Trump Administration Live Updates: Court Orders White House to Restore The A.P.’s Access
Where Things Stand
Media access: A federal judge ordered the White House to allow The Associated Press back into smaller events, such as those in the Oval Office and aboard Air Force One, after President Trump barred the news organization from them because it refused to adopt the administration’s renaming of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America in its news articles. Read more ›
Reviving coal: President Trump signed four executive orders aimed at expanding the mining and use of coal. The orders direct federal agencies to remove barriers to coal leasing and mining, loosen environmental reviews of coal projects and explore whether coal-fired electricity could help power new A.I. data centers. Read more ›
U.S. tariffs: Mr. Trump said his tariffs have been “somewhat explosive” but defended his far-reaching trade war, saying more than 70 countries have contacted the White House to “make deals,” echoing testimony to lawmakers earlier by Jamieson Greer, the U.S. trade representative. He plans to impose additional tariffs on Wednesday, including raising the tax on goods from China to at least 104 percent. Read more ›
A long list of prominent former national-security officials — mostly veterans of Democratic administrations, but also some Republicans — have filed a friend-of-the-court brief criticizing as illegal President Trump’s executive order targeting the Perkins Coie law firm. The signatories include Avril Haines, the director of national intelligence in the Biden administration, and Chuck Hagel, the former Republican senator from Nebraska who served as secretary of defense in the Obama administration.
Reporting from Washington
A federal judge in Washington rejected the White House’s effort to keep The Associated Press from routinely covering President Trump, siding with the wire service and finding that it had faced political retaliation over its editorial decisions.
The order dealt a blow to Mr. Trump, who, in a departure from decades of tradition, has moved to leverage access to White House events as a way of asserting more direct control over coverage of his administration. The dispute has raised profound questions about the independent news media’s role in shaping public opinion and the lasting implications of the president’s effort to determine how he is portrayed.
Judge Trevor N. McFadden of the Federal District Court for the District of Washington wrote in his opinion that the Trump administration must “immediately rescind their viewpoint-based denial” of The Associated Press from the White House press corps.
“The government repeatedly characterizes the AP’s request as a demand for ‘extra special access.’ But that is not what the AP is asking for, and it is not what the court orders,” he wrote. “All the AP wants, and all it gets, is a level playing field.”
The ruling came in response to a lawsuit The Associated Press filed in February, which asked that its longstanding access to smaller press events at the White House be reinstated.
Since that time, the administration has barred the publication from participating in the press pool, a rotating group of reporters that cover the president’s day-to-day activities, and blocked it from covering the president in intimate settings such as the Oval Office and Air Force One. It cited the wire service’s refusal to adopt the administration’s renaming of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America.
At issue is whether the White House’s moves amount to a suppression of the outlet’s free speech rights and are an act of prejudice.
As one of the world’s premier wire services, The Associated Press distributes articles, photographs and video to over 3,000 U.S. news outlets, as well as 900 international sites.
The White House has since said that it did not intend to discriminate against The Associated Press specifically, but to narrow the group of journalists who attend smaller events in the West Wing and travel with Mr. Trump on Air Force One. Karoline Leavitt, the press secretary, has said the moves are meant to expand access by bringing in smaller digital publications alongside the legacy media outlets that have long dominated the press corps.
But The Associated Press, in its complaint, asserted that it had been singled out over its decision not to recognize the new name.
Lawyers for the wire service have contended that the White House effectively seized control of the pool rotation previously organized by the White House Correspondents’ Association. As a result, the lawyers said, officials had started discriminating against outlets based on their viewpoint, sidelining mainstream news sources in favor of more conservative voices who would cover Mr. Trump more sympathetically.
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Trump said his tariffs have been “somewhat explosive,” but he defended the policy and said “the money is pouring in at a level we’ve never seen before.”
“We have a lot of countries coming in to make deals,” Trump said at the White House this afternoon. He said more than 70 countries have reached out to his administration about making deals after he instituted broad tariffs last week.
Julian E. Barnes reports on U.S. intelligence agencies and international security.
Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, announced Tuesday a new task force that would work on declassifying information in the public interest and improving efficiency inside the intelligence agencies.
Ms. Gabbard framed the work of the new task force, the Director’s Initiative Group, as an effort to eliminate the politicization of the agencies and to investigate episodes where intelligence was “weaponized” against people.
Some of the examples Ms. Gabbard’s office highlights as efforts to remove politics from the intelligence agencies have been seen by Democrats and Biden administration officials as political themselves, such as stripping security clearances from senior Democrats and opponents of President Trump.
But in a statement, Ms. Gabbard said the new push would restore trust in intelligence agencies.
“We are committed to executing the president’s vision and focusing the intelligence community on its core mission: ensuring our security by providing the president and policymakers with timely, apolitical, objective, relevant intelligence to inform their decision-making to ensure the safety, security and freedom of the American people,” Ms. Gabbard said.
Ms. Gabbard’s office did not name the members of the initiative group.
The group will review documents for potential declassification and release on a range of topics including the origins of the coronavirus pandemic, the intelligence community’s investigations of the health incidents linked to Havana syndrome and the investigation into Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election. The group may also advise on the release of documents on the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, which President Trump ordered released.
Ms. Gabbard also said she would have the group assess whether information about the Biden administration’s alleged surveillance or censorship of Americans should be released. While her office provided few details, the Trump administration has criticized the Biden administration’s work against domestic terrorism and countering disinformation, arguing such efforts curbed the rights of Mr. Trump’s supporters.
The group will also make recommendations to end wasteful spending by the intelligence agencies and to cut bureaucracy. Senior administration officials have suggested that cumbersome structures inside some spy agencies have slowed the flow of intelligence to the President’s Daily Brief and other important intelligence documents.
The House has officially killed a bipartisan rule-change proposal that would have allowed lawmakers to vote remotely for 12 weeks after the birth of a child. Speaker Mike Johnson tucked language into an unrelated procedural measure that wiped out that proposal, which had the support of a majority of members of the House. The procedural measure passed almost entirely along party lines after Representative Anna Paulina Luna, the Florida Republican who had been leading the proxy voting fight, caved and agreed to stand down on her proposal.
