President Donald Trump is expected to welcome UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer at the White House tomorrow.

They will meet in the Oval Office at 12:20 p.m. ET, followed by a closed lunch and then a news conference at 2:00 p.m. ET, the White House said.

For the second day in a row, the White House has included additional outlets as part of the press pool. On Thursday, NewsNation will join as the secondary television crew, and the pro-Trump conservative outlet, “The Daily Signal,” will join in the new media position. Reuters will be the wire service included in the pool, while other wires, Bloomberg News and the Associated Press, are not included, per White House guidance.

House Speaker Mike Johnson insisted Wednesday that Republicans would not make cuts to Medicaid or Medicare as they work to pass — and pay for — President Donald Trump’s agenda.

Pressed on how they would cut the amount laid out in the House’s budget blueprint without touching Medicare and Medicaid, Johnson argued that it is possible through work requirements and other cuts. Johnson also said that per capita caps on federal funding for those programs are “off the table.”

“Let’s let this play out,” he added.

Trump has promised repeatedly not to cut Medicaid, Medicare or Social Security, including during his administration’s first Cabinet meeting earlier Wednesday.

The House GOP plan calls for at least $1.5 trillion in spending cuts — and if it doesn’t hit $2 trillion, it forces tax-writers to downsize some of their plans. Almost $1 trillion of that will come from savings in the Energy and Commerce committee, which even some Republicans fear could mean steep cuts to the popular health program Medicaid.

Chief Justice John Roberts tonight paused a court-imposed midnight deadline that would have required the Trump administration to spend $2 billion in frozen foreign aid — a goal the government has claimed it is unable to meet.

The emergency appeal marks the first time President Donald Trump’s efforts to drastically remake the federal government — including with deep cuts across government agencies — have reached the nation’s highest court. The case appears likely to put the justices on a collision course with Trump’s sweeping efforts to consolidate power within the executive branch.

Roberts’ order does not resolve the underlying questions raised by the case. Rather, it imposed what’s known as an “administrative stay” to give the court a few days to review written arguments in the case. Roberts is the justice designated to handle emergency cases from the federal appeals court in Washington, DC.

The chief justice called for the groups that sued the administration to respond by Friday.

This post was updated with more details.

The Justice Department is abandoning cases that sought to force police and fire departments to end what the Biden administration alleged were discriminatory hiring processes, Attorney General Pam Bondi said Wednesday in the latest move by the Trump administration to end government support for efforts to increase diversity.

A Justice Department official said the administration is walking away from four cases, including one that led to a settlement agreement resolving an investigation into discriminatory hiring practices affecting Black and female applicants to the Maryland State Police.

It’s part of a broader effort by President Donald Trump’s administration to roll back initiatives and programs promoting diversity, equity and inclusion, which Republicans contend threaten merit-based hiring.

In the Maryland case, the Biden administration announced in October that it had reached an agreement with state police to change the ways applicants are tested after the department alleged police used a written test that discriminated against Black candidates and a physical fitness test that discriminated against female applicants.

The Biden administration found the tests disqualified Black and female applicants from the hiring process at significantly disproportionate rates, concluding that the tests violated a federal statute that prohibits employment discrimination based on race, sex, color, national origin, and religion.

Bondi’s chief of staff, Chad Mizelle, said in a social media post that the Biden administration had sought to punish police and fire departments “for using race-neutral hiring tools,” even though he said there is “no evidence that the departments engaged in intentional discrimination.”

Maryland State Police did not immediately respond to a request for comment Wednesday evening.

President Donald Trump’s administration on Wednesday filed an emergency appeal at the Supreme Court that asks the justices to halt a midnight deadline to restart $2 billion in foreign aid payments.

The filing leapfrogs an appeals court that had been considering the request.

A group of nonprofits and contractors sued over the Trump’s administration’s freezing of US Agency for International Development and State Department funds.

In a temporary restraining order issued earlier this month, US District Judge Amir Ali directed the State Department and USAID to restore funding for contracts that predated the Trump administration but were frozen by the new administration.

But the nonprofits and contractors who challenged the funding freeze repeatedly complained to the judge that the government was slow to fulfill its obligations, prompting Ali to order the payments to resume by midnight Wednesday.

The Trump administration said today that it will take “multiple weeks” to pay out nearly $2 billion owed to contractors and organizations affected by late January’s sweeping foreign aid freeze.

The Trump administration said it is terminating more than 90% of the US Agency for International Development’s foreign aid awards, according to a Wednesday court filing.

In addition to the USAID award terminations, “approximately 4,100 State awards were terminated, and approximately 2,700 State awards were retained,” according to the filing.

The administration clarified in a filing later Wednesday that “there are still 297 contracts that need to be reviewed.”

