Trump Drafts Plans to Take Over Congress’s Spending Powers

Donald Trump and his Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought plan to impound federal spending after Congress passes a budget to avoid government shutdown, setting up a major legal fight with Congress.

Trump and Vought, a Project 2025 alum, plan to impound some of the funds Congress allocates before the government shutdown deadline on Friday, Fox News reports. The move would violate the Impoundment Control Act of 1974, which Trump and his supporters have called unconstitutional, as it prevents the president from spending money appropriated by Congress in a different way.

A direct challenge to the law would prompt a legal fight that would very likely be decided by the Supreme Court and threaten the separation of powers outlined in the Constitution. If the executive branch gains impoundment power, Trump and future presidents would have much more power, with Congress significantly weakened.

Right now, the Senate is at a standstill over budget discussions, with Democrats standing in the way of Republicans’ attempts to pass a continuing resolution. The GOP needs eight Democrats to join them to pass it, and they are having trouble convincing enough to do so.

Vought’s role in Trump’s plans raises serious questions as he was one of the authors of the conservative Project 2025 manifesto, which seeks to completely remake the federal government, and by extension the country as a whole, to serve right-wing cultural and business interests. Impounding funds has worrying short-term consequences, but in the long term, could be part of an even more sinister strategy.

Donald Trump suggested Thursday that NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte could be “very instrumental” in helping him carry out his imperialist fantasy of wresting Greenland from Denmark.

During a meeting in the Oval Office, Trump was asked about the “potential annexation” of Greenland, the sparsely populated, mineral-rich island that the president has repeatedly insisted is very important for the U.S. to control.

“Well, I think it will happen. And, I’m just thinking, uh, I didn’t give it much thought before, but I’m sitting with a man that could be very instrumental,” Trump said.

“You know Mark, we need that for international security, not just security.”

Rutte replied diplomatically, saying that he should be left “outside” the discussions of the U.S. acquiring Greenland.

“I don’t want to drag NATO in that,” Rutte said. “But when it comes to the high north and the Arctic, you are totally right. The Chinese are using these routes. We know that the Russians are rearming.”

Trump continued to press that NATO might need to “get involved” on behalf of America’s national security.

“What do you think about that?” he pressed Rutte, quickly adding, “Don’t answer that.”

Trump then noted the U.S. already has “a couple bases” on Greenland (there is one U.S. military base on the island) and “quite a few soldiers there.”

“Maybe you’ll see more and more soldiers go there, I don’t know,” he mused.

Greenland’s parliamentary elections this week saw the victory of a center-right party that is set on a slower course toward independence and has already pushed back on Trump’s hopes of making Greenlanders American. The U.S. president has threatened to use tariffs to squeeze Denmark into relinquishing its claim on the world’s largest island.

Luckily, Trump has plenty of imperialist fantasies to keep him busy. His administration reportedly ordered the U.S. military to begin drawing up plans to take over the Panama Canal.

Even though they won’t come right out and say it, Republicans are proving increasingly unhappy with Donald Trump’s trade war.

A new Reuters-Ipsos poll out Thursday indicates that three in 10 Republicans believe the president has been “too erratic” in carrying out his economic agenda. Meanwhile, only Trump’s most ardent supporters opposed the language, with three in 10 Republicans telling the pollster that they “strongly disagreed” that Trump was too erratic.

And a CNN poll published Wednesday showed that one in five people who voted for Trump in 2024 disapproved of how the 78-year-old has implemented his tariff plan, as did 24 percent of Republican-leaning voters.

Another study by Center Forward, a nonpartisan nonprofit, found that some Trump voters felt the president was ignoring key issues such as the economy.

“What’s striking is that voters from across the political spectrum—Republicans, Democrats and independents alike—are all demanding that the administration tackle inflation and rising living costs. Many feel these kitchen-table issues aren’t getting the attention they deserve,” Bob Torongo, executive vice president of the Democratic research firm Breakthrough Campaigns, told The Washington Post Thursday.

Trump has admitted that his tariffs will destabilize the economy. ​​During an interview with Fox Business’s Maria Bartiromo that aired Sunday, Trump dodged a question on whether the country would dive headlong into a recession, sending stock indexes reeling.

He also floated that the “little disruption” caused by his aggressive trade policies could go on for quite a bit longer, suggesting that Americans should model their economic projections on a 100-year-model—like China—rather than assess his performance on a quarterly basis.