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In his Senate confirmation hearing today, Brian Burch, Trump’s nominee for ambassador to the Holy See, acknowledged the role would be “challenging” given the conflict between the U.S. and the Vatican over the administration’s cuts to global humanitarian aid work. But he told lawmakers that he saw “real commonality” in the goal of ending Christian persecution.
Burch, who co-founded Catholic Vote, an organization that advances conservative Catholic views, has vocally pushed back against Pope Francis, prompting concern from church leaders who see him as defying the pope’s agenda. The organization functioned as Trump’s Catholic mobilization effort in key swing states including Pennsylvania in the 2024 campaign.
“Let me also assure this committee that I fully understand the distinction between advocacy and diplomacy,” he said.
President Trump signed four executive orders Tuesday aimed at expanding the mining and use of coal in the United States, in an effort to revive the struggling industry.
Flanked by dozens of miners in white hard hats at the White House, Mr. Trump said he was instructing the Justice Department to identify and fight state policies and regulations that were “putting our coal miners out of business.”
He added that he would “guarantee” that future administrations could not adopt policies harmful to coal. “We’re going to give a guarantee that the business will not be terminated by the ups and downs of the world of politics,” Mr. Trump said, but he did not provide details.
The orders direct federal agencies to remove barriers to coal leasing and mining, loosen environmental reviews of coal projects and explore whether coal-fired electricity could help power new A.I. data centers. They called for accelerating permitting and funding for new coal projects. And they directed that federal lands be opened to more mining.
“This is a very important day to me because we’re bringing back an industry that was abandoned despite the fact that it was the best, certainly the best in terms of power, real power,” Mr. Trump said.
In recent weeks, Mr. Trump, Chris Wright, the energy secretary, and Doug Burgum, the interior secretary, have all spoken about the importance of coal. The two cabinet members sat in the front row at the White House ceremony, which was attended by members of Congress from Wyoming, West Virginia and other coal-producing states.
“Beautiful clean coal,” Mr. Trump told the gathering. “Never use the word ‘coal’ unless you put ‘beautiful, clean’ before it.”
Coal is the most polluting of all fossil fuels when burned, and accounts for roughly 40 percent of the world’s industrial carbon dioxide emissions, the main driver of global warming. It releases other pollutants, including mercury and sulfur dioxide, that are linked to heart disease, respiratory problems and premature deaths.
Over the past two decades, the use of coal has fallen precipitously in the United States, as utilities have switched to cheaper and cleaner electricity sources like natural gas, wind and solar power. That transition has been the biggest reason for the drop in U.S. emissions since 2005.
Coal power has declined sharply — and more retirements are coming.
It is unclear how much Mr. Trump could reverse that decline. In 2011, the nation generated nearly half of its electricity from coal; last year, that fell to just 15 percent. Utilities have already closed hundreds of aging coal-burning units and have announced retirement dates for roughly half of the remaining plants.
Over the past year, growing interest in artificial intelligence and data centers has fueled a surge in electricity demand, and some utilities have decided to keep at least some coal plants open past their scheduled closure dates. And as the Trump administration moves to loosen pollution limits on coal power — including regulations applied to carbon-dioxide and mercury — more plants could stay open longer, or run more frequently.
In discussing coal plants last month, Mr. Burgum said: “These are clean coal plants, they’ve been the most regulated segment of our energy industry. I applaud them if they’re still open and we need them to stay open.”
A major coal revival seems unlikely, some analysts said.
“The main issue is that most of our coal plants are older and getting more expensive to run, and no one’s thinking about building new plants,” said Seth Feaster, a data analyst who focuses on coal at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, a research firm. “It’s very hard to change that trajectory.”
During his first term, Mr. Trump suggested that he would use emergency authority to force uneconomical coal plants to stay open rather than retire. But that idea triggered a fierce blowback from oil and gas companies, electrical grid operators and consumer groups, and the administration abandoned the idea.
Ultimately, Mr. Trump struggled to fulfill his first-term pledge of rescuing the coal industry. Despite the fact that his administration repealed numerous climate regulations and appointed a coal lobbyist to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, 75 coal-fired power plants closed, and the industry shed about 13,000 jobs during his presidency.
Coal’s decline continued under President Joseph R. Biden Jr., who sought to move the country away from the fossil fuel altogether in an effort to fight climate change. Last year, his administration issued a sweeping E.P.A. rule that would have forced all of the nation’s coal plant to either capture and bury their carbon dioxide emissions or shut down by 2039.
This year, upon returning to office, Mr. Trump ordered the E.P.A. to repeal that rule. And Trump administration officials have repeatedly warned that shutting down coal plants will make the nation’s grid less reliable. Unlike wind and solar power, coal plants can run at all hours, making them useful when electricity demand spikes.
“We are on a path to continually shrink the electricity we generate from coal,” Mr. Wright told Bloomberg Television in February. “That has made electricity more expensive and our grid less stable.”
Some industry executives who run the nation’s electric grids have also warned that the country could face a greater risk of blackouts if too many coal plants retire too quickly, especially since power companies have faced delays in bringing new gas, wind and solar plants online, as well as in adding battery storage and transmission lines.
Yet coal opponents say that keeping aging plants online can bring with it steep costs. Earlier this year, PJM Interconnection, which oversees a large grid in the Mid-Atlantic, ordered a power plant that burns coal and another that burns oil to stay open until 2029, four years past their planned retirement date, to reduce the risk of power outages. The move could ultimately cost utility customers in the area of more than $720 million.
“Coal plants are old and dirty, uncompetitive and unreliable,” said Kit Kennedy, managing director for power at the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group. “The Trump administration is stuck in the past, trying to make utility customers pay more for yesterday’s energy. Instead, it should be doing all it can to build the electricity grid of the future.”
