On Thursday, a federal judge in Massachusetts issued a preliminary injunction blocking President Trump and U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon from carrying out Trump’s executive order calling for the secretary to close the Education Department.

The judge also told the administration to reinstate Education Department employees who lost their jobs during the reduction-in-force announced on March 11 and “to restore the Department to the status quo.”

This is a developing story and will be updated.

The Senate has overruled the guidance of the parliamentarian, a nonpartisan staffer who interprets the Senate’s rules, and voted 51 to 44 to overturn a waiver allowing California to set its own air pollution standards for cars that are stricter than national regulations. The Senate has only overruled its parliamentarian a handful of times in the 90-year history of the role.

The Senate has not yet voted on related resolutions to revoke two more waivers related to heavy-duty trucks. One allows California to mandate zero-emission trucks, and the other permits stricter emissions standards for new diesel trucks.

Congress is using a law called the Congressional Review Act, or CRA, as a mechanism to revoke the federal waivers that allowed California to set these rules. The House previously approved three resolutions to revoke the waivers.

But there are significant questions about whether this use of the CRA is legal; the Government Accountability Office and the Senate parliamentarian, who serve as referees within the federal government, both determined that it is not.

The GAO’s opinion is merely advisory. The parliamentarian’s guidance is also non-binding, but the Senate has traditionally followed it. While disregarding this advice is not unprecedented, it’s extremely rare. Historically, leaders of both parties have feared that if they act unilaterally to change the Senate’s norms, the other party will do the same when they’re in power. That’s exactly what happened in 2013 and 2017, when first Democrats and then Republicans deployed the “nuclear option” to eliminate the filibuster for judicial nominees.

“Today it’s all about California emission waivers. But tomorrow, the CRA could now be used to erase any policy from an agency that the Trump administration doesn’t like at a simple majority threshold,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said Wednesday evening as he tried unsuccessfully to derail the vote. He argued that the CRA could subsequently be used to repeal any policies the White House — including future administrations — doesn’t support, including waivers related to Medicaid or reproductive health care. “Republicans should tread carefully today,” he said. “What goes around comes around.”

Republicans have embraced a legal argument that the CRA can be used in this case. Speaking Wednesday afternoon, Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., said that Republicans were not changing the Senate’s broader rules or norms, and suggested other reasons for Democratic opposition. “I think a lot of Democrats support an electric vehicle mandate,” he said. “In fact I think they’re somewhat frantic at the prospect of losing this ‘Green New Deal’ policy.”

California Attorney General Rob Bonta has said that this use of the CRA is unlawful, and the state is expected to challenge it in court. “For more than 50 years, California has exercised its right under the federal Clean Air Act to pursue solutions that address the persistent air pollution challenges that our state faces,” Bonta wrote in a statement to NPR after the earlier House vote. “Reducing emissions is essential to the prosperity, health, and wellbeing of California and its families.”

Meanwhile, California Gov. Gavin Newsom framed the vote as a national economic issue, arguing that rolling back the standards risks ceding the global EV market to China, where EVs make up a much higher share of production than in the U.S. “The United States Senate has a choice: cede American car-industry dominance to China and clog the lungs of our children, or follow decades of precedent and uphold the clean air policies that Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon fought so hard for. Will you side with China or America?” he wrote in a statement.

A unique ability 

Because of its long history of regulating vehicle emissions, California has the unique ability to establish rules that are more ambitious than the federal ones. Each rule requires a waiver from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and other states can choose to follow California’s stricter standards if they want.

California has used this ability to push the auto industry toward zero-emission vehicles for many years, both to protect human health and to reduce the transportation industry’s contributions to climate change.

In the first Trump administration, the EPA withdrew a waiver that allowed California to set vehicle standards. A legal battle ensued. Some carmakers sided with the White House and others with Sacramento in the fight over whether that was legal. But the battle became moot after the Biden administration reinstated the waiver.

Since then, California’s mandates have become more aggressive, requiring a rapid acceleration in electric vehicle production, starting with 35% of new sales within the state in model year 2026 and reaching 100% of new sales by 2035.

Critics have called that goal unrealistic, given that currently EVs make up about a quarter of new car sales in California, and about 10% of sales nationally. Supporters say that the rules are flexible enough to make them more achievable than they seem.

Supporters also say that the state’s standards are more important, the weaker federal rules get — especially with the Trump administration now poised to roll back federal environmental regulations, including on emissions standards.