The significant slashing of foreign aid awards is a blow to the work of nonprofit organizations and contractors. Aid programs around the world have ground to a halt due to a sweeping fundingfreeze and review of billions of dollars of assistance.

It comes as the Trump administration has either placed the majority of USAID’s workforce on leave or terminated them.

The updates from the Trump administration were filed in response to a lawsuit challenging the blanket foreign aid suspension.

According to a filing, Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Wednesday had “made a final decision with respect to each award, on an individualized basis, affirmatively electing to either retain the award or terminate it pursuant to the terms of the instrument or independent legal authority as inconsistent with the national interests and foreign policy of the United States.”

However, the plaintiffs in that lawsuit pushed back Wednesday on the claim that Rubio was personally reviewing all of the termination decisions, arguing “it would be impossible for one person or even a group of people to meaningfully review all of these contracts and awards in such a short period.”

Senate Majority Leader John Thune would not commit to accepting the deep spending cuts called for in the House budget blueprint that was adopted last night but said GOP senators will start assessing those questions now.

“We’re going to take the measure of that pretty soon and find out if that’s something we can do,” Thune said.

He praised the bill that came out of the House as a “good product to work with” but said ensuring tax cuts in the bill are permanent, not temporary, is a key provision Senate Republicans want to include in a final bill.

Thune also said there are meetings scheduled next week for Senate Republicans to get briefed on the contours of the budget debate and the path forward.

Republican hardliners in the House made clear on Wednesday they’re going to hold firm in demanding significant spending cuts as part of any proposed strategy to advance President Donald Trump’s agenda, presenting a hurdle to GOP leadership who are in the process of determining how the House and Senate can agree on the same blueprint.

Rep. Chip Roy, who praised the “serious spending restraint” in the House’s blueprint, warned the Senate, “if they think they’re going to just do permanence on taxes and then get rid of the spending restraint and then send it back over here and get a warm reception, they’re not, at least for me, so they better stick to and/or improve the spending cut side of the equation.”

Rep. Ralph Norman called the framework the Senate advanced last week a “joke,” arguing there are basically “no cuts” in the other chamber’s narrower strategy.

House Speaker Mike Johnson said “big decisions” were made in Wednesday’s White House meeting with President Donald Trump and Senate Majority Leader John Thune on the budget resolution. The president will “announce all that later,” Johnson added.

Returning from the White House Wednesday, Johnson said “lots of progress” was made during the budget talks, but he still cautioned the Senate against any huge tweaks to the House version of the resolution.

Johnson said it’s the goal to make Trump’s tax cuts permanent and suggested that they could be offset by the fraud found by the Department of Government Efficiency, Trump’s tariffs and the president’s latest “gold card” immigration proposal — where wealthy immigrants could pay $5 million for a path to citizenship.

“All these things are going to change the math,” Johnson said. “So, it will be developing over the next several weeks as we’re working through all this.”

Vice President JD Vance, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and White House National Economic Council director Kevin Hassett also attended the meeting, according to Johnson.

The House speaker also told reporters that a one-year continuing resolution to fund the government “looks as though it is becoming inevitable at this point.”

More than 20,000 undocumented immigrants were arrested during Donald Trump’s first month as president, according to the Department of Homeland Security.

The Trump administration launched an immigration crackdown in the moments after his inauguration and publicized daily arrest totals during his first couple of weeks in office.

The pace of at-large arrests — meaning those done in the community — exceeded the Biden administration. In the last fiscal year, under Biden, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement conducted around 33,000 at-large arrests.

Senior Trump officials have expressed frustration with the pace of arrests, resulting in the removal of the acting ICE director last week.

Trump has made some recent moves to increase the number of arrests, including directing ICE agents to track down and deport thousands of migrant children who entered the country without their parents, according to an internal memo obtained by Reuters.

His administration is also considering a war-time authority to speed up deportations for certain undocumented immigrants.

Several of the Trump administration’s other directives have been held up in court, including the most recent decision by a federal judge in Seattle halting Trump’s order to suspend refugee admissions and funding,

President Donald Trump signed an executive action Wednesday that freezes agency employees’ credit cards for 30 days as part of the Department of Government Efficiency’s “efficiency initiative,” according to the official rapid response X account from the White House.

All credit cards that agency employees have will be “frozen” for the next 30 days — starting on the date of the action. There are few exceptions, which include “employees engaged in, or charges related to employees utilizing such credit cards for, disaster relief or natural disaster response benefits or operations or other critical services as determined by the Agency Head,” the order reads.

Agency employees must also record justifications for grants and loans, with those justifications posted publicly “to the maximum extent deemed practicable by the Agency Head,” according to the action. And employees must submit justification for federally funded travel for conferences “or other non-essential purposes.”

