Trump administration cuts to CDC will affect 9/11 responders, critics say

(WASHINGTON) — The stopgap spending plan negotiated between House Republicans and Democrats to avoid a government shutdown appears to be dead two days before the deadline after it was condemned by President-elect Donald Trump and his ally Elon Musk.

Johnson’s original plan called for extending government spending at current levels until March and added other provisions like relief for disaster victims and farmers and a pay raise for members of Congress.

In a joint statement Wednesday afternoon, Trump and Vice President-elect JD Vance called on Congress to “pass a streamlined spending bill that doesn’t give [Senate Majority Leader] Chuck Schumer and the Democrats everything they want.”

“Republicans must GET SMART and TOUGH. If Democrats threaten to shut down the government unless we give them everything they want, then CALL THEIR BLUFF. It is Schumer and [President Joe] Biden who are holding up aid to our farmers and disaster relief,” Trump and Vance said.

Later Wednesday evening, Trump threatened any Republican in the House who voted for a clean bill.

“Any Republican that would be so stupid as to do this should, and will, be Primaried,” he posted on his Truth Social platform. “Everything should be done, and fully negotiated, prior to my taking Office on January 20th, 2025.”

In another post, Trump also pushed Republicans to deal with the debt limit before he takes office, saying if they don’t, “he’ll have to ‘fight ’til the end’ with Democrats.”

“This is a nasty TRAP set in place by the Radical Left Democrats!” he wrote. “They are looking to embarrass us in June when [the debt limit] comes up for a Vote. The people that extended it, from September 28th to June 1st, should be ashamed of themselves.”

Scalise says ‘hopefully tomorrow’ the House will have deal
Congress faces a deadline Friday, when the current government funding extension expires, to pass a new bill before a government shutdown kicks in.

House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, R-La., told reporters late Wednesday that negotiations on government funding remained ongoing after a “productive” late-night meeting in Speaker Mike Johnson’s office.

“We are going to continue to work through the night to the morning to get an agreement we can bring to the floor,” Scalise said, adding “hopefully tomorrow” the House can “get it resolved.”

Among those in the speaker’s office for negotiations was Vance, who told reporters the conversation was “productive,” adding, “I think we will be able to solve some problems here.”

In his remarks to reporters, Scalise said Trump “wants to start the presidency on a sound footing, and we want him to as well. And I think that’s one of the things we’re all focused on,” he said.

Scalise added, “There’s a lot we want to get done starting in January. But obviously we’ve got to get through this first. And we are going to get it resolved.”

Asked if the debt limit is going to be part of any new agreement, as Trump has called for, Scalise said: “We are not there yet. We are still having conversations with our members with a lot of other folks too just to make sure that everybody is on the same page. But we are still talking about some good ideas that will address some of the issues our members raised today. And then make sure we take care of the disaster victims.”

What Elon Musk said

Earlier Wednesday, Musk came out against the bill, going so far as to threaten lawmakers who voted for it.

After posting on X that “This bill should not pass,” Musk escalated his rhetoric, warning that “any member of the House or Senate who votes for this outrageous spending bill deserves to be voted out in 2 years!”

“Please call your elected representatives right away to tell them how you feel! They are trying to get this passed today while no one is paying attention,” he implored his over 200 million followers.

He later posted that “No bills should be passed Congress until Jan 20, when @realDonaldTrump takes office.”

Republican leaders had been discussing a clean short-term funding bill, but specifics are unclear, sources told ABC News. This comes less than a day after Republicans unveiled the legislative text that was the product of bipartisan and bicameral negotiations.

What Democrats are saying

House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries signaled Democrats were not inclined to vote for a clean bill.

“An agreement is an agreement,” Jeffries told reporters.

“House Republicans have been ordered to shut down the government and hurt everyday Americans all across this country,” he said. “House Republicans will now own any harm that is visited upon the American people that results from a government shutdown or worse.”