In his first official remarks after meeting with President José Raúl Mulino of Panama, U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said that the Panama Canal faced new threats and that they would not allow China, or any other country, to “endanger” the inter-oceanic waterway.
“China did not build this canal, China does not operate this canal and China will not weaponize this canal,” Hegseth said, celebrating Panama’s decision to withdraw from China’s Belt and Road global infrastructure initiative. “Together, with Panama in the lead, we will keep the canal secure and available for all nations through the deterrent power of the strongest, most effective and most lethal fighting force in the world.”
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“Boys will be boys,” Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said of the increasingly caustic fighting between Elon Musk and Peter Navarro, Trump’s top trade adviser. On Tuesday, Musk slammed Navarro on his social media platform, X, as “dumber than a sack of bricks.” Tensions between the two have exploded over wide-ranging tariffs that have upended the global economy.
transcript
Reporter: “There’s been some public sparring between Elon Musk and the president’s trade adviser, Peter Navarro, on some of these tariffs. Musk actually referred to Navarro as being, quote, ‘dumber than a sack of bricks.’ Are you at — or is the administration, the president, at all concerned that this is maybe impacting the public’s understanding of these tariffs? It might be messing with the message on it?” “No, look, these are obviously two individuals who have very different views on trade and on tariffs. Boys will be boys, and we will let their public sparring continue. And you guys should all be very grateful that we have the most transparent administration in history.”
President Trump will host El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, on April 14, the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said. Under the Trump administration, Bukele, who refers to himself as the “coolest dictator,” has become a crucial ally of the U.S. president, taking in deportees of any nationality and housing them for the United States for a fee.
Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said the new tariffs President Trump threatened China with would go into effect at 12:01 a.m. Wednesday, Eastern time, in the United States.
transcript
Reporter: “The president’s threat yesterday on social media to increase tariffs against China by an additional 50 percent in response to their retaliation, has he signed anything in terms of an executive order or any documentation around that? Will that additional 50 percent go into effect tomorrow?” “They will be going into effect at 12:01 a.m. tonight. So effectively tomorrow — yes.”
Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, told reporters Tuesday that President Trump had tasked his advisers to “have tailor-made trade deals with each and every country that calls up this administration to strike a deal.” But she rejected the idea that this marked an “evolution” from aides’ earlier comments that there would not be a negotiation over tariffs, with more set to take effect tomorrow. She later reaffirmed the president was not planning to pause implementation of his plan. “He expects these tariffs are going to go into effect,” Leavitt said.
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A federal housing regulator issued a statement saying that more than 100 employees of Fannie Mae, a government-controlled firm that underpins much of the country’s mortgage industry, had been fired for “unethical conduct, including facilitating fraud” over the past few weeks.
The statement from William Pulte, the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, offered no details about the conduct he said the fired employees had engaged in. Pulte has said he intends to make Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, another government-controlled mortgage finance firm, better-run businesses.
The Senate Finance Committee hearing with Jamieson Greer, the U.S. trade representative, has just concluded. Before it wrapped up, Senator Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent, described himself as “not a great fan of unfettered free trade” but called the national emergencies President Trump has used to impose tariffs against Canada and other countries “a lie.”
According to Trump’s interpretation of trade laws, Sanders told Greer, “the president can declare an emergency with any country on Earth.” He added, “That’s called authoritarianism.”
Greer responded: “Sir, Congress delegated this power to the president.”
Brandon Williams, President Trump’s pick to become the keeper of the nation’s nuclear weapon arsenal, testified on Tuesday that he would not recommend that Trump resume explosive testing of nuclear arms. His testimony, during a confirmation hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee, is surprising as advisers to the incoming administration had suggested a restart of nuclear tests. Williams, a former Navy officer and one-term congressman from upstate New York, was nominated by Trump in early January to serve as administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration, which runs the nation’s atomic complex.
A bipartisan group of senators plans to introduce a resolution this week that would terminate the national emergency the president declared last week to introduce his tariffs. A copy of the resolution I’ve obtained shows it will be introduced by a handful of Democratic senators — Ron Wyden, Chuck Schumer, Tim Kaine, Jeanne Shaheen, Peter Welch and Elizabeth Warren — as well as one Republican, Rand Paul.
Any such measure would face a tough path, needing enough support to overcome a presidential veto. And the House may avoid having to consider it at all. Last week, the Senate approved a similar measure to scrap the tariffs that Trump imposed on Canada, but House Republicans moved preemptively to shut down the requirement that they vote on such a measure.
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENTThe Retail Industry Leaders Association, which represents major companies like Walmart, Target, Starbucks and Best Buy, released a statement this morning criticizing President Trump’s aggressive trade policies. They said that the tariffs had caused “disruption and uncertainty in the markets and with consumers” and could drive up prices for products like baby clothes, handbags and paper plates. “Americans elected President Trump to lower inflation and grow the economy,” the group said. “Instead, these broad-based tariffs threaten family pocketbooks and risk destabilizing confidence in the economy.”
Jamieson Greer, the U.S. trade representative, has been testifying before the Senate Finance Committee for more than two hours. Thom Tillis, a Republican from North Carolina, had some fiery and skeptical questions, asking him if he’s in charge of the tariffs or “whose throat I get to choke when it’s wrong.” He also sought to clarify if there would be any exceptions, probably on behalf of his constituents who depend on imported parts and components for their businesses. Greer said the president had directed that there would be no exclusions for the steel and aluminum tariffs or products made in China, but demurred when asked how long tariffs would be in place. “We have to take this step by step,” he said. “We have to take it country by country, to address these issues.”
Reporting from Washington
The Supreme Court on Tuesday blocked a ruling from a federal judge in California that had ordered the Trump administration to rehire thousands of fired federal workers who had been on probationary status.
The court’s brief order said the nonprofit groups that had sued to challenge the dismissals had not suffered the sort of injury that gave them standing to sue.
The practical consequences of the ruling may be limited, as another trial judge’s ruling requiring the reinstatement of many of the same workers remains in place.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor dissented, but she gave no reasons. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said the court should not have ruled on such an important issue in the context of an emergency application.