In April, more than 100 public health and environmental groups sent a letter to Congress saying that blocking the California standards would mean “more children suffering asthma attacks and missing school, more grandparents dying prematurely, and more death and destruction from extreme weather.”

The use of the CRA to revoke the waiver is new; last time, Congress wasn’t involved and the executive branch withdrew the waiver on its own. But just like during the first Trump administration, expect this decision to trigger a legal battle, as California, climate advocates and health groups are almost certain to defend the state’s rules.

Industry allied against the regulations

President Trump campaigned against “EV mandates” and “gas car bans” that would require gas cars to be replaced with electric ones. And while federal EV rules are not technically mandates, California’s more aggressive rules do directly require companies to stop selling new gas vehicles (unless they can also run on electricity, like plug-in hybrids do).

The Trump administration has powerful allies in its fight against these rules. The oil industry has repeatedly sued to challenge California’s stricter rules. The agriculture lobby, which favors biofuels over batteries, also opposes the California waiver. A group of more than 100 energy, agriculture and transportation trade groups issued a letter in mid-March urging Congress to disapprove the California waivers, arguing the three California rules would “harm American economic and national security” by increasing reliance on battery supply chains that are dominated by China.

The American Petroleum Institute has argued that electric vehicle mandates reduce consumer choice and raise the up-front costs of vehicles. In legal filings and public comments, the group also emphasizes it would cost the oil industry enormously.

“[An EV] mandate would produce widespread effects on the national economy, such as the reduced need for oil and gas production and gas processing, and changes to petroleum refining and distribution,” the group wrote in one set of comments in 2024, describing the changes required to meet California’s rules as “extraordinary.”

Automakers have also opposed the rule, although the issue is more complicated for the auto industry than for the oil industry. Carmakers would like some regulatory stability, since they need to plan vehicle production years in advance. In the name of stability, some automakers previously volunteered to keep following some California regulations during the first Trump administration, when they were disputed.

On the other hand, many traditional automakers think that California’s current rules are unrealistic, particularly for the dozen or so states that have opted in to follow those standards. The Alliance for Automotive Innovation, the major automaker trade group, says it would take a “miracle” to meet the rules, because demand for EVs is not as strong as California had hoped.

The auto industry has been lobbying California, and each of the states following its rules, to slow down, pause or soften their strict EV requirements, with some success. But carmakers have simultaneously been lobbying for the use of the CRA to eliminate the California rule altogether, and knock out all those state requirements at once — precisely what’s happening now.

JOHANNESBURG — “All in all it was awful but it could have been worse,” was how one South African newspaper summed up President Cyril Ramaphosa’s extraordinary Oval Office meeting with President Trump on Wednesday.

Many South Africans – including those in the government delegation – had feared a repeat of February’s heated exchange between Trump and and Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

But despite what another newspaper called “serious provocation” by Trump – which included the dramatic moment he asked for the lights to be dimmed and played a lengthy montage of video footage purporting to prove “white genocide” – Ramaphosa kept his cool.

The South African leader, who was a protégé of Nelson Mandela, has experience intense negotiations. He was one of the key mediators in the talks that ended South Africa’s apartheid in 1994.

Most South African media as well as many social media users are praising him for remaining calm and polite throughout what’s widely being called the ambush by Trump, though some wished he’d hit back harder.

“Who among us did not also secretly yearn to see Ramaphosa fight back a little more?” asked writer Rebecca Davis in the Daily Maverick newspaper.

Ramaphosa himself tried to put a positive spin on things at a press briefing later on Wednesday. He said behind closed doors, at the lunch that followed the Oval Office drama, things had gone well. Trump might still attend the G20 in Johannesburg later this year, he said, adding they had also had good trade talks.

“I know that many South Africans were filled with concern and fear that we will have a ‘Z’ moment,” the president said, apparently referring to Zelenskyy, “and all that did not ensue.”

He added that he was sorry to disappoint the South African press corps who had travelled to Washington and wanted to see some drama, prompting one reporter to say: “Mr. President … I don’t know what constitutes drama in your book, but that was very dramatic.” Another reporter told Ramaphosa he deserved a stiff drink.

Debunking Disinformation 

Despite the South African delegation’s attempts to explain the facts to the U.S. leader, Trump again and again repeated a right-wing conspiracy theory that there is systematic persecution and “genocide” of white South Africans. And used disinformation to support his allegations.