House Speaker Mike Johnson was asked about Musk’s post during an interview on “Fox & Friends” on Wednesday morning. He appeared to not worry about Musk’s post influencing the ability of the funding bill to get through both chambers ahead of a partial government shutdown deadline at the end of the day Friday.

“I was communicating with Elon last night. Elon and Vivek [Ramaswamy] and I are on a text chain together and I was explaining to them the background of this. Vivek and I talked last night about midnight, and he said ‘look I get it.’ He said, ‘We understand you’re in an impossible position,'” Johnson said.

Johnson said Musk and Ramaswamy, the two DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency) leaders, are aware of the tough spot the speaker is in with a slim majority and Democratic control of the Senate and White House. DOGE is an outside-of-government (or private) operation.

“We gotta get this done because here’s the key. By doing this, we are clearing the decks, and we are setting up for Trump to come in roaring back with the American first agenda. That’s what we are going to run with gusto beginning January 3 when we start the new Congress,” he said.

Johnson, whose speakership has been characterized by beating back criticism from his far-right flank, had originally promised a clean bill that would solely extend current levels of government funding to prevent a shutdown. However, natural disasters and headwinds for farmers, necessitated additional federal spending.

In the end, the bill included $100 billion for recovery efforts from Hurricanes Helene and Milton and another $10 billion for economic assistance for farmers.

Johnson at an earlier press conference said his hands were tied after “acts of God” necessitated additional money.

“It was intended to be, and it was, until recent days, a very simple, very clean [continuing resolution], stopgap funding measure to get us into next year when we have unified government,” he said. “We had these massive hurricanes in the late fall, Helene and Milton, and other disasters. We have to make sure that the Americans that were devastated by these hurricanes get the relief they need.”

Still, Republican spending hawks cried foul, accusing Johnson of stocking the bill with new spending without any way to pay for it and keeping the bill’s creation behind closed doors.

“We’re just fundamentally unserious about spending. And as long as you got a blank check, you can’t shrink the government. If you can’t shrink the government, you can’t live free,” Texas Rep. Chip Roy said.

Musk, too, mocked the size of the bill.

“Ever seen a bigger piece of pork?” he posted on X, along with a picture of the bill stacked on a desk.

ABC News’ Rachel Scott and Katerine Faulders contributed to this report.

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(NEW YORK) — New York Attorney General Letitia James sent a letter to health care providers, calling on medical institutions to continue providing gender-affirming care amid reports, according the attorney general’s office, that several providers in the state had stopped providing treatments following a President Donald Trump executive order.

James reminded providers in a Monday letter “to comply with New York law … [providers] must continue to provide health care services, including gender affirming care, to transgender or gender nonconforming individuals.”

They must provide care regardless “of the availability of federal funding,” James told providers, noting that New York State laws prohibit discrimination, which includes “withholding the availability of services from transgender individuals based on their gender identity or their diagnosis of gender dysphoria, while offering such services to cisgender individuals.”

In a Jan. 28 executive order, Trump threatened to stop providing federal funding and grants to medical institutions that provided gender-affirming care for people under the age of 19.

Trump’s executive order does not restrict puberty blockers, hormone therapies, or surgeries for cisgender patients under the age of 19.

On Jan. 31, a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order to stop Trump’s efforts to freeze federal funding, saying that the freeze is likely a violation of the Constitution.

James’ office told providers in her letter that the temporary restraining order applied to both current and future grants of federal assistance and that funding cannot be frozen or withdrawn as it applies to providing gender affirming care to minors.

The executive order against gender-affirming care is the latest action from Trump that impacts the transgender community, which is estimated to make up less than 1% of the U.S. population over the age of 13.

Trump also recently signed executive orders restricting transgender participation in the military, ending federal legal recognition of transgender people, and restricting gender marker changes on federal documents.

James was one of 22 state attorneys general behind the lawsuit aiming to halt the implementation of the Trump administration’s policies freezing federal agency grants and financial assistance.