The order was the latest administration victory in the Supreme Court in a case arising from President Trump’s recent blitz of executive orders. Like others, though, it was technical and tentative. The justices said their order would remain in place while the case moved forward.
The case concerned a preliminary injunction issued last month by a federal judge in California that ordered the administration to reinstate more than 16,000 probationary employees it had fired from the Pentagon, the Treasury, and the Agriculture, Energy, Veterans Affairs and Interior Departments.
In his ruling, Judge William H. Alsup, of the Northern District of California, acknowledged that “each federal agency has the statutory authority to hire and fire its employees, even at scale, subject to certain safeguards.”
But he wrote that the Office of Personnel Management, which he said had coordinated the terminations, had no authority to hire and fire employees in other agencies.
“Yet that is what happened here — en masse,” he wrote.
A divided panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in San Francisco, declined to pause Judge Alsup’s order while the government pursued an appeal.
In an emergency application asking the Supreme Court to intervene, Sarah M. Harris, the acting solicitor general, wrote that federal judges have issued more than 40 temporary restraining orders or injunctions blocking administration programs. Many of them, she said, involved rulings that applied nationwide.
Judge Alsup’s order, she wrote, was particularly problematic.
“The court’s extraordinary reinstatement order violates the separation of powers, arrogating to a single district court the executive branch’s powers of personnel management on the flimsiest of grounds and the hastiest of timelines,” Ms. Harris wrote. “That is no way to run a government. This court should stop the ongoing assault on the constitutional structure before further damage is wrought.”
In response, the labor unions and nonprofit groups challenging the firings said the administration should not be allowed to argue that unwinding the firings would be burdensome because that harm was self-inflicted.
“While the government complains that the reinstatement of more than 16,000 employees at the six covered agencies is an ‘enormous’ task that would interfere with agency functioning (without presenting evidence supporting that assertion),” the challengers’ brief said, “the scale of the task is simply a reflection of the scale of the government’s own unlawful action and its ‘move fast and break things’ ethos.”
A different federal judge, James K. Bredar of the Federal District Court in Maryland, last month also ordered the administration to reinstate federal workers in a case brought by 19 states and the District of Columbia. Last week, in an 84-page decision, Judge Bredar again ruled for the states, though he limited the scope of his decision to people who live or work in those states and not in 31 others.
The administration has sought a stay of that ruling from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, which is expected to rule shortly.
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENTElon Musk slammed President Trump’s top trade adviser as “dumber than a sack of bricks” on Tuesday, exposing a remarkable rift in the president’s inner circle over the wide-ranging tariffs that have upended the global economy.
The feud between Mr. Musk and Peter Navarro, who has been the architect of many of Mr. Trump’s trade plans, has been simmering for days as the administration’s new tariffs have caused huge losses across global financial markets.
So far, Mr. Trump has not weighed in on the clash between his top aides, both of whom he claims to hold in high regard. But Mr. Musk’s words — though aimed at Mr. Navarro — were a rare criticism of Mr. Trump’s policies from one of his most influential advisers.
Mr. Musk, the world’s richest man, is estimated to have lost roughly $31 billion since Mr. Trump announced sweeping tariffs on foreign countries on April 2, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
The squabble escalated on Monday when Mr. Navarro said on CNBC that Mr. Musk was not a “car manufacturer” but a “car assembler” because Tesla, Mr. Musk’s electric vehicle company, relied on parts from around the world.
Mr. Musk fired back on Tuesday, calling Mr. Navarro a “moron” and “dumber than a sack of bricks” in a post on X, the social media site he owns. Later in the day, Mr. Musk doubled down, posting that he wanted to “apologize to bricks.”
“That was so unfair to bricks,” Mr. Musk wrote. He also used a slur to refer to Mr. Navarro, calling him “Peter Retarrdo.”
Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, tried to downplay the feud.
“Boys will be boys, and we will let their public sparring continue,” she told reporters.
Mr. Navarro ignored questions from reporters at the White House on Tuesday afternoon about Mr. Musk’s posts on social media.
Mr. Trump has long allowed, and at times fostered, conflict between his top advisers, but it is unusual for animus between aides to play out so publicly. Mr. Navarro was a senior official on trade issues during Mr. Trump’s first term and stayed loyal to the president afterward, even spending four months in jail after being convicted of contempt of Congress for refusing to testify in its investigation into the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.
Mr. Musk, a key member of the president’s inner circle who spent hundreds of millions of dollars to support his presidential campaign, is usually a staunch supporter of Mr. Trump’s policies. But the tariffs have been an exception.
Mr. Musk has rejected Mr. Trump’s approach and called for “zero tariffs” between the United States and Europe. He has chastised Mr. Navarro for having a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard, writing that was “a bad thing, not a good thing,” and then posting that Mr. Navarro “ain’t built” anything, using an expletive. (He later deleted the second post.)
Mr. Musk’s brother, Kimbal, has also critiqued the tariffs, posting a flurry of messages on X over the last several days and defending his brother. He asserted that the president had “implemented a structural, permanent tax on the American consumer.”
Mr. Musk often uses his X account to barrage his critics, insulting them and inciting his nearly 219 million followers to join in. Since acquiring Twitter and renaming it X, Mr. Musk has often targeted judges who have made rulings about his companies that he disagrees with. And in recent months, Mr. Musk lashed out at judges who have slowed or halted his federal cost-cutting efforts at the Department of Government Efficiency.
Since Mr. Trump announced the tariffs last week, administration officials have given varying and, at times, conflicting explanations in public about the president’s plan. Mr. Navarro has been adamant: The tariffs are not a negotiating tactic to win more favorable trade deals with other countries. But Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has signaled that Mr. Trump is open to negotiations as countries flood the White House with calls to discuss new deals.
“President Trump, as you know, is better than anyone at giving himself maximum leverage,” Mr. Bessent said on Fox News.
Kate Conger and Maggie Haberman contributed reporting.