He misrepresented a video showing a protest, where people placed white crosses in a field to commemorate a farmer and his wife who were murdered in a 2020 home robbery, as a “burial site.” South African news site News24 said there are no bodies at the site and the number of crosses do not relate to the number of murders.

Trump also played clips of two controversial South African opposition politicians – who in no way speak for the government – singing songs from the struggle against apartheid, including one called “kill the Boer” – which means Afrikaaner or farmer.

The one politician, firebrand Julius Malema, heads a flailing opposition party that won just over 9% of the vote at the last elections. Trump asked why he wasn’t arrested. In fact Malema was taken to court on charges of hate speech for singing the song at rallies, and the Constitutional court ruled the singing of the song was protected by freedom of speech.

Malema seems to have delighted in his 15-minutes of Oval Office fame, posting dismissively on X: “A group of older men gathered in Washington to gossip about me.”

Finally, Trump handed Ramaphosa a bunch of printed articles that he said showed “death, death, horrible death.” News outlets in South Africa, as well as the AFP news agency, studied the articles and found some were from partisan blogs and unsubstantiated online sources.

One article Trump held up, saying it was about “white farmers being burned” was in fact about the Democratic Republic of Congo.

South African businessman Johann Rupert, left, and South African golfers Retief Goosen, center, and Ernie Els, right, look on as President Donald Trump meets South African President Cyril Ramaphosa in the Oval Office of the White House.

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Evan Vucci/AP

About those golfers

Whatever one’s take on the meeting, it’s undeniable it’s been dominating much of social media. White South African rightwing groups – and MAGA commentators – applauded Trump for repeating their talking points on race relations, while some far-left groups denounced Ramaphosa for bringing white South African businessmen and white star golfers along to the meeting.

Ramaphosa and Trump are both avid golfers, and the presence of former World Number 1 Ernie Els and two-time U.S. Open champion Retief Goosen was a tactic the South African team hoped would diffuse any tensions at the meeting. Els is a personal friend of Trump’s and is reported to have helped Ramaphosa get the White House meeting.

Also present was South Africa’s richest man, business mogul Johann Rupert, also white and Afrikaans and a friend of both presidents.

Rupert won some praise from South African media for telling Trump “it’s not only white farmers” who are victims of violent crime “it’s across the board,” and stating that non-whites were in fact the biggest victims. Ramaphosa’s white Minister of Agriculture John Steenhuisen, also challenged Trump, telling him most white farmers wanted to remain in South Africa.

But the golfers angered many.

Els seemed to support Trump’s narrative of white persecution, referring to the apartheid era but adding: “I don’t think two wrongs makes a right.” He also thanked the U.S. for supporting South Africa during its war with Angola – but as X users were quick to point out, that support had been for the old apartheid regime. “Ernie Els is worse than an apartheid apologist,” one X user wrote.

A Daily Maverick journalist wrote that the men were talented golfers but “what the hell do they have to do with international relations?” South African media asked Ramaphosa after the meeting if the golfers should not have been better prepped. He defended them as patriots, but admitted they could have been.

What is particularly galling to many though, is Trump’s derisive treatment of the head of state of a constitutional democracy. Several local newspaper articles pointed out he doesn’t treat authoritarian leaders with dubious human rights records like he treated the South African president.

President Trump is hosting an exclusive dinner tonight at his Trump National Golf Club near Washington, D.C., with a unique guest list: 220 of the largest investors in his $TRUMP meme coin, whose current or previous holdings of the cryptocurrency earned them a seat at the table.

It’s an event where the murky world of cryptocurrencies collides with questions of presidential ethics.

Here are three key things to know about the president’s meme coin, Thursday’s dinner and what it all might mean.

What is $TRUMP?

Days before the inauguration, the president launched $TRUMP, which surged to a $27 billion market cap within hours – valuing the president’s personal stake at more than $20 billion. Its price peaked at more than $74 before plummeting. Since hitting a low in April, it has recovered some of its losses, making back much of it in the last month as the $TRUMP dinner was hyped.

In a Bitcoin World editorial about the meme coin dinner, the publication said that the timing of the latest spike suggests that “access to a high-profiled political figure and event acted as a powerful catalyst.”

