“President Trump’s promises will be fulfilled,” Speaker Mike Johnson told reporters shortly after the vote, “and we’re really excited that today we took a big step in getting that done.”Credit...Haiyun Jiang for The New York Times G.O.P. budget: The House narrowly adopted the Republican budget blueprint for slashing taxes and government spending, a key step in advancing President Trump’s fiscal agenda. Republican budget hard-liners who fear that it will balloon the nation’s debt relented after leaders in both chambers assured them that any spending bill would include cuts of at least $1.5 trillion, even though the measure does not require it. Nominee withdraws: Mr. Trump’s nominee to lead the Bureau of Land Management, Kathleen Sgamma, withdrew from consideration days after a memo surfaced in which she sharply criticized him after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. She had been a champion of oil and gas who hoped to run the agency overseeing 245 million acres of public land across the country. Read more › Supreme Court: As legal challenges to the Trump administration mount, the justices are facing an important test, a flood of “emergency applications” requesting immediate intervention. Critics say they force the justices to consider cases of enormous consequence — abortion rights, Covid-19 mandates and environmental regulations — quickly and without a fully developed record from lower courts. Read more › Trade war: Follow live coverage of Mr. Trump’s tariffs here. Glenn Thrush Reporting from Washington news Analysis The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives tends to draw intense scrutiny during bursts of regulatory activity under Democratic presidents, then recede into obscurity when Republicans return and reverse those regulations.Credit...Tamir Kalifa for The New York Times The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives — a small government agency tasked with the titanic challenge of stemming the spread of illegal guns — has long been regarded as the spurned stepchild of federal law enforcement. It is fast becoming an orphan. That ended when President Trump took office. Since then, the A.T.F., a division of the Justice Department, has been ravaged by the departure of key career personnel, the diversion of dozens of agents from core duties to immigration enforcement and from what amounts to a campaign of indifference — leaving it rudderless, leaderless and demoralized. On Wednesday morning, the A.T.F.’s roughly 10,000 employees were handed off from a distracted caretaker, the F.B.I. director Kash Patel, and dumped on the bureaucratic doorstep of the Army secretary. The secretary, Daniel Driscoll, had only been told he was being saddled with the assignment a few days before, according to people familiar with the situation who spoke on the condition of anonymity to publicly discuss the matter. The highly unusual move placed a civilian military leader in charge of a domestic law enforcement entity for the first time in memory, and critics of the administration were quick to discern sinister motives. The truth was less menacing, if no less damning for an agency Republicans have long sought to handcuff and marginalize: Mr. Patel was too busy doing his day job, and Mr. Driscoll had been confirmed by the Senate, a prerequisite for taking over. Image During his brief stint as interim head of the A.T.F., Kash Patel, the F.B.I. director, is known to have visited its headquarters only once, stayed for a few hours and has not been back since.Credit...Kenny Holston/The New York Times The fact that Mr. Driscoll, a close friend of Vice President JD Vance, has no relevant experience did not deter the White House from tapping him for the job. (Mr. Driscoll gained proficiency with firearms as a cavalry scout with the Army’s 10th Mountain Division in Iraq.) “We already witnessed four years of a Trump administration hellbent on underfunding and undermining the critical role of A.T.F.,” said T. Christian Heyne, head of policy at Brady, a gun violence prevention organization. “The appointment of another acting director — one that is already tasked with overseeing over a million U.S. soldiers — shows a total disregard for public safety and American lives,” he added. It is not clear why, or when, the White House decided to remove and replace Mr. Patel. But administration officials seem to have decided relatively early on, right after his February swearing-in, that Mr. Patel’s time there would be short, and settled on Mr. Driscoll as his successor, officials said — although no one appears to have informed him. Mr. Patel, for his part, seemed eager to offload the responsibility, even though he told friends in recent weeks that he was most likely to serve for the foreseeable future, simply because he could not find an offramp. To say the A.T.F. was not his top priority is an understatement. Mr. Patel is known to have visited A.T.F. headquarters only once, stayed for a few hours and has not been back since, although his top deputy, Dan Bongino, visited on several occasions. It is not clear how much time, if any, Mr. Driscoll plans to spend there. He is often abroad and was traveling in Germany on Wednesday when his appointment became public. Leadership of the bureau has been virtually nonexistent — even the top-ranking career official on site, Marvin Richardson, is being forced out — and morale has plummeted at headquarters, current and former employees said. Despite this uncertainty, most of the bureau’s staff of investigators are doing their jobs with minimal disruption, and have played significant roles in major drug and crime busts heralded by the Trump administration. Many of the bureau’s frontline employees are, in fact, conservatives who supported Mr. Trump and embrace his law-and-order message. And to the extent that Trump administration officials have debated A.T.F.’s future, it has been with an eye toward cutting back its regulatory functions, while bolstering its role in drug cases and immigration. Dozens of agents have been diverted to beef up the federal law enforcement presence at immigration raids. Mr. Patel, speaking on an internal conference call recently, floated the idea of reassigning about 1,000 of A.T.F.’s most experienced agents to the F.B.I. — but later settled on the detailing of about 125, many to the southern border, according to officials. Image Daniel Driscoll, the Army secretary, had only been told he was assuming charge of the A.T.F. a few days before receiving the assignment, according to people familiar with the situation.Credit...Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images A bigger Justice Department reorganization plan, recently drafted by Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche working closely with the White House, proposed merging the A.T.F. with the Drug Enforcement Administration. The proposal was greeted with wary optimism inside the A.T.F.: It might provide greater long-term stability for both organizations, which collaborate often. But it would require congressional approval, and could take years to be implemented. There are some signs that the Trump administration would like to find a permanent, Senate-appointed leader. Over the past two months Trump appointees have quietly interviewed several candidates to be the permanent director, including Michael D. Faucette, a prominent gun rights lawyer. But none have panned out. One applicant withdrew from consideration when he learned the salary, less than $250,000 a year, according to people familiar with the situation. The paradox of A.T.F. is that it draws intense scrutiny during bursts of regulatory activity under Democratic presidents — both as a target and a fund-raising magnet for the Second Amendment movement — then recedes into obscurity when Republicans return to reverse with a few pen strokes what their predecessors toiled over years to enact. Earlier this week, Attorney General Pam Bondi rolled back a range of Biden-era gun control measures, including a crackdown on federally licensed gun dealers who falsify business records and skip customer background checks. She also directed A.T.F. to review two other major policies enacted under the Biden administration, with an eye toward scrapping both. One is a ban on so-called pistol braces used to convert handguns into rifle-like weapons, and the second is a rule requiring background checks on private gun sales. That does not mean the administration will not become more aggressive. Ms. Bondi has also announced her intention to convene a task force to expand gun rights and has repurposed the department’s civil rights division to open investigations into the purported infringement of Second Amendment rights by localities that seek to regulate firearms to confront violent crime. But, for now, the A.T.F. appears to be an afterthought rather than a focal point. One person who foretold the current scenario was Steven M. Dettelbach, who stepped down as the bureau’s director in December after pushing through some of the most significant gun control measures in decades. “What I am concerned about is that is that people will take their eye off the ball, that they’ll either get complacent or political,” he said in an interview just before he left. “That will result in more people getting killed.” A day after President Trump signed an executive order against a law firm that brought a number of successful defamation suits filed over news outlets airing Trump’s false claims about fraud in voting machines in 2020, the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, tells him in the Cabinet meeting about “vulnerabilities” in voting systems. Kathleen Sgamma at a hearing of the House Committee on Natural Resources in 2023.Credit...Mariam Zuhaib/Associated Press Kathleen Sgamma, an advocate for oil and gas whom President Trump had tapped to run the Bureau of Land Management, has abruptly withdrawn her nomination, a White House spokeswoman said. Ms. Sgamma had been scheduled to testify on Thursday before the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, which was considering her nomination to oversee the agency. It manages 245 million acres of public land across the United States. At the start of the hearing, Senator Mike Lee, the Utah Republican who leads the committee, announced that Ms. Sgamma had withdrawn but did not elaborate. Liz Huston, a White House spokeswoman, confirmed that Ms. Sgamma had removed herself from consideration but did not offer an explanation. “We accept her withdrawal and look forward to putting forth another nominee,” Ms. Huston said. Ms. Sgamma worked as president of the Denver-based Western Energy Alliance for nearly 20 years before stepping down this year. In that role, she promoted independent oil and gas companies, which have sought to strip away government protections and expand drilling and mining on public lands in Western states. She opposed virtually every policy aimed at addressing climate change, conserving public lands and protecting biodiversity. This week, the investigative news outlet Documented published a memo it had obtained showing that Ms. Sgamma had criticized President Trump after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. In a memo the day after the attack by supporters of Mr. Trump, Ms. Sgamma wrote to members of the Western Energy Alliance that she was “disgusted by the violence witnessed yesterday and President Trump’s role in spreading misinformation that incited it.” In recent months, applicants for positions in the Trump administration have said they have been asked for their thoughts on Jan. 6 and who they believe won the 2020 election, in what many described as a perceived loyalty test. David Bernhardt, who led the Interior Department during the first Trump administration, suggested on social media on Thursday that the recently publicized memo written by Ms. Sgamma was the reason for her withdrawal. “Sad,” Mr. Bernhardt wrote on X, with a link to the article about Ms. Sgamma’s memo. “Self-inflicted.” Ms. Sgamma did not respond to a request for comment. The American Petroleum Institute, the oil industry’s main lobbying group, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The Western Energy Alliance declined to comment. Environmental activists, who had roundly opposed Ms. Sgamma for the role, said they were relieved. “Good riddance to Sgamma, whose withdrawal is good news for America’s public lands and imperiled animals,” Taylor McKinnon, the Southwest director of the Center for Biological Diversity, said. “There’s no doubt that Trump’s next nominee will also be a poisonous threat to our wildlife and wild places, but this speed bump gives senators a chance to ponder whether they really want to feed America’s public lands and monuments into the snapping jaws of the fracking and mining industries,” he said. Aaron Weiss, the deputy director of the Center for Western Priorities, an environmental nonprofit organization, has criticized Ms. Sgamma for not making public a list of members of the Western Energy Alliance. “It is ironic, and maybe fitting, if maybe her lack of candor and secrecy is what ultimately did her nomination in with the White House,” Mr. Weiss said. The Trump administration has made emergency requests of the Supreme Court in recent weeks to intervene on actions including freezing more than a billion dollars in foreign aid, deporting Venezuelans to a prison in El Salvador without due process and ending birthright citizenship.Credit...Photographs by Roberto Schmidt/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images; Secretaria de Prensa de la Presidencia, via Reuters; Wilfredo Lee/Associated Press The Trump administration has in recent weeks asked the Supreme Court to allow it to end birthright citizenship, to freeze more than a billion dollars in foreign aid and to permit the deportation of Venezuelans to a prison in El Salvador without due process. In