The market, in turn, has tumbled as Trump’s trade war sparks fears of a forthcoming recession. Last week, the Dow dropped 670 points. This week, the slump continued, reacting to Trump’s 25 percent levy on all steel and aluminum imports, and the retaliatory tariffs slapped on American goods by countries around the globe in protest.

Trump further failed to assuage economic fears during a press conference at the White House on Thursday, offering no clear path forward for small businesses amid his whiplash tariff proposals.

Donald Trump is once again rewriting history to make it seem like Russian President Vladimir Putin never invaded Ukraine.

During an appearance Thursday in the Oval Office with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, Trump seemed unsure whether Russia would forfeit its seized territory.

“I don’t know if they would have to give anything back. I guess … Crimea?” Trump said, sounding confused. That’s probably because it’s clear that Trump does not intend to force Russia to relinquish any of its seized territory now—and Russia has previously refused to do so.

“You know, uh, I said it last time: Crimea was given by Obama. Biden gave ’em the whole thing. And Bush gave ’em Georgia. And Trump didn’t give ’em them anything.”

Trump once again managed to rewrite the story of Russia’s illegal seizure of other territories, but in his version, Putin wasn’t responsible for any of it.

Putin seized Crimea in 2014, and as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy noted when he visited the White House last month, “nobody stopped him.” After Trump’s first term, the situation was the same, Zelenskiy said—but pointing this out got him scolded and tossed from the premises.

Cut to 2025, and Russia now controls roughly 20 percent of Ukraine’s territory. But the U.S. president is still content to play dumb about the role that his administration has played in Russia’s illegal occupation.

Trump’s support for Putin during his first term in the White House, and his lack of support for Zelenskiy, emboldened Moscow and weakened Kyiv, making way for Russia to launch its deadly multiyear ground offensive in Ukraine in 2022.

Trump’s continued rhetoric now serves to normalize Russian aggression and put the onus on anyone else for the ongoing invasion of Ukraine.

When the U.S. temporarily paused military and intelligence aid to Ukraine last month, Russia moved forward with its efforts to push Ukrainian forces out of Kursk—an area that Ukraine had hoped to use as a bargaining chip in peace negotiations. The flow of aid restarted this week after Zelenskiy said that he agreed to Trump’s 30-day ceasefire agreement. But Zelenskiy added that his country would not recognize any occupied Ukrainian territory as Russia.

Putin said, “We definitely support” the deal but that several questions still remained. He warned that Ukrainian forces in Kursk would need to “surrender or die.” He added that Moscow would wish to retain at a minimum 18 percent of the Ukrainian territory it had stolen.

Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency is shaking up the Internal Revenue Service, running into resistance from career staff as it seeks sensitive taxpayer information.

The IRS’s top lawyer, William Paul, was removed from his position Thursday despite only having the job for two months. It’s part of DOGE’s plans to cut nearly 20 percent of the tax agency’s staff despite income taxes being due in less than a month. The acting IRS commissioner was told by DOGE to eliminate 18,141 jobs from the agency by May 15, according to The Washington Post.

The largest cuts would come from the tax compliance department, which would lose 8,260 jobs, followed by taxpayer services with 3,247 cuts, followed by information technology. This would only be the first level of cuts, with DOGE signaling even more terminations to come. None of this would help with processing tax returns, but the Trump administration has other concerns: getting the addresses of undocumented immigrants.

The Department of Homeland Security wants the IRS to hand over the addresses of about 700,000 undocumented immigrants, which career employees believe is illegal. Along with Paul’s departure, DOGE’s ongoing purge of the federal workforce has left longtime IRS employees worried. One IRS veteran who had worked at the agency for decades, Doug O’Donnell, left the agency last month.

Musk and DOGE hope to use IRS records in their goal to go after fraud in spending on federal benefits, hoping to check those benefits against tax records. The agency’s staff is concerned about legal protections against the use of such sensitive information, joining their counterparts in other agencies, including the Social Security Administration and the Department of Health and Human Services.

These moves could damage an important government agency, but that may be by design. Conservatives have long opposed the IRS, and Trump has claimed that his tariffs could supplant income tax revenue with his new “External Revenue Service.” It remains to be seen how the government will function with a severely weakened IRS.

Donald Trump can only point to big businesses as the potential benefactors of his trade war.

“Many American small-business owners say they are concerned that these tariffs are going to hurt them,” a reporter asked during a White House press conference Thursday. “What’s your message to them?”