Meme coins are cryptocurrencies inspired by internet memes or viral trends — or in this case, a U.S. president. They are typically created for entertainment or speculative purposes and are driven mostly by hype. As speculation, they tend to enrich early investors who are able to dump their coins before their value crashes.

Like Bitcoin, meme coins, sometimes called meme tokens, use blockchain technology, but usually lack a clear use case and underlying value.

“Meme coins aren’t investments. I wouldn’t even call them speculative. They’re riskier than the dog track,” according to Michael Lee, the founder of Michael Lee Strategy, a wealth planning and investment management firm.

Lee describes himself as “a full red-blooded Trump supporter” and calls the original cryptocurrency Bitcoin “digital gold.” But as an investor, he says he wouldn’t touch $TRUMP.

“This isn’t even casino-level risk,” he said. “In a casino, at least there’s odds.”

CIC Digital LLC, an affiliate of The Trump Organization, and Fight Fight Fight LLC collectively own about 80% of the total supply of one billion $TRUMP tokens, according to GetTrumpMemes.com, the official website.

People walk past a cryptocurrency exchange office with a screen featuring President Donald Trump holding cryptocurrency coins in Hong Kong on March 12, 2025.

Mladen Antonov/AFP via Getty Images

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Mladen Antonov/AFP via Getty Images

Who is attending the $TRUMP dinner?

Of the 220 investors planning to attend, all but a very few have only been identified by their “crypto wallet address” online handles.

“There’s been a lot of speculation about who might hold them and who might not,” Politico reporter Declan Harty told NPR recently. “But from those folks who are talking about their plans to attend the dinner, they are mostly cryptocurrency believers and hoping to really get an audience with the president.”

Like Chinese-born crypto-investor Justin Sun, the founder of the blockchain-based operating platform TRON. Sun announced on X that he is the top holder of $TRUMP and will therefore be on the list for the dinner and the private White House tour.

“Honored to support @POTUS and grateful for the invitation from @GetTrumpMemes to attend President Trump’s Gala Dinner as his TOP fan!” he wrote.

In 2023, Sun was charged by the Securities and Exchange Commission for the unregistered sale of his cryptocurrencies, for artificially inflating their trading volume, as well as concealing payments to celebrity endorsers to promote them, according to the SEC. As of February, the SEC case was still pending, according to Reuters.

But Sun is perhaps best known to the general public for another purchase he made last year at a New York auction. The tech mogul bought a $6.2 million banana stuck to a wall with duct tape — a conceptual work by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan. Sun subsequently ate the banana, bragging about it on social media.

After Sun, MemeCore, a Singapore-based crypto network, ranks second. Like Sun, MemeCore made no secret of its quest for the No. 1 slot, posting on X earlier this month that “We’re not just aiming for #1 in the $TRUMP leaderboard – we’re here to conquer the entire meme space.”

Wintermute, a London-based crypto market-making firm, reportedly comes in at #3, according to BitCoin World. NPR reached out to the company to confirm its holdings, but did not receive an immediate reply.

What are the ethical implications?

Norm Eisen is a former ambassador who was an ethics advisor to former President Barack Obama and now serves as the executive chair of Democracy Defenders Action.

Citing the Emoluments Clause, the constitutional provision that bars federal officials from accepting gifts, payments, or other benefits from foreign governments without congressional consent, Eisen describes the dinner as “the most profound ethics and constitutional emoluments violations in the history of our presidency.”

“The existence of this digital currency is a naked attempt to exploit [Trump’s] prior and current presidencies,” Eisen said.

“Foreigners and foreign governments are going to take advantage of that situation to put money in — expecting things in return,” he predicted.

Creating such a quid pro quo could have significant national security implications, with such influence potentially leading to foreign policy decision that favor other countries over the U.S. Notably, foreign entities are prohibited from donating to political campaigns or influencing decision making of candidates — all to avoid foreign interference in U.S. affairs.

In an emailed statement to NPR, White House deputy press secretary Anna Kelly said: “The president is working to secure GOOD deals for the American people, not for himself.”

“President Trump only acts in the best interests of the American public — which is why they overwhelmingly re-elected him to this office, despite years of lies and false accusations against him and his businesses from the fake news media,” she said.

Speaking on condition of anonymity, a White House official said, “the meme coin has nothing to do with the White House.”