each case, the administration told the justices the request was an emergency. By filing so-called emergency applications, the administration has asked for immediate intervention from the nation’s highest court 10 times so far — more than the total number of such requests during the 16 years of the presidencies of Barack Obama and George W. Bush. Trump administration lawyers have repeatedly told the justices their intercession is necessary to quickly undo the decisions of lower court judges who have imposed temporary pauses on large swaths of President Trump’s agenda. The Supreme Court has in recent years heard about 60 to 80 traditional “merits” cases each term. These cases often arrive at the court only after months or years of consideration by lower courts. The justices do not issue opinions until after reading extensive briefs, listening to oral arguments and meeting to discuss and exchanging multiple drafts of decisions. But an emergency application is fast-tracked, with rulings expected within days or weeks of filing after limited briefing and no arguments. Traditionally reserved for clearly urgent matters — most often requests for stays of execution for people sentenced to death — they are now the favored path to challenge so-called nationwide injunctions, where a single federal judge issues a ruling that affects not only the parties to a case but the entire nation. For a court whose work is already veiled in secrecy, the emergency docket adds another layer of mystery because the court releases little information about its deliberative process on the applications, and the rulings often do not include the court’s reasoning or even a vote count. “It has completely transformed what the Supreme Court does on a day-to-day basis,” said Stephen I. Vladeck, a law professor at Georgetown University who writes a weekly newsletter about the court and published a book about the emergency docket. “There’s no question: For better or for worse, the justices are confronting really important questions at earlier stages with less information and in contexts where the stakes are remarkably high.” In response to the glut of Trump administration applications, several of the justices themselves have now joined the chorus of criticism. “The risk of error increases when this court decides cases — as here — with bare-bones briefing, no argument and scarce time for reflection,” Justice Elena Kagan wrote in a dissent, referring to the court’s use of the emergency docket to allow the Trump administration to temporarily suspend $65 million in teacher-training grants for poor and rural areas. Several of the justices themselves, including Justice Elena Kagan and Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson have now joined the chorus of criticism in response to the glut of Trump administration applications.Credit...Pool photo by Chip Somodevilla The emergency applications filed by the administration so far focus on some of the most high-profile moves by Mr. Trump. He and his allies have insisted immediate action by the justices is necessary to counter lower judges who have halted some of his policy moves. “If Justice Roberts and the United States Supreme Court do not fix this toxic and unprecedented situation IMMEDIATELY, our Country is in very serious trouble!” the president wrote on social media in March. Mike Davis, a former law clerk to Justice Neil M. Gorsuch who now leads the Article III Project, an advocacy group that describes itself as using “brass knuckles to fight leftist lawfare,” said the justices had invited the flood of emergency applications by siding against one of the president’s first emergency requests in February to lift a district court stay preventing Mr. Trump from freezing nearly $2 billion in foreign aid. That sent a tacit message to lower court judges, he said, that the Supreme Court wouldn’t interfere if they blocked Mr. Trump’s actions. “They wouldn’t be in this mess if they would have shut down these activist judges several weeks ago,” Mr. Davis said. “That’s what unleashed these dozens of cases around the country.” Image Mike Davis, the leader of the Article III Project, an advocacy group that describes itself as using “brass knuckles to fight leftist lawfare.”Credit...Eric Lee/The New York Times So far, the court has ruled on five of these applications, handing Mr. Trump a number of temporary victories but largely through narrow rulings that have allowed the justices to avoid weighing in on the larger issues presented by Mr. Trump’s actions, such as whether they are unconstitutional. Five more are currently pending. The emergency docket hasn’t always operated this way. In February 2016 the court, by a 5-to-4 vote, dealt a major blow to President Obama’s climate change plan by issuing an emergency order that temporarily blocked the administration’s attempt to combat global warming by regulating emissions from coal-fired power plants. The court’s four liberal members at the time dissented. It was an unprecedented move by the Supreme Court, which had never before granted a request to pause a regulation before it was reviewed by a federal appeals court. The strategy of seeking immediate Supreme Court review, led by the attorneys general from Texas and West Virginia, set off a new flood of emergency applications, many of them coordinated by groups of state attorneys general and filed under both Republican and Democratic administrations. Under the first Trump administration, the Justice Department went to the court to ask for emergency relief 41 times. The court sided with the administration and granted at least partial relief in 28 of the cases, according to data from Mr. Vladeck’s book, “The Shadow Docket.” Under President Joseph R. Biden Jr., the government sought emergency relief 19 times and was granted relief 10 times. Parties other than the government can also file emergency applications, though since Mr. Trump took office, it has often been the government seeking intervention, largely because so many of his policy moves have been blocked by the courts. The “merits docket” is the traditional path for most of the seminal cases in American law: Brown v. Board of Education, Gideon v. Wainwright and New York Times v. Sullivan. A ruling on a merits case is a long, deliberative process, starting with a lengthy consideration over whether the justices will even hear the case. The Supreme Court each year typically accepts only about 1 percent of the cases they are requested to review. They release their written opinions by the end of each term, along with concurrences and dissents. The substance of the justice’s internal discussions for merits cases is a closely held secret. But the emergency applications process is even more opaque. Each emergency application is first reviewed by only a single justice, based on where in the country the case originated. (Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. is assigned to applications