“They are gonna be so much richer than they are right now,” the president said. “We have many—yesterday General Motors was in, they want to invest $16 billion—the people from Facebook were in yesterday, they’re going to invest $60 billion by the end of the year.”

Facebook announced in January plans to build a Manhattan-size datacenter in Louisiana to power the company’s latest AI model, Llama 4.

“Other people are talking about numbers,” Trump continued. “Apple, as you know, a few days ago announced a $500 billion investment. They’re going to build their plants in the United States, which as you know, almost all of their plants are in China. Now they’re building in the United States.”

Apple announced in February that it would invest in AI development and silicon engineering, and expand its facilities in Michigan, Texas, California, Arizona, Nevada, Iowa, Oregon, North Carolina, and Washington, as well as build a new factory in Texas. Altogether, the company said it would add as many as 20,000 jobs to the U.S. market over the next four years.

But General Motors, Facebook, and Apple do not count as small businesses.

Nearly half of all private-sector workers are employed by more than 33 million small businesses in the U.S., according to data from the Small Business Administration. The vast majority of companies in the country are, in fact, small—approximately 99.9 percent of them.

Polls show that small-business optimism has plummeted in the wake of Trump’s tariff rollercoaster. The National Federation of Independent Business’s Uncertainty Index recorded its second-highest reading on record in February, marking the smallest number of respondents who believe now is a good time to expand their business since April 2020.

Trump has admitted that his tariffs will destabilize the economy. ​​During an interview with Fox Business’s Maria Bartiromo that aired Sunday, Trump dodged a question on whether the country would dive headlong into a recession, sending stock indexes reeling.

He also floated that the “little disruption” caused by his aggressive trade policies could go on for quite a bit longer, suggesting that Americans should model their economic projections on a 100-year-model—like China—rather than assess his performance on a quarterly basis.

The market, in turn, has tumbled as Trump’s trade war sparks fears of a forthcoming recession. Last week, the Dow dropped 670 points. This week, the slump continued, reacting to Trump’s 25 percent levy on all steel and aluminum imports and the retaliatory tariffs slapped on American goods by countries around the globe in protest.

Still, Trump was quick to ignore the facts and pat himself on the back for what he viewed as the seeding ground for future U.S. growth.

“Look, the reason is two things. Number one, the election, November 5. And the other thing is tariffs, I think probably in that order,” he added Thursday.

Hundreds of Jewish New Yorkers and allies staged a sit-in at Trump Tower in support of Mahmoud Khalil, the pro-Palestine activist and recent Columbia University graduate who was kidnapped by ICE agents last Saturday night.

Over 300 protesters, many of them affiliated with anti-Zionist organizing group Jewish Voice for Peace, took over the tower around 11:30 a.m. They chanted, “We want justice. You say, how? Bring Mahmoud home now!” and “Fight Nazis, not students.” About 100 protesters were arrested, according to NBC News.

“My grandmother lost her cousins in the Holocaust. I grew up on these stories. We know what happens when authoritarian regimes begin targeting people, begin abducting them at night, separating their families and scapegoating,” JVP spokesperson Sonya Meyerson-Knox told NBC. “And we know that it’s one step from here to losing all right to protest and then further horrors happening, as we have seen too well in our history. We’re calling on everyone to speak up today because otherwise we won’t be able to tomorrow.”

Republicans are trying to spin Donald Trump’s decision to kneecap the U.S. stock market by arguing that the United States doesn’t actually want to have a booming economy.

Montana Senator Tim Sheehy appeared on CNN Wednesday evening, where he was faced with a brutal CNN poll that found a whopping 56 percent of respondents disapproved of Trump’s handling of the economy.

Earlier this week, the stock market plummeted after Trump refused to say that the U.S. wasn’t heading toward a recession caused by his steep tariffs against its closest trading partners.

Sheehy had his own explanation for why Wall Street falling was actually OK.

“Well, first of all the stock market’s been on a sugar high for a long time,” he said.

“There’s a fundamental difference between public spending and private spending. And what we’ve seen over the past several years, past three and a half years specifically, is unprecedented money printing into the market. And to be quite frank, a lot of companies benefited from that,” Sheehy said.

Sheehy claimed that a handful of mega-tech companies had driven the stock market index to an all-time high.

“We all love a good stock market, but the reality is that stock market imbalance didn’t necessarily benefit the smaller, midsize companies and average shareholders across the country,” he said.