Reporting from the Capitol
The fate of a budget blueprint to unlock President Trump’s spending and tax cuts was in doubt in the House on Tuesday as conservative Republicans lined up in opposition to the measure, arguing it would add too much to the nation’s debt.
House Republican leaders pressed for a vote as early as Wednesday to move their party’s budget resolution past its next hurdle, after the Senate pushed through the measure in an overnight weekend session.
The action would clear the way for the G.O.P. to craft legislation carrying out Mr. Trump’s domestic agenda and move it through Congress over unified Democratic opposition. A defeat or failure to move it would imperil his priorities, sending Republicans back to the drawing board to come up with an entirely new plan.
But even after Mr. Trump met for roughly two hours on Tuesday afternoon with a group of conservative hard-liners who have refused to back the resolution, it was not clear whether he had persuaded enough of them to guarantee passage, given the party’s slim majority. At the meeting, the president “expressed his commitment to making sure we get the job done, that we find real savings to change the debt trajectory for the country, but also protect the essential programs,” Speaker Mike Johnson said.
Mr. Johnson has leaned heavily on Mr. Trump in recent months to persuade G.O.P. skeptics to fall in line on key votes. Even the staunchest holdouts have shown the president extraordinary deference, giving in at critical moments. After meeting with Mr. Trump on Tuesday, at least a handful of Republicans who had expressed concerns about the budget measure said that they would support the resolution.
“We have House issues, and we have Senate issues to deal with,” said Representative Ron Estes of Kansas. “But at the end of the day, I think we’re all working for the same goals.”
But some were unmoved. Representative Chip Roy of Texas told CNN that he was still opposed to the resolution. And some of the most determined holdouts did not even attend the meeting with Mr. Trump, either because they were not invited or because they refused to go.
Representative Andy Harris of Maryland, the chairman of the Freedom Caucus, said that he had been invited to the meeting with Mr. Trump but had declined to attend.
“No matter what the president tells anybody, the votes just aren’t there,” Mr. Harris said, adding that there were “at least a dozen” Republicans who would refuse to vote for the resolution.
“He’s just not going to change my mind,” Mr. Harris said of Mr. Trump.
Representative Jodey Arrington of Texas, the chairman of the Budget Committee, who has called the resolution “unserious and disappointing,” also did not attend. He said that he was “going to be doing other things.”
If all Democrats vote, Mr. Johnson can afford to lose no more than three Republicans on the resolution. Many more than that have said that they are opposed.
The conservative holdouts are unhappy with the level of spending reductions in the Senate resolution: roughly $4 billion over a decade, or a fraction of the $2 trillion in spending cuts that the House had approved.
Republican leaders have said that number is a minimum intended to give them more flexibility to comply with strict procedural rules in the Senate. They must follow those rules in order to take advantage of a process called reconciliation that allows them to push the tax and budget measure through the Senate, shielding it from a filibuster.
But first, the Senate and the House must agree on the same budget blueprint.
Many House Republicans are also unhappy with the Senate’s insistence that extending the tax cuts that Mr. Trump signed into law in 2017 would cost nothing, because such a move simply maintains the status quo. Senate Republicans adopted that approach so that they could extend the tax cuts indefinitely without appearing to balloon the deficit. But fiscal hawks in the House have rejected that strategy, describing it as a gimmick.
“No serious individual would suggest that this is going to possibly reduce the deficits,” said Representative Eric Burlison of Missouri. “This is going to only accelerate our deficit.”
Their resistance poses a familiar problem for Mr. Johnson, who must again try to deliver the votes on budget-related legislation that is deeply unpopular with hard-liners.
Mr. Johnson on Tuesday argued that House Republicans needed to approve the legislation so that lawmakers could get to work writing the bill with the tax and spending cuts favored by Mr. Trump.
“This amendment just allows us to get off the sidelines, to get on the field and start this game,” Mr. Johnson said. “We’ve got to get this done.”
He added: “We have no luxury of complacency, and we really don’t have time to dither on this thing.”
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South Korea’s acting president, Han Duck-soo, said his country would not band together with other countries like China to push back against tariffs imposed by President Trump. “We will not take that route,” Han told CNN in an interview, adding that South Korea “clearly would like to negotiate” with Washington. “I don’t think that kind of fighting back will improve the situation dramatically,” he said.
In his 30-minute telephone call with President Trump on Tuesday, South Korea’s acting president, Han Duck-soo, said his country was willing to cooperate with the United States in shipbuilding, liquified natural gas imports and the balance of trade. Both sides agreed to continue high-level talks on tariffs and economic cooperation to “find a win-win solution,” Han’s office said.
During an appearance before the Senate Finance Committee by the U.S. trade representative, Jamieson Greer, Senator Steve Daines, Republican of Montana, said he was concerned about the inflationary effect of tariffs because consumers pay the cost of tariffs in the short and medium term. But he said he was encouraged that other countries were approaching the United States to negotiate. Markets are rebounding today because “there’s hope that these tariffs are means and not solely an end,” Daines said.
Senator Ron Johnson, Republican of Wisconsin, said he was “disappointed” that the Trump administration was not considering exclusions to the global tariffs, and lamented the potential impact on small businesses in his state that rely on trade with a number of foreign companies. “Tariffs are a double-edged sword,” Johnson told Greer. He added, “I hope you and the president are sensitive to companies potentially going bankrupt by these actions.”
Mark Warner, the Democratic senator from Virginia, says in Greer’s hearing that the markets may be up today, but he likens it to “a good day in hospice.” Since President Trump took office, more than $11 trillion has vanished from the stock market, Warner says.
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENTCharles Grassley of Iowa, one of the few Republicans who have signed on to legislation opposing Trump’s tariffs, says in Greer’s hearing this morning that he supports the president generally but believes Congress has delegated too much authority to the president over trade.
Republicans from farm states have been put in a particularly tough position by the tariffs. “We all know agricultural is usually the first place of retaliation,” Grassley says.