from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, where many of the Trump administration cases have originated.) These applications are handled on “paper,” which means there are typically no hearings or oral argument. Justices do not need to be in the court building to act on an application. The circuit justice can act on an application alone, but in significant cases the justice sends a case to the rest of the justices to examine. What happens next is shielded from public view. A spokeswoman for the court declined to comment about how the process works, directing a reporter to an online guide that does not detail it. But people familiar with the court’s work said the next step is handled informally by phone and through email. Image The emergency docket adds another layer of mystery to the work of the Supreme Court because it releases little information about its deliberative process on the applications, and the rulings often do not include the court’s reasoning or even a vote count.Credit...Haiyun Jiang for The New York Times A law clerk for the justice assigned to the case typically writes up a memo expressing a view on how the court should rule. This starts off memo traffic between the justices, emailed back and forth among the chambers. The votes are tallied, with the chief justice making sure each justice has voted and checking the count, especially since much of the work is done remotely and can happen at all hours. To grant a stay request, five justices must agree. But unlike with normal merits cases, the court does not always announce a vote count or disclose how each justice voted. The secrecy drew particular scorn from Justice Jackson in the case of the Venezuelan migrants this week. She cited Korematsu v. United States, a notorious 1944 decision by the court upholding the forcible internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, writing, “At least when the court went off base in the past, it left a record so posterity could see how it went wrong.” Often, the best clue to the court’s reasoning comes not from the majority but from statements or dissents included along with the majority’s order. It’s there, too, that some of the justices have aired their discontent about the emergency docket. In April 2022, the justices reinstated a Trump administration regulation that made it more difficult for states to block infrastructure projects that could cause water pollution. The case, Louisiana v. American Rivers, was decided on the emergency docket without explanation of the court’s reasoning. It prompted a dissent from Justice Kagan, who criticized the court’s decision to hear the case as an emergency, writing that the emergency docket was becoming “only another place for merits determinations — except made without full briefing and argument.” “That renders the court’s emergency docket not for emergencies at all,” she wrote. Asked what changed between last night, when a number of Republican holdouts forced Republican leaders to delay their budget vote, and this morning, Speaker Mike Johnson said only that “sometimes when the pressure gets turned up, people need to release that.” He credited discussion and deliberation this morning for changing the minds of those who were holding out. Speaker Mike Johnson indicated to reporters that President Trump was not as active in the effort to whip Republican votes as he was during earlier budget votes. “He didn’t have to call a single member,” Johnson said. As congressional leaders encouraged reluctant Republican lawmakers to vote for the budget resolution in the House, they made assurances that the process started by the budget would result in at least $1.5 trillion in spending cuts over the next decade. But the budget measure itself makes no such promises, an important reason House conservatives who are worried about the future of federal debt are wary. Each square represents $25 billion. Amounts shown are 10-year totals. The February version requires a minimum of $1.5 trillion in spending cuts. But it requires $2 trillion in spending cuts in order to make all desired tax cuts. The New York Times Unlike a budget the House passed in February, the current resolution has few hard targets for savings. It specifies instead that Senate committees with jurisdiction over portions of government spending must save at least a combined $4 billion — far, far short of the $2 trillion called for by the previous bill. Since the budget itself doesn’t require the cuts, congressional leaders are asking their colleagues to trust that they will ultimately find the cuts as they write future legislation. Several of the Republicans who had said they were holdouts on the budget resolution congregated on the House steps to defend their decision to flip and ultimately support it. They’re saying the “game changer” was getting firmer commitments from Speaker Johnson, the White House and Senate Majority Leader John Thune that any bill that came to the floor would slash a minimum of $1.5 trillion in federal spending. The Republican-led House just passed a bill that would require people prove they were U.S. citizens when they registered to vote, 220-208, with four Democrats joining Republicans. The bill, which is unlikely to make it through the Senate, echoes an executive order President Trump signed last month as part of his push to tighten voting laws tied to debunked claims of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election. It is already against the law for noncitizens to vote in federal elections, and there is no evidence of widespread illegal voting by noncitizens. Only two Republicans opposed the measure, Representatives Thomas Massie of Kentucky and Victoria Spartz of Indiana. All Democrats present also voted against it. Speaker Mike Johnson and Senator John Thune of South Dakota, the majority leader, at the Capitol on Thursday.Credit...Haiyun Jiang for The New York Times The House on Thursday narrowly adopted a Republican budget blueprint for slashing taxes and government spending, after hard-line conservatives concerned that it would balloon the nation’s debt ended a revolt that had threatened to derail President Trump’s domestic agenda. Approval of the plan, which was in doubt until nearly the very end, was a victory for Republican leaders and Mr. Trump. It allowed them to move forward with crafting major legislation to enact a huge tax cut, financed with deep reductions in spending on federal programs, and pushing it through Congress over Democratic opposition. “President Trump’s promises will be fulfilled,” Speaker Mike Johnson told reporters just off the House floor shortly after the vote, “and we’re really excited that today we took a big step in getting that done.” But approval came only after a mutiny on the House floor on Tuesday night that underscored the deep divisions Republicans still have to bridge in order to push through what Mr. Trump has called his “big, beautiful bill.” It forced Mr. Johnson to delay a planned