Lee, the investment manager, says he doesn’t think the meme tokens or the dinner present a particularly thorny ethical dilemma. “I don’t know how you would get close to Trump by buying his meme coin,” he says. “If you’re a person of means, you can get close to any politician, right?”

But even some Republican lawmakers have expressed concerns. Wyoming Sen. Cynthia Lummis, a staunch Trump supporter, said that the situation “gives me pause,” while Alaska Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski, speaking to NBC, said “I don’t think it would be appropriate for me to charge people to come into the Capitol and take a tour.”

Eisen believes during Obama’s presidency, it would have been inconceivable for such an event to take place.

“Conversely, if one of us had suggested it, he would have thrown us out of the Oval Office,” he said.

But he does believe that Trump’s challenge to the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution will be challenged in the courts. Otherwise, Eisen says, “if this goes unchecked, it will hang a ‘for sale’ sign on the White House.”

Yair Reiner sells kitchenware: a splatter guard for stovetop cooking called the Frywall.

But when President Trump imposed 145% tariffs on Chinese goods, Reiner knew his Brooklyn business was in trouble.

“When the tariffs were at 145%, it felt like someone had their boot on the neck of my business, and I couldn’t really get any oxygen,” he said. “I didn’t know what my next move was going to be.”

Reiner makes the splatter guard in China. So when Trump lowered those tariffs to 30% last week, Reiner, the CEO of Gowanus Kitchen Lab, said he felt relief — but only some.

“The boot’s still there,” he said. “The level of pressure has eased, but certainly I’m not breathing well and it’s very hard to figure out what my next steps are going to be.”

Prior to Trump’s trade war, Reiner says he was paying tariffs of around 3% or 4% to bring his splatter guards into the country — so 30% isn’t low for him by any stretch.

But there’s a sign here of how remarkable Trump’s tariff shifts have been: they’ve made 30% feel like something of a relief.

Charts showing tariffs that President Trump imposed on April 2, 2025, displayed at the White House. Trump paused the tariffs a week later.

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Alex Wong/Getty Images

This is part of a pattern on tariffs

This pattern has played out repeatedly with Trump’s chaotic tariff policy: he first suggests a high number, only to later ratchet it down or offer exemptions.

On April 2, for example, Trump announced tariffs on nearly every country – some of them prohibitively high. A week later, Trump pulled many of those tariffs back, setting a rate of 10% on goods from most countries.

But the end result was still a broad tariff that didn’t exist before Trump took office.

Marcus Noland, director of studies at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, put the whiplash in historical perspective.

“With the so-called ‘Liberation Day‘ tariffs, he took us to just catastrophic levels,” Noland says. “And now with these cuts, he’s brought us back down to roughly where they were in 1940.”

Currently, the average effective tariff rate in the U.S. is nearly 18% – the highest level since 1934, according to the Budget Lab at Yale. That represents a sharp spike from the past couple of decades, when the figure had been in the low single digits.

Despite that, Noland thinks Trump’s tariff swings have successfully reframed tariffs for investors.

“Markets seem to believe that things are back to normal, but they’re not,” Noland said. “The tariffs now are much higher than when Trump took office.”

A container ship sits docked at the Port of Los Angeles on May 6, 2025. The port saw a significant drop in expected cargo ships after President Trump imposed steep tariffs on Chinese imports.

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Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

Trump has been doing this his entire career

In the business world, this tendency to recontextualize numbers in a negotiation is something called the anchor effect.

“In many negotiations, you open high in order to anchor the party on your end of the range — or open low, depending on whether you’re buying or selling,” said Richard Shell, a professor at the Wharton School of business at the University of Pennsylvania.

“Then when you come in with a more reasonable offer, that’s still very favorable to you, there’s a psychological relief that sets in.”

Shell has studied Trump’s business career and said his tariff shifts seem like a classic Trump move. But he said that Trump’s intention isn’t clear.

“It’s not clear whether the president is doing this on purpose or whether he is doing it because he throws his fishing rod out there, his fishing line, and then he sees whether or not it causes the trouble and if it causes enough trouble, he pulls it back in again,” Shell said.

President Trump departs the White House on May 12, 2025.

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Andrew Harnik/Getty Images

But the uncertainty has caused its own problems

And all that change creates problems — namely, uncertainty, said Scott Lincicome, vice president of general economics at the libertarian Cato Institute.