Grassley says he has taken a vocal “wait and see” approach to tariffs because he believes Trump and Greer are using them as a tool to get fairer trade. “If that’s not the case, level with me.”
Greer, the nation’s trade representative, responds that the United States is happy to negotiate with countries in ways that will reduce the U.S. trade deficit. “It’s going to be country by country,” he said.
Reporting from Washington
The Internal Revenue Service has agreed to help homeland security officials find immigrants they are trying to deport, according to court records, committing to sharing information in what would be a fundamental change in how the tax collector uses its tightly regulated records.
In a court filing, the Trump administration said that the I.R.S. and Immigration and Customs Enforcement had reached the agreement on Monday and that the two agencies had not yet shared any information. Under the terms of the deal, a partially redacted version of which was submitted in the case, ICE officials can ask the I.R.S. for information about people who have been ordered to leave the United States or whom they are otherwise investigating.
Federal law tightly controls taxpayer information, protecting home addresses, earnings and other data from disclosure even to other agencies within the government. I.R.S. officials have for weeks warned that the Trump administration’s plan to use the I.R.S. to help with deportations could be illegal. The top I.R.S. lawyer was demoted as the agreement came together, and was replaced by a former Trump nominee.
“It’s unprecedented,” Nina Olson, the executive director of the Center for Taxpayer Rights and a former top I.R.S. official, said of the Trump administration’s plan.
There are narrow exceptions to the prohibition on sharing tax information, and the agreement shows that the Trump administration will rely on a carve-out allowing its use in criminal investigations. The agreement repeatedly refers to a law that penalizes migrants who have not left the United States despite receiving a judicial order to do so.
A Treasury spokesperson said the agreement was “founded in longstanding authorities granted by Congress, which serve to protect the privacy of law-abiding Americans while streamlining the ability to pursue criminals.”
Many undocumented workers pay taxes, improving the financial outlook for federal programs like Social Security. Immigration activists and tax lawyers said they had long trusted that the I.R.S. would protect the confidentiality of migrants’ tax information. Advocacy groups have sued to try to block any information sharing, and the Trump administration disclosed the agreement in response to that suit.
Even the possibility of the federal government using tax information for deportations has already caused concern among undocumented immigrants. While the exact data ICE is seeking from I.R.S. is redacted in the court filing, previous drafts of the deal have shown that ICE officials have sought confirmation of migrants’ home addresses.
Audrey Casillas, who helps low-income residents of the Los Angeles area file their taxes, said fewer people were coming in to file their taxes this year because they don’t want to be deported.
“The fear is real,” Ms. Casillas, who works on economic development efforts at the Koreatown Youth and Community Center, said. “There a lot of no shows. Clients are asking us: ‘Is ICE going to be there when we do our taxes?’”
In many cases, undocumented immigrants use a phony Social Security number — such as someone else’s number, a made-up sequence of digits or a number from a previous work authorization — so that they can get a conventional job, rather than employment under the table that only pays in cash. These migrants have taxes withheld from their paychecks by their employer, while others might self-report income they earn from other forms of work.
In a report, the Yale Budget Lab estimates that in 2023 unauthorized immigrant workers paid $66 billion in federal taxes, with roughly $43 billion of that taking the form of the payroll taxes that fund Social Security and Medicare.
To complete a tax return in the spring, the I.R.S. has allowed undocumented workers to submit tax returns using a separate nine-digit code called an individual taxpayer identification number. Migrants can also use these numbers to get a driver’s license or get a loan. In the 2022 tax year, roughly 3.8 million returns were submitted to the Internal Revenue Service with at least one individual taxpayer identification number, though not all holders are undocumented immigrants, according to I.R.S. data.
Unauthorized migrants are not eligible for many tax benefits, but they may still receive a refund in the spring if their employers withheld too much in tax over the course of the year. Francine Lipman, a law professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, said she has advised unauthorized migrants she works with to delay filing their taxes, even if it means postponing or foregoing a refund.
“We are suggesting pause and consider the opportunity to file an extension,” she said. “This population is generally speaking underpaid, so the tax refund is an important part of their cash flow needs, so some of those folks are still filing.”
Over time, though, economists expect that fewer migrants will want to work over-the-table jobs if they have fear tax information could be used to deport them. This would ultimately reduce revenue, and the Yale Budget Lab estimates the loss from fewer undocumented immigrants paying taxes could amount to $313 billion over 10 years.
How many undocumented immigrants could be caught up in the partnership between the I.R.S. and ICE is unclear. The agreement states that migrants with orders to leave the country will be the primary target. ICE officials recently told I.R.S. counterparts that they would hope to use tax information to help deport as many as seven million people, according to four people familiar with the remarks.
For people who have encouraged undocumented workers to trust that the I.R.S. would not help deport them, the prospect of a reversal has been difficult.
“A lot of people are feeling a lot of guilt because we told people to rely on this. And it’s personally very difficult to know I’ve been in these spaces telling people: Comply, come forward,” said Angela Divaris, an attorney with Greater Boston Legal Services.
At the start of the Senate Finance Committee hearing where Jamieson Greer, the top U.S. trade official, is appearing, Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, the top Democrat on the committee, assailed Trump’s trade policy: “The U.S. economy has gone from the envy of the world to a laughingstock, in less time than it took to finish March Madness.”
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Immigration lawyers are reacting to the Supreme Court’s ruling that declared that any legal challenges to the Trump administration’s plan to use a wartime statute to deport a group of Venezuelan migrants have to be filed where the men are being held.
And as they scrambled to adjust on Tuesday, their efforts could be guided by a similar case that is underway in Federal District Court in Brownsville, Texas. It was filed last month by Daniel Zacarias Matos, a Venezuelan migrant who claimed that the administration tried to deport him — without a hearing or an order of removal — under President Trump’s recent proclamation invoking a wartime law, the Alien Enemies Act.
In mid-March, Judge Fernando Rodriguez Jr., who is handling the case, issued an order stopping Mr. Zacarias Matos from being deported until he could look deeper into the matter. His lawyers and lawyers for the Justice Department are expected to file dueling court papers this month laying out the details of what happened.