vote on the measure after he spent more than an hour Wednesday night huddled with the holdouts, trying without success to persuade them to support it. The vote on Thursday was 216 to 214, with two Republicans opposing the measure. All Democrats present voted against the plan, which they said would pave the way for cuts to Medicaid and other vital safety net programs that would harm Americans, all to pay for large tax cuts for the wealthiest. “You target earned benefits and things that are important to the American people, like Medicaid,” Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the Democratic leader, said, addressing Republicans. “And what are you doing it for? What is it in service of? All to pass massive tax breaks for your billionaire donors like Elon Musk.” The measure’s fate had been in doubt for days before the vote, as anti-spending House Republicans warned that the plan would add too much to the nation’s debt and defied Mr. Trump’s entreaties to fall in line behind it. The plan the Senate passed over the weekend directed committees in that chamber to find about $4 billion in spending cuts over a decade. That is a fraction of the $2 trillion in spending cuts that were approved by the House, and conservatives there feared that if they agreed to the Senate’s measure, they would ultimately be forced to accept far smaller spending cuts than they want. In the end, even though the skeptics had complained that the resolution violated their core principles, they were loath to cross Mr. Trump and set back his top legislative priority just months after their party won a governing trifecta. A defeat would have dealt party leaders a significant rebuke and sent them back to the drawing board to find another way to push through their fiscal plan. “There was a lot of concern about the length of time that would add,” Representative Lloyd K. Smucker, Republican of Pennsylvania, said about changing the resolution. “The speaker has been saying that it is critical that we move forward now to meet his deadline, and all of our deadline, on passing the final reconciliation bill.” The holdouts relented despite having failed to force any modifications to the measure. They agreed to support it after Mr. Johnson and Senator John Thune of South Dakota, the majority leader, said it was his conference’s “ambition” to find at least $1.5 trillion in cuts. “We have got to do something to get the country on a more sustainable fiscal path,” Mr. Thune said at a news conference at the Capitol on Thursday morning with Mr. Johnson. “We have a lot of United States senators who believe that is a minimum,” he continued, referring to the $1.5 trillion target. In the end, Representatives Thomas Massie of Kentucky and Victoria Spartz of Indiana were the only two Republicans to vote “no.” “The big, beautiful bill cuts taxes while keeping spending on an increasingly unsustainable trajectory,” Mr. Massie said, explaining his vote. It was the latest instance of House Republicans caving to Mr. Trump on a critical issue. But in the days before the vote, normally reliable Trump allies displayed a remarkable degree of resistance to passing a measure that would allow their party to get started on his agenda. After a meeting that Mr. Trump hosted at the White House on Tuesday failed to flip a critical number of holdouts, he began stepping up the public pressure on Republicans to back the blueprint. “Close your eyes and get there; it’s a phenomenal bill,” Mr. Trump told lawmakers on Tuesday night at a fund-raising dinner in Washington. “Stop grandstanding.” To move along the reconciliation process, which Republicans plan to use to push their budget and tax legislation through Congress strictly along party lines, the House and the Senate must adopt the same budget resolution. But in addition to demanding more spending cuts than the Senate approved, conservatives in the House also were deeply skeptical of the Senate’s insistence that extending the tax cuts that Mr. Trump signed into law in 2017 would cost nothing, because doing so maintains the status quo. Senate Republicans adopted that approach so they could extend the tax cuts indefinitely without appearing to balloon the deficit. The holdouts said they were reassured after receiving the pledge from Mr. Thune and Senate Republicans that their chamber would produce deeper spending cuts than those laid out in the text of the resolution. How that is achieved in the Senate remains an open question. House Republicans have directed that a huge amount of savings come from the committee in charge of Medicaid. But a number of Senate Republicans have been publicly squeamish about supporting cuts to the program, teeing up a potential clash. House Republican leadership just emerged from a closed-door meeting and said they were “optimistic” that they had the votes to pass the measure as they headed to the floor. When asked if they were going to pass the bill, Speaker Mike Johnson replied, “We are, yes.” Notably, G.O.P. leadership was confident they had the votes Wednesday night before they ultimately had to cancel the vote and reconvene with holdouts. We’ll see how this plays out as the House continues to vote. Speaker Mike Johnson, who has so far struggled to win over enough of his Republican colleagues in the House to move the budget process along, says “I think we’re good” as he heads into another meeting with Representative Jodey Arrington of Texas, the chairman of the Budget Committee. The House is now voting. Representative Eric Burlison, Republican of Missouri and one of the holdouts on the budget resolution, said he was “not necessarily” a “yes” vote yet on the budget, but he was “getting closer.” He said holdouts had been having private conversations and were coalescing around written assurances that could be released later. Burlison said Senate Majority Leader John Thune’s comments this morning “really weren’t helpful, because he was not definitive.” House conservatives who have withheld their support for the budget measure have been hoping to get some kind of ironclad assurance from the Senate that Republicans in that chamber will join them in slashing a minimum of $1.5 trillion in federal spending. Senator John Thune of South Dakota, the majority leader, stopped just short of that during this news conference. “We have got to do something to get the country on a more sustainable fiscal path,” Thune said, adding that his “ambition in the Senate” was “aligned with the House in terms of what their budget resolution outlines.” “We have a lot of United States senators who believe that is a minimum,” he said. After a number of Republican holdouts forced Republican leaders to delay their budget vote last night, Speaker Mike Johnson says that after close consultation with the White House and the Senate his Republican colleagues in the House will have enough votes to “finally adopt” the resolution to pass “this big beautiful bill.” A new vote is scheduled for around 