And Sheehy knows something about big business. He recently won his seat in Montana thanks to the backing of 12 billionaires, including members of the Walton family and organizations linked to Charles Koch and Stephen Schwarzman, the CEO of Blackstone—which owns the Wyoming oil and gas pipeline company Tallgrass Energy, of which Sheehy’s brother is the president.*

Sheehy insisted Wednesday that the “stock market is not the economy,” and said that “uncertainty” would cause disruptions as Trump attempted to create a new “economic landscape.”

Sheehy’s coping mechanism was similar to that of the dumbest U.S. senator, Tommy Tuberville, who was interviewed on Fox Business Monday.

“People are looking at the stock market like, ‘Hey this is how it’s going to continue to be for months and months and months’—that’s not gonna happen,” Tuberville said. “We were probably over-bloated with the stock market here, for a while.”

* This piece has been updated to clarify who is the CEO of Blackstone.

The Trump administration has asked the U.S. military to draw up options for retaking the Panama Canal. 

President Trump has been pushing for retaking the canal since December, and repeated his desire in a joint address to Congress last week, without any elaboration. The rest of the Trump administration hasn’t attempted to explain what he means, either. 

The military is drawing up options, according to NBC News, that range from a closer partnership with the Panamanian military to soldiers seizing the Panama Canal by force, according to unnamed officials. The use of force depends on how much Panama’s military is willing to work with the United States, the officials told NBC News. 

The commander of U.S. Southern Command, Admiral Alvin Holsey, presented the different strategies to Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth earlier this week. The plan to use military force against Panama will only be considered if posting additional U.S. military personnel does not accomplish Trump’s goal of “reclaiming” the canal, the officials said.  

Right now, the U.S. has more than 200 troops in the country, including Special Forces units working with Panamanian units to combat internal unrest. Trump claims China has troops in the canal, which Panamanian President José Raúl Mulino denies, as does China. In February, Panama decided not to renew an infrastructure agreement with China, drawing criticism from the country toward the U.S. 

China “firmly opposes the U.S. smearing and undermining the Belt and Road cooperation through means of pressure and coercion,” said Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Lin Jian, referring to the country’s Belt and Road development initiative. 

Later this month, Hegseth is expected to visit Panama, where discussions on increasing U.S. troop presence in the canal zone will take place. The Cabinet secretary is fully on board with Trump’s desire to retake the canal, saying in January that the U.S. has “the right—we retain the right—to do what is necessary to make sure there is free navigation in the Panama Canal.”

The canal is one of the busiest waterways in the world, with most of the cargo passing through heading to or from the U.S. Any disruption or blocking of the canal would have devastating effects on the U.S. as well as the world economy. But Trump has proven during his presidency that his personal wishes outweigh any economic concerns, no matter how absurd.

A federal judge ruled Thursday that the mass firing of federal employees was an “unlawful” directive by the Office of Personnel Management.

U.S. District Judge William Alsup ordered several agencies to “immediately” reinstate all fired probationary employees. Those agencies included the Department of Veterans Affairs, as well as the Departments of Defense, Energy, Interior, Treasury, and Agriculture. That would also restore numbers at the Internal Revenue Service, which falls under the helm of the Treasury Department and has been hit hard by job cuts in recent weeks.

In a hearing leading up to the decision, Alsup torched the Trump administration’s decision not to submit OPM director Chad Ezell for questioning as a “sham,” and accused the White House’s effort to cast the firings as performance failures as “a gimmick.”

“It is sad, a sad day, when our government would fire some good employee and say it was based on performance when they know good and well that’s a lie,” Alsup said, according to Politico’s Kyle Cheney.

The Trump administration has fired at least 30,000 employees with the help of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. DOGE has made a point to target probationary employees still within the first year of their roles. Some of those employees have been called to return, but most are still not working, reported Axios.

Alsup’s order comes as federal agencies are due to submit “reduction memos” to the White House that could affect as many as 250,000 additional federal employees who fit that criteria.

Alsup further accused the administration of hiding the facts of who directed the layoffs.

“You will not bring the people in here to be cross-examined. You’re afraid to do so because you know cross-examination would reveal the truth,” the California judge told a DOJ attorney, according to Politico. “I tend to doubt that you’re telling me the truth.… I’m tired of seeing you stonewall on trying to get at the truth.”

This story has been updated.