While the facts in Mr. Zacarias Matos’s case do not line up exactly with those in the cases of the Venezuelan migrants directly affected by the Supreme Court’s ruling, they could shed light on some of those proceedings as they start to move forward, most likely one by one.
According to court papers, Mr. Zacarias Matos came to the United States with his 8-year-old daughter in December 2023, seeking asylum from Venezuela. Federal immigration agents took him into custody in October at the El Paso County Jail after he was arrested on charges of violating the terms of his probation on two misdemeanor charges that have since been dismissed, court papers show.
Early last month, the papers say, Mr. Zacarias Matos was sent to the El Valle Detention Center in Raymondville, Texas, where the administration was holding scores of Venezuelan migrants they were planning to deport to a prison in El Salvador under the expansive powers of the Alien Enemies Act.
Most of the Venezuelans had been accused of being members of a violent street gang, known as Tren de Aragua. But even though there is no public evidence that Mr. Zacarias Matos has faced similar accusations, he claims officials told him they were planning to deport him along with several other Venezuelans under Mr. Trump’s proclamation.
On the morning of March 14, immigration agents tried to put Mr. Zacarias Matos on a plane out of the country but were unable to, court papers say, “because it did not pass an inspection.”
That afternoon, Mr. Zacarias Matos was told he would be placed on another flight the next day. When he complained that he had not received an order of deportation, he was told that “he was going to be departing the country due to an order from the president,” according to the papers.
Moreover, the papers say, officials told him that if he did not sign a voluntary departure order, they would sign one for him.
The Supreme Court’s ruling focused on the narrow issue of where the lawsuit by the larger group of Venezuelan men was filed. The justices said that it could not be filed in Washington, where lawyers had initially brought it, but that it had to be filed — like the Zacarias Matos case — in Texas, where the men were being held.
In issuing their ruling, the justices did not weigh in on the deeper issue of whether Mr. Trump abided by several provisions of the Alien Enemies Act that were intended to limit how and when the law is used.
The act, which was passed in 1798, can be invoked only in times of declared war or during an invasion against members of a hostile foreign nation. Immigration lawyers have argued that there is no invasion or declared state of war, and that the Venezuelans should not be considered as connected to a hostile foreign government.
But on Monday, when the court filings in Mr. Zacarias Matos’s case start to be filed, they could explore the question of whether Mr. Trump has used the Alien Enemies Act in a lawful manner and whether the act should apply to someone like Mr. Zacarias Matos.
Judge Rodriguez has asked for three rounds of briefings to be filed by the end of the month and scheduled a hearing to discuss the case on May 5.
Beijing has denounced Vice President JD Vance’s rhetoric as “ignorant” after he said the United States was borrowing money from “Chinese peasants” in a television interview last week.
“China’s position on Sino-U.S. economic and trade relations has been made very clear,” said Lin Jian, a spokesman for China’s foreign ministry, during a news conference on Tuesday. “It is surprising and sad to hear the vice president say such ignorant and impolite words.”
China has remained defiant in the face of the Trump administration’s tariffs and the latest threat from President Trump of an additional 50 percent tariff on Chinese goods unless Beijing reverses its retaliatory levies on U.S. imports. China’s Ministry of Commerce on Tuesday accused the United States of “blackmail,” and said that Beijing would “fight to the end.”
In an interview with Fox News last week, Mr. Vance defended the Trump administration’s sweeping global tariffs, asking what the “globalist economy” has given the United States.
Answering his own question, Mr. Vance said America was “incurring a huge amount of debt to buy things that other countries make” for its market. “We borrow money from Chinese peasants to buy the things those Chinese peasants manufacture,” he said.
Mr. Trump’s new policies, condemned by many international leaders, have wrought havoc on financial markets and spurred experts to issue warnings about inflation.
The spiraling trade war between the two countries is poised to be costly to Americans, who last year purchased $440 billion of goods from China, making the country the second-largest source of imports after Mexico.
Gillian Wong contributed reporting.
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENTThe Trump administration signaled on Tuesday that it was ready to negotiate deals with countries targeted by sweeping tariffs, saying that 70 governments had approached the United States to try to roll the levies back and that officials would begin talks with Japan, South Korea and other nations.
But President Trump and his advisers have been clear that these entreaties will not stop the next round of tariffs from going into effect just after midnight Wednesday, including another 50 percent duty on China. As a result, tariffs on Chinese goods will be at least 104 percent.
On Tuesday, Mr. Trump acknowledged his tariffs had been “somewhat explosive,” but he defended the policy and said “the money is pouring in at a level we’ve never seen before.”
“We have a lot of countries coming in to make deals,” he said Tuesday afternoon at a White House event.
Earlier in the day, Mr. Trump said on social media that he had “a great call” with South Korea’s acting president, Han Duck-soo, about trade and tariffs, and that South Korean officials were heading to the United States for talks. He also expressed optimism that a trade war with China could be averted.
“China also wants to make a deal, badly, but they don’t know how to get it started,” Mr. Trump wrote. “We are waiting for their call. It will happen!”
The president’s decision this month to impose a 10 percent global tariff and far steeper “reciprocal” tariffs on dozens of countries has already triggered a trade war with China and caused other countries to draw up their own retaliation plans. As a result, economists have raised their expectations for a recession in the United States, and many now consider the odds to be a coin flip.
Mr. Trump has dismissed those concerns and said he will not back away from his trade agenda. The president says his approach is necessary to return manufacturing and industrial production to the United States. He and his economic advisers have pointed to recent offers by countries to lower their own tariffs, though some officials have given mixed signals about how willing the president will be to negotiate.
News that the administration was considering reaching agreements with trading partners helped to buoy stock markets after three days of punishing losses. But by Tuesday afternoon the S&P 500 had given up any gains.
Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said in a briefing Tuesday afternoon that Mr. Trump had spoken with the prime minister of Japan on Monday and that the United States would be seeking deals. She said that the president had asked his advisers to “have tailor-made trade deals with each and every country that calls up this administration to strike a deal.”
But Ms. Leavitt rejected the idea that the request represented an “evolution” from aides’ earlier comments that there would not be a negotiation over tariffs. She said the president was not planning to pause his plan. “He expects these tariffs are going to go into effect,” she said.
Ms. Leavitt also insisted that the United States had the upper hand when it came to negotiations. “America does not need other countries as much as other countries need us, and President Trump knows this,” she said.
Mr. Trump’s Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, made similar comments on Tuesday as he assailed China for retaliating against the United States with tariffs of its own and warned that America has more leverage in a trade war with the world’s second-largest economy.
“What do we lose by the Chinese raising tariffs on us?” Mr. Bessent said on CNBC. “We export one-fifth to them of what they export to us, so that is a losing hand for them.”
Jamieson Greer, Mr. Trump’s top trade official, defended the administration’s aggressive tariff moves before a Senate committee Tuesday morning, arguing that the U.S. economy was facing “a moment of drastic, overdue change” after decades of factories moving overseas and hurting the American working class.
Mr. Greer said that the president had imposed the tariffs to achieve “reciprocal treatment from other countries.” He added that the policy was already working, citing announcements that companies have made in recent weeks of investments in the United States.
He declined to say how long the tariffs would be in effect, saying that the administration was looking at it “country by country.” But he implied that there may not be quick remedies.
“Our large and persistent trade deficit has been over 30 years in the making, and it will not be resolved overnight, but all of this is in the right direction,” Mr. Greer said.
Mr. Bessent, who will oversee negotiations with Japan along with Mr. Greer, also indicated an openness to negotiating deals.
“I think you are going to see some very large countries with large trade deficits come forward very quickly,” Mr. Bessent said. “If they come to the table with solid proposals, I think we can end up with some good deals.”
Other officials have been less optimistic about the possibility of countries finding a way to avoid the tariffs.
“This is not a negotiation,” Peter Navarro, a White House trade adviser who is a strong supporter of tariffs, wrote in an opinion essay on Monday. “For the U.S., it is a national emergency triggered by trade deficits caused by a rigged system.”
Mr. Trump’s aggressive tariffs have prompted sharp blowback from Democrats in Congress and increasing nervousness from Republicans, who are under pressure from constituents to defend their export markets.
A bipartisan group of senators — including Ron Wyden of Oregon, the top Democrat on the committee; the minority leader Chuck Schumer; and one Republican, Rand Paul of Kentucky — plans to introduce a resolution later this week that would terminate the national emergency the president declared to introduce his tariffs.
But the measure would face a tough path to passage. If the House approves it, Congress would need enough votes to override the president’s veto. And the House may take action so it is not forced to vote on the resolution.
Last week, the Senate approved a similar measure to scrap the tariffs that Mr. Trump imposed on Canada, but House Republicans moved pre-emptively to shut down the requirement that they vote on such a measure.
Representatives Don Bacon of Nebraska and Jeff Hurd of Colorado, both Republicans, introduced a bipartisan House bill on Monday that would give Congress the final say on any proposed tariffs. The measure, cosponsored by two Democrats, Representatives Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey and Gregory W. Meeks of New York, has not yet drawn any other Republican supporters.
But Mr. Bacon said on Monday that he had spoken to several other colleagues — “like, 10 to 20” — who said they liked the proposal but wanted to wait and hear from Mr. Greer on Capitol Hill. On Wednesday, Mr. Greer will testify before the House Ways and Means Committee.
Several Senate Republicans had forceful exchanges with Mr. Greer on Tuesday about whether the tariffs were a negotiating tool and whether businesses that depend on imported products might find relief.
“We need to think strategically about tariff policy, including how to minimize unnecessary costs on American families,” Senator Michael D. Crapo, the Republican chairman of the finance committee, said. “I also recognize that although it is easy to see the costs arising from tariffs, it is far more difficult to assess the cost of denied market access opportunities.”
Senator Steve Daines, a Republican from Montana, said he was concerned about the inflationary effect of tariffs on consumers. But he said he was encouraged that other countries were approaching the United States to negotiate. He said that stock markets were rebounding Tuesday because “there’s hope that these tariffs are means and not solely an end,” he said.
Senator Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, one of the few Republicans who have signed on to legislation opposing Mr. Trump’s tariffs, said that agriculture “is usually the first place of retaliation.”
During the trade fight with China in Mr. Trump’s first term, U.S. agricultural exports plummeted after China imposed high retaliatory duties on soybean, corn, wheat and other American imports, and the United States spent about $23 billion to support American farmers.
Mr. Grassley said that he supported the president generally but believed that Congress had delegated too much authority to him over trade. He said he had taken a “wait and see” approach to tariffs because he believed Mr. Trump and Mr. Greer were using them as a tool to get fairer trade.
“If that’s not the case, level with me,” Mr. Grassley told Mr. Greer.
The Retail Industry Leaders Association, which represents major companies like Walmart, Target, Starbucks and Best Buy, released a statement ahead of Mr. Greer’s testimony saying that the tariffs had caused “disruption and uncertainty in the markets and with consumers” and could drive up prices for products like baby clothes, handbags and paper plates.
“Americans elected President Trump to lower inflation and grow the economy,” the group said. “Instead, these broad-based tariffs threaten family pocketbooks and risk destabilizing confidence in the economy.”
For Democrats, the tariffs have provided plenty of fodder to argue that Mr. Trump is mismanaging the economy.
“The U.S. economy has gone from the envy of the world to a laughingstock, in less time than it took to finish March Madness,” Mr. Wyden said on Tuesday. “Through it all, Donald Trump and his advisers have yet to provide any understandable explanation at all for what his tax hike on the American people is supposed to accomplish.”
“Donald Trump is single-handedly driving this economy off a cliff with no evidence to back him up,” said Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts.
Maya C. Miller Tony Romm and Tyler Pager contributed reporting.
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