the Department of Health and Human Services and former Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., to lead the Justice Department.

Hegseth has raised concerns over his past comments that women should not serve in combat roles.

“I can tell you, because I was at the Pentagon on Thursday, and there is absolute like hallway, constant chatter and conversation and concern from senior women officers. But also I’ve heard from folks who I’ve recommended to service academies, young women who are just starting out their career, saying, ‘Am I going to actually be able to accomplish what I want to accomplish here?'” Slotkin said.

Trump’s pick for defense secretary has also repeatedly criticized “woke” policies in the Pentagon, and advocated for firing top officials in the armed forces who have backed the department’s diversity efforts.

“I think they’ve been very clear that they’re putting together some sort of panel that’s going to look at generals, people who have served their nation the — their entire lives over multiple administrations, Democrat and Republican in combat, they are now openly talking about dismissing them like some sort of kangaroo court. You can imagine the stress in the Pentagon about that, but also in the future of who we are as a military,” Slotkin said.

Slotkin did sound a more positive note about Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio, who is Trump’s pick to lead the State Department and has a more conventional background as an advocate for muscular U.S. involvement in the world.

“We’re not perfect, but, man, I’d rather have American leadership over Chinese or Russian leadership any day of the week. And so, I hope that despite the impulses maybe of President-elect Trump, that we have Marco Rubio as a more traditional pick who’s going to understand that American role that leadership role is important,” she said.

Still, Slotkin declined to preview how she’d vote on any Cabinet nominee, despite her concern about people like Hegseth and Gabbard.

“In general, I’m a senator-elect, and advice and consent from the Senate is part of our constitutional process. So I’m going to try and meet with everybody, hear them out. But I also am a former CIA officer and Defense Department official. I know just how important these jobs are, not just for who gets what in Washington, but for the actual security of people in the United States,” she said.

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(WASHINGTON) — As Kash Patel, President Donald Trump’s pick to lead the FBI, appears Thursday for his Senate confirmation hearing, some of the rhetoric he has espoused for years to defend Trump and promote Trump’s reelection is sure to elicit sharp questions about whether he is fit to lead one of the nation’s premiere law enforcement agencies.

Patel has derided the FBI as the “Federal Bureau of Insanity.” He’s announced “a mission to annihilate the ‘Deep State'” — what he calls a “cabal of unelected tyrants” inside government, undermining Trump. He’s said the conspiracy theory QAnon, claiming a secret global plot to traffic children and take down Trump, is right in many ways and “should get credit for all the things” it has accomplished. And he once promised to “come after” and prosecute “the conspirators not just in government, but in the media” who “helped Joe Biden rig the presidential election.”

On a podcast two years ago, Trump adviser Roger Stone told Patel his critics are right about one thing: “You are a Trump loyalist.”

Patel chuckled and nodded affirmatively.

But that’s just what Democrats — and even some Republicans — on the Senate Judiciary Committee may wonder about most: If confirmed, is Patel so loyal to Trump that he would use the FBI to push Trump’s political agenda and target Trump’s perceived enemies?

‘An existential threat’

According to Patel, the FBI has already become a political weapon — especially with its multiple investigations of Trump, including the unprecedented search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in 2022 — and that’s what he wants to change.

“The rot at the core of the FBI isn’t just scandalous, it’s an existential threat to our republican form of government,” Patel wrote in his book, published two years ago, titled “Government Gangsters.”

Trump, on social media, called Patel’s book “the roadmap to end the Deep State’s reign” when it came out.

Many of Trump’s allies in Congress have lauded Patel’s nomination, touting him as the change agent needed at the top of an embattled agency. Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, has called Patel’s career “a study in fighting for unpopular but righteous causes, exposing corruption, and putting America First.”

Democrats, however, not only point to what they see as Patel’s concerning rhetoric — but also what they’ve described as his relative lack of experience for such a significant position.