10:30 a.m. Johnson says that congressional Republicans are committed to pursuing steep spending cuts of at least $1.5 trillion in their budget resolution, something some moderate Republicans had hoped to avoid. “I can tell you that many of us are going to aim much higher and find those savings because we believe they are there,” he said during a news conference. After a group of conservative House Republicans forced a delay on a vote on their party’s budget blueprint, President Trump said on Truth Social that the party was “getting close” to a resolution. Trump lobbied for the measure this week and urged the House to adopt it yesterday, but he was unable to persuade a small group of lawmakers focused on lowering the nation’s debt and cutting federal spending. How long does it take you to wet your hair in the shower? A few seconds? A minute? The president of the United States, who has long complained about being unable to coax more than a dribble or trickle of water from his showers, says it takes him much longer. “I like to take a nice shower to take care of my beautiful hair,” President Trump said on Wednesday in the Oval Office. “I stand under the shower for 15 minutes until it gets wet. It comes out drip, drip, drip. It’s ridiculous.” Much of the world was focused at that moment on his trade war, but Mr. Trump wanted to talk about showers. He offered this insight while signing an executive order to loosen restrictions on water flow from American shower heads. The order directs Energy Secretary Chris Wright to rescind a definition of shower heads first implemented by President Barack Obama. It is the second time that Mr. Trump as president has attempted to redefine a shower head. A rule he introduced in his first term drastically increased the amount of water that showers with multiple nozzles could use. The Biden administration later reversed that change. “No longer will shower heads be weak and worthless,” the White House said in a news release on Wednesday. How big of an issue is this, really? And how many ways can you define a shower head? For Mr. Trump, it has been a long-running crusade. He has railed for years against low water pressure in bathrooms, an issue in some New York City high-rises. During his first term in the White House, he lamented that his showers did not supply enough water for him to achieve his “perfect” hair, part of a campaign against what he described as excessive government regulation. “You take a shower, the water doesn’t come out,” he said in 2020. “You want to wash your hands, the water doesn’t come out. So what do you do? You just stand there longer or you take a shower longer? Because my hair — I don’t know about you, but it has to be perfect. Perfect.” At a dinner with Republican leaders in 2023, he repeated his complaint: “You know I have this gorgeous head of hair — when I take a shower, I want water to pour down on me. When you go into these new homes with showers, the water drips down slowly, slowly.” Mr. Trump’s new order restores language from a 1992 federal law, enacted to conserve water, that prevented new American-made shower heads from spritzing more than 2.5 gallons of water per minute. Some states, including California and Colorado, as well as New York City, have imposed their own lower rates. As showers with multiple nozzles became more common, the Obama administration ordered the 2.5-gallon limit to be applied to each shower head, not each nozzle. Toward the end of Mr. Trump’s first presidential term, he set out to redefine what constitutes a shower head. Previously, it had been defined in federal regulations as “any plumbing fitting designed to direct water onto a bather,” meaning that a unit with multiple nozzles counted as a single shower head. Mr. Trump’s first administration changed that, defining it as “an accessory to a supply fitting for spraying water onto a bather.” That meant that each nozzle counted as an individual shower head, and each could pump out 2.5 gallons, with no restrictions on the total number of nozzles. It released a diagram showing examples of shower heads with as many as eight nozzles, which could theoretically spray 20 gallons of water per minute. Back then, Mr. Trump also redefined the bathroom fitting known as a “body spray” to make it a different category from a shower head, and therefore exempt it from the 2.5-gallon limit, because it sprays water sideways instead of downward. After Joseph R. Biden Jr. became president in 2021, he rescinded Mr. Trump’s rules. Most commercially made shower heads had continued to comply with the Obama-era standard anyway. According to the Appliances Standard Awareness Project, an energy conservation advocacy group, few manufacturers took advantage of the Trump rule on shower heads, and some opposed it. When the Biden administration rescinded the rule in 2021, the Energy Department said it was, in part, because showers that provided the extra water desired by Mr. Trump were not widely available. It’s unclear what effect if any Mr. Trump’s new executive order will have. If your water pressure is weak, according to the Appliances Standard Awareness Project, it’s probably because of your home plumbing or because of lime scale buildup on the shower head, rather than anything to do with the flow rate. Attorney General Pam Bondi, speaking at a news conference last month, suggested that the migrant, Henrry Villatoro Santos, would not “be in the country much longer.”Credit...Rod Lamkey/Associated Press The Justice Department moved on Wednesday to drop charges against an immigrant from El Salvador and speed his deportation, two weeks after the U.S. attorney general described him as “the East Coast leader” of the MS-13 gang. A department official asked a federal judge in Virginia “to dismiss without prejudice” a criminal complaint against the migrant, Henrry Villatoro Santos, who was charged with immigration and firearms violations. The papers provided no explanation for the move. Officials later said that the government filed the motion to fast-track the deportation of Mr. Villatoro Santos, 24, to El Salvador, even though it is far more common to initiate deportation actions after a trial in a U.S. court. “As a terrorist, he will now face the removal process,” Attorney General Pam Bondi said in a statement. Ms. Bondi trumpeted the arrest of Mr. Villatoro Santos in a news conference last month, accusing him of overseeing a series of violent acts undertaken by gang members and suggesting that he would not “be in the country much longer.” Mr. Villatoro Santos was arrested after federal agents, along with state and local police, raided his townhouse in Dale City, Va. Photos posted after his arrest showed what appeared to be a semiautomatic rifle. Officials portrayed the arrest as a major achievement in the Trump administration’s effort to combat gang violence and illegal immigration. But Ms. Bondi and other officials provided few details of crimes Mr. Villatoro Santos