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(WASHINGTON) — Taking office at the start of the Biden administration, Rep. Nicole Malliotakis, R-N.Y., hasn’t had that much face time with a commander in chief.

On Saturday, she’ll be one of a handful of blue-state Republicans meeting with President-elect Donald Trump in Mar-a-Lago, in one of several planned strategy sessions between Trump and House Republicans this weekend, less than two weeks from his inauguration.

“It’s going to be a good discussion,” Malliotakis said Thursday.

Trump’s meetings come as Republicans debate how to best advance their policy agenda. They have spent the week debating whether to pass an energy, tax and border security package along party lines in a single package — an approach favored by House leaders and Trump — or split it up into two bills, which Senate Republicans have endorsed.

Trump hosted members of the hard-line House Freedom Caucus on Friday. Over the weekend, he will meet with other groups of lawmakers, including House GOP committee chairs, blue-state Republicans and appropriators.

House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., told reporters it was Trump’s “idea to bring in small groups of Republicans to come together and just have fellowship together, to talk about the issues and talk about the vision that we have for the year ahead of us.”

The Republican balancing act

The groups are each expected to push different priorities for the all-encompassing policy bill — from various proposed spending cuts to regional tax and policy issues that could be difficult for the GOP to fit into its legislative package.

New York Republicans plan to bring up changes to the cap on state and local tax deductions, a limit imposed in the 2017 Republican rewrite of the tax code set to expire at the end of 2025 and affects taxpayers in high-tax states such as New York, California and New Jersey. That change helped finance other tweaks the law made to the tax code.

Nearly all of the 12 Republicans who voted against Trump’s tax package came from one of those states. But now, with a one-seat majority in the House, the president-elect and Johnson can’t afford any defections.

Rep. Mike Lawler, R-N.Y., who will meet with Trump this weekend and has introduced legislation to boost the cap on the “SALT” deduction, said it’s unlikely Republicans will be able to reverse the tax provision fully.

“We will work to get the number as high as we can as part of the negotiation, but you have to look at everything in totality,” he said. “There’s a lot of factors here, as you work through it.”

Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart, R-Fla., a senior member of the House Appropriations Committee who is scheduled to meet with Trump over the weekend, said it’s important for Republicans to discuss policy as they figure out the broader strategy to move legislation through Congress.

“This is a process where you have to do everything at the same time,” he said. “There are a million different conversations about every potential issue at the same time.”

Republicans, he added, “don’t have the luxury to say, ‘I’m going to deal with that later.'”

Malliotakis, who compared the discussions and intraparty negotiations to a “Rubik’s Cube,” said she also plans to bring up other topics in the meeting, including New York City’s new congestion pricing system and how the incoming administration can challenge it.

Democrats debate approach to new administration

In the early days of the new Congress, Democrats have taken a more cautious, less resistant approach to elements of the GOP agenda following Trump’s victory and sweep of the popular vote in the presidential election.

For the first time in decades, no Democrats raised an objection to any state’s electoral votes on Jan. 6, when the vice president presided over Congress’s counting and certifying of the presidential election results.

Forty-eight Democrats voted with House Republicans this week on a bill that would require the detention of any illegal immigrant charged with “burglary, theft, larceny, or shoplifting,” and a number of Democrats supported advancing the measure in the Senate.

And 45 House Democrats supported a GOP bill to sanction the International Criminal Court in response to the ICC issuing arrest warrants for top Israeli leaders over alleged war crimes.

Centrist Rep. Pat Ryan, D-N.Y., who voted for the ICC bill but against the immigration proposal, has called for Trump to lead bipartisan negotiations over changes to the SALT deduction cap.

“I disagree with President Trump strongly on most things — to be clear, I don’t pull my punches on that or anything,” Ryan said. “But this is a tangible thing that he said he wants to do, and I’m going to take him at his word.”

ABC News’ Lauren Peller, Allison Pecorin, Katherine Faulders and Rachel Scott contributed to this report.

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