“If you simply don’t know what the tariff rate is going to be 10 days from now, it’s pretty impossible for you to invest in, say, a new factory in the United States — or for you to settle in and a long-term contract with an overseas supplier,” Lincicome said.

Trump has justified his tariffs by saying they will create long-term gain, in the form of more U.S. manufacturing.

Reiner, the splatter guard maker in Brooklyn, doesn’t necessarily disagree with that goal.

“I could see the logic of that,” he said. “What gets in the way is that I think long-term gain hinges on long-term planning, and I’m not able to do that.”

Trump has said that the 30% China tariffs would only last 90 days. The United States and China could reach a longer-term deal before then… but if not, that means the tariff rate could change again down the road.

House Republicans released an updated version of their massive bill on Wednesday in hopes of advancing much of President Trump’s domestic agenda by the end of the week. The new legislation aims to satisfy competing demands from fiscal hawks looking to reduce the deficit to blue state Republicans looking to lock in more favorable taxes for their constituents.

The updated legislation came at the end of a day of near-constant negotiations within the GOP. The talks included a White House meeting on Wednesday afternoon between Trump, House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., and several holdouts and skeptics.

Johnson told reporters after the meeting that he was optimistic about passing the bill as early as Thursday.

“The plan is to move forward as expected,” Johnson said. “I think that all of our colleagues here will really like this final product.”

Johnson will need nearly unanimous support from his members for the bill to pass and it could face further challenges in the Senate. Democrats are expected to vote against the bill in unison.

The sweeping piece of legislation runs more than 1,000 pages long. Here’s a brief look at what’s inside the latest version.

Note: This is a partial list that will be updated.

Extending the Trump tax cuts

The Republican plan calls for roughly $3.8 trillion in tax cuts — the bulk of which would come by extending the 2017 Trump tax cuts. Those cuts are due to expire at the end of the year, so without an extension, most households would see their taxes go up.

No taxes on tips or overtime

The bill includes temporary changes designed to make good on several of Trump’s campaign pledges, including no taxes on overtime earned between 2026 and 2028. The plan would also allow Americans to deduct interest on car loans — but only if the car is made in the U.S. It would increase the child tax credit to $2,500 until 2028 — but only for people with Social Security numbers. After that, it would drop to $2,000 and grow with inflation. It would allow for a higher standard deduction through 2028, and to deliver on Trump’s pledge not to tax Social Security benefits, the bill would allow for an extra $4,000 deduction for people over the age of 65, but it phases out for people at higher incomes.

More SALT

One of the thorniest issues during negotiations has been the state and local tax deduction, also known as SALT. The deduction is hugely important to a small number of GOP lawmakers from blue states with high taxes, like California and New York. The 2017 tax cuts capped the SALT deduction at $10,000. The House plan would lift the cap to $40,000 for married couples with incomes up to $500,000.

Work requirements for Medicaid

The bill includes several proposed changes to Medicaid — the joint federal/state health care program for low-income, elderly and disabled Americans. It’s remained one of the most divisive issues throughout GOP negotiations, but lawmakers argue that changes introduced by the bill will bring in hundreds of billions in necessary savings through the introduction of new work requirements. Beginning at the end of 2026, childless adults without disabilities would be required to work 80 hours per month to qualify for benefits.

The legislation also zeroes in on what Republicans characterize as “waste fraud and abuse” within the program by shifting the enrollment period from once a year to every six months and adding additional income and residency verifications for enrolled individuals.

Changes to SNAP 

The Republican legislation also outlines reforms for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, known as SNAP, which benefits more than 40 million low-income Americans. The bill increases the amount states contribute to the program and mandates work requirements for able-bodied SNAP enrollees who don’t have dependents. Independent estimates suggest these changes could result in many people losing coverage. Like with Medicaid talks, some Republican lawmakers have pushed back against massive changes to SNAP given its wide reach and the millions enrolled in the program.

Lift the debt ceiling

The House bill would raise the nation’s debt limit by $4 trillion. Lifting the debt limit doesn’t authorize new spending. Instead, it allows the government to pay for programs that Congress has already authorized. If the cap isn’t lifted and the government can’t meet its obligations, then it will be at risk of default – a scenario that economists say would be catastrophic not just for the U.S., but the global financial system as a whole. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has told Congress that without action, the U.S. will run out of money to pay its bills as soon as August, which means the clock is ticking.

(Image credit: Kevin Dietsch)