was accused of committing. The charging documents unsealed later referred to only indications of his MS-13 affiliation found in “the garage bedroom” of his house in Dale City. “Because of operational security, we won’t get into too many details about this individual,” Kash Patel, the director of the F.B.I., said last month. The Justice Department move comes as civil rights advocates voice growing concerns about the Trump administration’s deportation arrangements with El Salvador’s autocratic president, Nayib Bukele. Mr. Bukele has agreed to house dozens of undocumented immigrants from the United States in his country’s notoriously brutal prisons. In 2020, Mr. Bukele — praised by Mr. Trump and his allies for his crackdown on crime — was accused of secretly colluding with local gangs. He has denied links to the gangs. President Trump signing executive orders in the Oval Office on Wednesday.Credit...Eric Lee/The New York Times President Trump on Wednesday signed executive orders punishing two officials from his first administration and an elite law firm, continuing a campaign of retribution that he has gleefully carried out since his inauguration. A third order targeted the law firm Susman Godfrey with many of the same sanctions that Mr. Trump has applied to other law firms that had taken on cases or causes he did not like. In 2023, Fox News agreed to pay $787.5 million to resolve a defamation suit filed by Dominion Voting Systems over the network’s promotion of misinformation about the 2020 election. Susman Godfrey represented Dominion, a manufacturer of voting machines that lawyers allied with Mr. Trump attacked with outlandish claims about widespread voting fraud. Mr. Trump has also sought to rewrite the history of his defeat in 2020, and has continued to repeat his lie that the election was stolen from him. Mr. Krebs, leading the agency tasked with protecting election machinery from foreign interference, shot down many of Mr. Trump’s false claims of widespread fraud, and Mr. Trump fired Mr. Krebs days after his loss. Mr. Trump has continued to harbor deep resentments against the agency. “This guy, Krebs, was saying ‘oh the election was great,’” Mr. Trump said Wednesday as he signed the order. He added, of Mr. Krebs,:“He’s the fraud. He’s a disgrace.” The executive order punishing Mr. Krebs referred to Mr. Trump’s debunked claims, asserting that Mr. Krebs had “denied that the 2020 election was rigged and stolen, including by inappropriately and categorically dismissing widespread election malfeasance and serious vulnerabilities with voting machines.” Apparently referring to the Dominion defamation suit, Mr. Trump’s order accused Susman Godfrey of spearheading “efforts to weaponize the American legal system and degrade the quality of American elections,” and attacked the firm’s diversity efforts, as well as its representation of other clients whom Mr. Trump disagreed with. In a statement, Susman Godfrey said that “there is no question that we will fight this unconstitutional order.” Mr. Krebs did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The order punishing Mr. Taylor accused him, without evidence, of “illegally” publishing classified conversations in a book he wrote after his opinion article in The Times, adding that “this conduct could properly be characterized as treasonous and as possibly violating the Espionage Act.” In a statement, Mr. Taylor said that the executive order punishing him had been expected. “Dissent isn’t unlawful,” Mr. Taylor said on social media. “It certainly isn’t treasonous. America is headed down a dark path. Never has a man so inelegantly proved another man’s point.” The orders also directed “calls for a review,” according to the White House, into the actions of Mr. Krebs and Mr. Taylor during their time in the first Trump administration, searching for — among other potential wrongdoing — the “unauthorized dissemination of classified information.” After the ruling by an appeals court on Wednesday, there is no court order in place to stop the Trump administration from firing probationary employees.Credit...Felix Lipov/Alamy The Trump administration is once again free to fire probationary employees. For now. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, in a 2-to-1 decision, sided with the government on Wednesday to block a lower-court ruling in Maryland that had led to the reinstatement of thousands of federal workers who had been fired in February. The purge of the employees had marked one of the first stages of President Trump’s plan to rapidly downsize the civil service and overhaul or eliminate entire offices and programs. Since then, the status of the workers has been tied up in legal battles over whether the firings had been carried out lawfully. The Wednesday appeals court decision came a day after the Supreme Court blocked a similar ruling in California reining in the government in a separate case. There is now no court order in place to stop the government from firing probationary employees. Both courts ruled on narrow issues of standing: whether the probationary firings harmed the plaintiffs so much that they had the right to sue in district court. In California, nonprofit organizations sued the government over the firings at six agencies because they said they benefited from the services the federal workers provided. In Maryland, 19 states and the District of Columbia sued 20 federal agencies, arguing that the government was obligated to give them notice when personnel actions could abruptly and significantly increase demand for unemployment benefits. It was not immediately clear what the latest decision meant for the thousands of fired probationary employees, nearly all of whom had been recently reinstated as a result of district court orders. The back-and-forth has left the employees in a state of limbo, wondering if they will be fired again after having just been rehired. The day of Mr. Trump’s inauguration, the Office of Personnel Management, the government’s human resources arm, directed agencies to compile lists of all probationary employees. The workers were considered easier to fire because they lacked the civil service protections of longer-term employees. The Partnership for Public Service, a nonprofit that promotes best practices in government, estimated earlier this year that the government employed more than 250,000 of them. The Trump administration has not disclosed the exact number of probationary workers who have been fired, but court filings indicate that the figure is more than 20,000. While the cases challenging the firing of probationary employees have plodded through the courts, the Trump administration has moved ahead with other stages of mass layoffs. Shortly after they were reinstated last month, some of the probationary employees heard that they would be let go again as part of another round of layoffs. Mr. Trump has directed the government to substantially downsize the federal work force