After meeting with Patel last week, the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., said he has “grave concerns” about Patel’s nomination, declaring, “Mr. Patel has neither the experience, the temperament, nor the judgment to lead the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”

‘I just got to my breaking point’

Now in his mid-40s, Patel grew up on New York’s Long Island, ultimately deciding to attend law school after caddying for a group of criminal defense attorneys at the Garden City County Club. By his own account, in 2005, he graduated from Pace University Law school in the bottom third of his class — something he was “very proud of,” he once joked.

After law school, he spent nine years as a public defender, and in late 2013 he moved to Washington, D.C., to join the Justice Department’s National Security Division as a terrorism prosecutor, helping U.S. attorneys’ offices around the country prosecute their cases.

He was involved in Justice Department cases all over the world, including ones stemming from the 2012 attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi and the 2010 World Cup bombings in Uganda.

But in his book and in media interviews, he said he grew frustrated with his time at the Justice Department, especially after a dust-up with a federal judge that made national headlines.

In early 2016, while Patel was in Tajikistan for work, the judge presiding over one of his cases in Texas called for an in-person hearing back in the United States. Patel didn’t have a suit or tie with him in Tajikistan, and after racing halfway around the world to make the hearing, the judge badgered him to “dress like a lawyer” and “act like a lawyer,” according to a transcript of the exchange.

“You don’t add a bit of value, do you?” the judge added.

As Patel recounted in his book, his bosses at the Justice Department privately expressed support for him, but when the Washington Post wrote a story about it two weeks later, the Justice Department, in Patel’s telling, refused to defend him publicly, so the newspaper “dragged my name through the mud.”

Patel has also described how he grew upset over the Justice Department’s handling of the Benghazi case following the 2012 attack by Islamic militants, believing that “terrorists went free” despite his disputed assertion that the Obama administration had enough evidence to charge even more people for the attack.

“I just got to my breaking point,” Patel once recalled. So in 2017, he left the Justice Department to become a senior investigator on Capitol Hill, where he helped lead the House Republicans’ probe of “Russiagate” — which, as he describes it, exposed FBI wrongdoing in its 2016 investigation of alleged ties between Trump’s presidential campaign and Russia.

‘Not a credible witness’

Patel’s work on the Russia probe led to him joining the Trump administration in 2019, and in the final year of Trump’s presidency he was appointed acting deputy director of national intelligence — the second-in-command of the entire U.S. intelligence community — and then chief of staff to the acting U.S. defense secretary, a position that critics claimed he was unqualified to hold even for just the 10 weeks he was there.

After Trump’s first administration ended, Patel regularly appeared on conservative media outlets, frequently praising Trump and criticizing the Justice Department for investigating and then prosecuting Trump for his alleged mishandling of classified documents after leaving office and his alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election.

Patel has claimed — despite the Justice Department’s inspector general finding otherwise — that the FBI played a part in pushing pro-Trump protesters to attack the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. And he has claimed in media interviews and court testimony that Washington, D.C., Mayor Muriel Bowser and then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi deserve blame for the attack — not Trump — because, Patel insists, Trump days earlier had authorized up to 20,000 National Guard to secure the Capitol.

The judge who listened to his court testimony in a case about Trump’s eligibility to be on Colorado’s ballot in the November election ruled that Patel “was not a credible witness,” saying his testimony was “not only illogical” but “completely devoid of any evidence in the record.”

After Trump left office, Patel launched a tax-exempt charity, now known as the Kash Foundation, which made national headlines in 2023 with revelations that it provided thousands of dollars to at least two so-called “FBI whistleblowers” who helped House Republicans push disputed claims of corruption inside the Justice Department.

Patel has said his charity helps fund defamation lawsuits, supports whistleblowers, buys meals for families in need over Christmas, supports Jan. 6 families, and more recently funds “rescue operations” out of Israel.

But he has refused to offer specifics about who is benefiting from his charity, and, as ABC News previously reported, experts have questioned whether it was following the law. At the time, Patel declined to speak with ABC News about its reporting.

After Trump announced his latest presidential campaign, Patel traveled the country to promote Trump’s reelection, saying that Trump would fire “thousands and thousands and thousands” of government employees to root out the “Deep State.”

Three weeks after Trump was reelected president, he named Patel as his pick to lead the FBI.

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