Trump announces SoftBank will make $100 billion investment in the US

(WASHINGTON) — GOP House leaders and Vice-President-elect JD Vance continue to meet behind closed doors in Speaker Mike Johnson’s office Thursday to craft a path forward and reach a budget deal — hoping to both appease President-elect Donald Trump’s evolving demands as well as rank and file members on the right who are traditionally against any spending deal or debt limit increase.

Across the aisle, Democrats maintain the best path forward is the defunct deal they struck with House Republicans that Trump and Elon Musk demolished on Wednesday.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries expressed disbelief that the bipartisan agreement had fallen apart — emphasizing that Republicans will own the consequences, including the impact of a potential government shutdown.

“This reckless Republican-driven shutdown can be avoided if House Republicans will simply do what is right for the American people and stick with the bipartisan agreement that they themselves negotiated,” Jeffries said at a news conference Thursday.

That deal 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.

Things changed Wednesday after Musk began a pressure campaign on X with multiple posts opposing the deal. Later that day Trump and Vance posted a statement calling on Congress to “pass a streamlined spending bill,” with the president-elect echoing Musk’s threats of primarying any GOP member who didn’t comply.

Trump told ABC News’ Jonathan Karl Thursday morning that there will be a government shutdown unless Congress eliminates the debt ceiling or extends the limit on government borrowing before he takes office.

“We’re not going to fall into the debt ceiling quicksand,” he said. “There won’t be anything approved unless the debt ceiling is done with.”

Under current law, the federal government would hit its borrowing limit sometime in the spring of 2025, during the first months of the second Trump presidency. Trump, however, said he wants it taken care of now, while Joe Biden is president.

“Shutdowns only inure to the person who’s president,” Trump said.

With several alternative plans to avert a shutdown under Republican consideration, House Majority Leader Steve Scalise told members to expect votes related to government funding Thursday, but the timing of any action was unclear as discussions continue.

Some Senate Republicans, including John Kennedy and Mike Rounds, expressed displeasure with Johnson’s bill and praised Trump for stepping in.

But Sen. Thom Tillis, whose home state was devastated by Hurricane Helene, said he’d do everything in his power to slow down the passage of any government funding bill that doesn’t include disaster relief.

Congress faces a deadline of Friday night, when the current government funding extension expires, to pass a new one or non-essential agencies would shut down.

House Republicans of every stripe were seen rotating in and out of the speaker’s office on Thursday — including House Appropriations Chairman Tom Cole, Majority Whip Tom Emmer, Texas Rep. Chip Roy and Freedom Caucus Chairman Andy Harris of Maryland.

Jeffries told reporters that raising the debt limit as part of the government funding bill is “premature at best.”

“We are going to continue to maintain an open line of communication to see if we can resolve this issue on terms that are favorable to the everyday Americans,” Jeffries said when asked if he was speaking to Johnson.

Behind closed doors during a caucus huddle Thursday morning, Jeffries delivered the same message to Democrats: Republicans backed out of a bipartisan deal and now have to figure out a way to get out.

“This kind of chaos and dysfunction has real-world impacts on hard-working people,” Rep. Kathy Castor, D-Fla., said.

Rep. Bill Keating, D-Mass., told ABC News that Jeffries quoted President John F. Kennedy to the caucus: “Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate.”

“He said, look, we kept all our doors open during this negotiation. We made concessions. Most of us weren’t happy with the outcome of this, but you have to do your basic job. He’s saying that will continue. We’re open to everything, but we’re not open to the kind of bullying tactics that Elon Musk is doing,” Keating said.

Rep. Brad Sherman, D-Calif., quipped, “We had a deal. We negotiated a deal, and then Musk decided to change the deal. Do I call him ‘President Musk?'”

Texas Rep. Greg Casar, the new chair of the progressive caucus was also critical of Musk.

“If Elon Musk is kind of cosplaying co-president here, I don’t know why Trump doesn’t just hand him the Oval Office, or Speaker Johnson should maybe just hand Elon Musk the gavel if they just want that billionaire to run the country,” Casar said.

While many Democrats support eliminating the debt limit in principle, members left their closed-door meeting opposed to striking it now as part of a spending deal, stressing it should be a separate matter.

ABC News’ Emily Chang and Ivan Pereira contributed to this report.

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(WASHINGTON) — Environmental nonprofits are gearing up to challenge some of the actions President Donald Trump has issued since taking office.

There is litigation coming for the majority of the executive orders Trump has signed so far that affect the environment, conservation and decarbonizing the economy, several nonprofits told ABC News.

Environmental lawyers are also on standby for any directives issued in the future that could violate existing environmental laws, according to several sources familiar with the lawsuits already being prepared against the Trump administration.

The White House did not immediately respond to ABC News’ request for comment.

How environmental groups are responding to Trump’s executive orders

Trump began his second term as president by signing a slew of executive actions, including an order that attempts to revoke action taken by President Joe Biden in the last weeks of his term to ban all future offshore oil and natural gas drilling on America’s East and West coasts, the Eastern Gulf of Mexico and Alaska’s North Bering Sea.

While Trump immediately vowed to reverse the ban when it was signed on Jan. 6, that could prove difficult. The law Biden invoked, the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act, was written so a presidential action under its authority is permanent — providing legal precedent to ensure it stands, several environmental lawyers told ABC News, describing Trump’s move as illegal.