of more than two million. The court decisions on Tuesday and Wednesday did not address whether the federal government followed the law when it fired the probationary workers en masse. If the courts decide that the plaintiffs cannot bring the challenges, questions about the legality of the firings may go unanswered. “That does not mean, however, that the probationary employees lack valid claims,” said Nick Bednar, an administrative law expert at the University of Minnesota. “The problem is determining how these employees will find relief.” In multiple cases challenging the Trump administration’s personnel actions, the federal government has argued that Congress established a separate system for federal employees to handle employment disputes: the independent Merit Systems Protection Board. But that system, experts say, was not designed to handle the number of mass firings carried out by the Trump administration. Mr. Trump fired the head of that board, Cathy Harris, who then sued. Ms. Harris has since been reinstated and fired again multiple times. The latest twist came on Wednesday, when the Supreme Court sided, for now, with the Trump administration, allowing the government to remove her, along with Gwynne Wilcox, who leads the National Labor Relations Board, another independent panel that protects federal workers’ rights. Ms. Harris and Ms. Wilcox will remain fired while the Supreme Court reviews the case, according to an interim order issued by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. Representative Darrell Issa, Republican of California, introduced the bill barring federal district judges from issuing nationwide injunctions.Credit...Valerie Plesch for The New York Times The House passed legislation on Wednesday that would bar federal district judges from issuing nationwide injunctions, part of an escalating Republican campaign to take aim at judges who have moved to halt some of President Trump’s executive orders. The bill, approved mostly along party lines on a vote of 219 to 213, would largely limit district court judges to issuing narrow orders that pertain to parties involved in a specific lawsuit, rather than broader ones that can block a policy or action from being enforced throughout the country. It would make an exception in cases that were brought by multiple states, which would need to be heard by a three-judge panel. It faces a slim chance of becoming law because of the obstacles it faces in the Senate, where seven Democrats would have to join Republicans to allow it to advance. So far, similar bills have not been approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee. House Republicans have framed the legislation, named the No Rogue Rulings Act, as a necessary constitutional check on what they claim is an abuse of power by judges attempting to wield political influence from the bench. Citing an increase in nationwide injunctions since Mr. Trump took office, Republican lawmakers have argued that an unelected federal judge in one district should not be able to block the executive branch from implementing nationwide policies, a duty they say should be left to appeals courts or the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court “must reach a majority in order to make something the law of the land, and yet a single district judge believes that they can make the law of the land,” Representative Darrell Issa, the California Republican who introduced the bill, said on the House floor on Wednesday. Democrats have argued that federal judges are simply performing their duty to review executive actions. They say that Mr. Trump has been subject to a flurry of injunctions because he has pushed aggressive policies that exceed the scope of his authority and violate the law. “If it seems like an incredible number of cases to lose in less than 100 days, recall that Trump is engaged in a record number of illegal actions at a breathtaking velocity never seen before in U.S. history,” Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, said. Nationwide injunctions, in which judges stop policies from being implemented while their legality is being weighed in court, have long been used by judges to halt actions taken by both Democratic and Republican administrations. Their use grew during President Barack Obama’s second term and then exploded during Mr. Trump’s first term, when 64 injunctions were issued against his administration’s policies, according to a 2024 survey by the Harvard Law Review. During President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s term, judges used them to halt a federal mask mandate on airplanes, a Covid-19 vaccine mandate for federal contractors and parts of a student debt relief plan. Members of both parties have complained about nationwide injunctions for years, and some Supreme Court justices have voiced skepticism about the tactic. But Republican anger over the practice has boiled over during Mr. Trump’s second term after a number of rulings went against him, particularly around immigration. Less than three months into Mr. Trump’s second term, district judges have issued nationwide injunctions or temporary restraining orders that stopped the Trump administration from firing thousands of civil servants; ending birthright citizenship for children of undocumented immigrants and foreign residents born on American soil; barring transgender troops from the military; and deporting migrants using an 18th-century wartime law. The Trump administration has filed emergency applications to reverse many of these decrees, and has asked the Supreme Court to weigh in on the legality of nationwide injunctions, as part of a case related to Mr. Trump’s executive order attempting to eliminate birthright citizenship. Implementation of that order was paused nationally by lower federal courts. A ruling on it from the justices is expected any time. Just this week, the Supreme Court blocked district court rulings that would have required the rehiring of fired probationary workers and temporarily stopped the administration from deporting migrants using the Alien Enemies Act, a law from 1798 that the White House has said allows it to deport supposed gang members without court hearings. Mr. Issa’s bill gained momentum in the wake of that last case, in which James E. Boasberg, a veteran judge in the District of Columbia, temporarily stopped the administration’s deportations. A furious Mr. Trump called for Judge Boasberg to be impeached, a call echoed by key advisers and a number of hard-right House Republicans. But no federal judge has ever been impeached strictly for the outcome of a case, and Republican leaders have been wary of pursuing judicial impeachments. Instead, they suggested pursuing alternatives, including curbing judges’ powers. Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, the Republican chairman of the Judiciary Committee, has called for using spending bills to limit their ability to issue nationwide injunctions.