“We’ll see them in court at some point,” said Brett Hartl, government affairs director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “I think we will prevail on this.”

Trump’s vow to revoke the ban is an attempt to fulfill his campaign promise to increase fossil fuel production, Sam Sankar, senior vice president at Earthjustice, the nation’s largest public interest environmental law firm, told ABC News.

In doing so, he is ignoring a large swath of U.S. coastline communities who would prefer for drilling to decrease, said Joanne Spalding, director of the environmental law program at the Sierra Club.

“People in Florida don’t want drilling. People in California don’t want drilling,” Spalding told ABC News. “There’s lots of places where people are not interested in having that activity on their coastlines.”

Existing environmental laws could also serve as roadblocks as Trump aims to increase the amount of federal land that will be subject to drilling, the experts said.

Separately, groups criticized Trump’s planned 10-to-1 deregulatory freeze, which would require the federal government to repeal 10 existing rules, regulations or guidance documents in order to adopt a new one, as “completely arbitrary,” Spalding said.

That order is “almost verbatim” to a two-for-one deregulatory freeze issued in 2017 that “never amounted to anything,” Hartl said.

“A lot of what we’ve seen, even in the first two weeks, have been almost just copy-and-paste activities from executive orders that we saw in the first Trump administration,” he said.

What worries conservation nonprofits the most

The potential dismantling of several federal agencies that conduct important work for conservation is a concern for environmental groups.

The Office of Management and Budget Office’s move to suspend federal financial aid programs could be a warning sign for federal agencies that conduct environmental work that does not align with Trump’s agenda, Hartl said.

“Right now, the biggest threat to the environment is Trump’s across-the-board attempt to simply dismantle the federal government,” he said.

In addition, the presence of the newly created Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and DOGE head Elon Musk’s buyout offer to millions of federal employees could severely disrupt the conservation work of several agencies, he added.

“If you don’t have people working at the EPA, it’s pretty hard to keep the air clean, the water clean,” Hartl said. “If you don’t have folks working at the National Park Service, how are you going to run your national parks? How are you going to protect endangered wildlife?”

In addition, the potential defunding of the Inflation Reduction Act and Bipartisan Infrastructure Act — both by enacted by Biden — poses serious setbacks for decarbonizing the country’s economy and moving toward a net-zero economy by 2050, environmental advocates said. Both are “the most important pieces of legislation ever in addressing global climate change,” Spalding said.

As part of his executive actions, Trump temporarily suspended the disbursement of funds from the IRA. Sankar said that has worried NGOs because the money is intended to advance the development of a clean energy economy as well as improve public health and support communities that bore the brunt of the impact of the fossil fuel economy.

“We are looking at and developing lawsuits aimed at ensuring that the money flows to the intended recipients,” he said.

Several lawsuits challenging the authority of DOGE are also being prepared, according to the groups.

Lessons learned from the 1st Trump administration

Many of Trump’s declarations are relatively symbolic or declare an intention but don’t necessarily constitute any actual action, environmental law experts said.

“Trump likes just holding up his signature, and that’s the main reason we we see him doing these flurry of executive orders,” Hartl said, adding that a lot of Trump’s actions were not effective during the first term.

Along with the executive orders comes rumor and speculation about what they actually can achieve, which makes it difficult for nonprofits to take immediate action, Sankar said.

Because of this, environmental groups may be more selective this time around about which executive actions they actually decide to take to court — especially since nonprofits don’t have endless resources to challenge every order, Spalding said.

“We’re always very choosy about our litigation to make sure that we have the best claims with the clients who are most clearly affected,” Sankar said.

This time around, environmental lawyers will be more savvy about responses, Spalding said.

“We’ll continue to focus on those priorities and make sure that we’re engaged every step of the way during the regulatory rollback process,” she said.

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(WASHINGTON) — Special counsel Jack Smith’s team has withdrawn from their appeal of the classified documents case against President-elect Donald Trump’s co-defendants and referred the case to the United States Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Florida, according to a court filing Monday afternoon.

Smith last month dropped his appeal against Trump due to a longstanding Department of Justice policy prohibiting the prosecution of a sitting president, but his team continued to pursue their appeal against Trump’s two co-defendants in the case, longtime Trump aide Walt Nauta and Mar-a-Lago employee Carlos De Oliveira.

Trump pleaded not guilty last June to 37 criminal counts related to his handling of classified materials, after prosecutors said he repeatedly refused to return hundreds of documents containing classified information ranging from U.S. nuclear secrets to the nation’s defense capabilities, and took steps to thwart the government’s efforts to get the documents back.

The former president, along with Nauta and De Oliveira, also pleaded not guilty to allegedly attempting to delete surveillance footage at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate.

Smith’s appeal, to the Atlanta-based Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals, came after U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon dismissed Smith’s case in July, citing the constitutionality of his appointment as special counsel.

With the appeal ongoing, Smith’s team on Monday withdrew from the case and passed the case to federal prosecutors in Florida. In a separate filing, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida, Markenzy Lapointe, entered his appearance in the case.

A representative for the office of the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida did not immediately respond to a request for comment from ABC News.

Smith has also been winding down his federal election interference case against Trump following Trump’s reelection, and is expected to issue a report on his investigations to Attorney General Merrick Garland in the coming weeks.

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