The action makes exemptions for law enforcement officers, US Customs and Border Protection and US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, as well as for classified information or systems.

Trump’s signing of the executive action comes on the same day that he held his first Cabinet meeting, where DOGE’s Elon Musk had a prominent role.

Energy Secretary Chris Wright on Wednesday said the first meeting of President Donald Trump’s Cabinet involved a “wide-ranging discussion” while dismissing the idea that Elon Musk, the billionaire tasked with reforming the federal government, is directing Cabinet secretaries on how to run their agencies.

The energy secretary said following the roughly hourlong news conference that opened the meeting, “there was a wide-ranging dialogue around the table from the Cabinet members, the president and the vice president.”

Wright said he doesn’t believe Department of Government Efficiency-directed cuts to the federal workforce will impair his agency’s initiatives “at all.”

“DOGE is like consultants,” he said. ”They’re like auditors coming into your business to gather data, identify trends for you. And then each secretary is going to use that information differently to make their department leaner, but more efficient and higher output.”

President Donald Trump said the United States will be reversing “concessions” on “the oil transaction agreement” with Venezuela under the Biden administration, citing unmet electoral conditions by authoritarian president Nicolás Maduro and a dissatisfaction with the pace of transporting violent undocumented Venezuelan criminals back to their home country.

“I am therefore ordering that the ineffective and unmet Biden ‘Concession Agreement’ be terminated as of the March 1st option to renew. Thank you for your attention to this matter!” he said today on Truth Social.

It was part of the Biden administration’s effort to ease restrictions on certain financial transactions involving Venezuela, particularly in the oil sector, amid ongoing negotiations between the Maduro government and the Venezuelan opposition to promote free and fair elections in Venezuela. But some sanctions were reimposed after Maduro blocked the opposition candidate, Maria Corina Machado, from the presidential election.

Though Trump does not explicitly mention Chevron, the Biden administration authorized Chevron to “resume limited natural resource extraction operations in Venezuela,” according to the Treasury Department at the time. Trump said that this authorization would not be renewed on March 1, as it normally would be, but terminated.

Venezuelan Vice President Delcy Rodríguez criticized what she called Trump’s “damaging and inexplicable decision.”

“The United States government has made a damaging and inexplicable decision by announcing sanctions against the US company Chevron. In its attempt to harm the Venezuelan people, it is in fact hurting the United States, its population and its companies, and also calling into question the legal security of the US´s international investment regime,” she said in a statement.

CNN’s Jennifer Hansler contributed to the reporting.

Hampton Dellinger, fired by President Donald Trump from the Office of Special Counsel, will be allowed to remain at least until Saturday, a federal judge said following a hearing Wednesday.

Because the case raises such significant constitutional questions, Judge Amy Berman Jackson, who had previously given Dellinger a temporary restraining order keeping him in place until today, extended her order for three days.

The Justice Department has indicated it wants the Supreme Court to eventually make the dispute a crucial first test of Trump’s presidential authority as he gives orders to cut back the federal workforce and replace some officials with people of his choosing. The high court previously declined to reverse his reinstatement, at least initially.

Jackson said she’d write a fuller opinion likely by Saturday, which will tee up Dellinger’s case to the appeals courts above, including likely the Supreme Court.

The Trump administration has argued that Jackson doesn’t even have the power to add three days to Dellinger’s tenure after reinstating him to the job earlier this month, saying his employment should be the president’s decision alone.

White House chief of staff Susie Wiles answered questions about a number of topics at a closed-door lunch meeting with GOP senators — including about Elon Musk and his role in the administration, an issue that has caused growing GOP angst on Capitol Hill.

According to Sen. Josh Hawley, Wiles laid out the “nuts and bolts” of Musk’s job and said that he reports directly to Trump — not Cabinet secretaries.

Sen. Tommy Tuberville of Alabama, said Wiles explained Musk’s “procedure, what they do and how they do it…how Elon runs it, how he’s hired people, put them together, where they go, what they’re doing next.”

Wiles did not get into the details on the budget blueprint and how to reconcile the House and Senate Republicans’ sharply divergent approaches. The two chambers must agree and pass one blueprint in order to move ahead with Trump’s larger agenda through the budget process, which allows them to pass it along party lines in the Senate.

At the end of the meeting, Senate Majority Leader John Thune told his colleagues there would be changes to the House bill, according to GOP senators.

“He doesn’t think the House resolution gets the job done in terms of permanency and other issues,” Hawley said, referring to making permanent the expiring 2017 tax law.

Thune said: “There need to be changes made” to the House plan.

The Trump administration says it will take “multiple weeks” to pay out nearly $2 billion owed to contractors and organizations affected by late January’s sweeping foreign aid freeze, despite a court order to have it completed by midnight tonight.

The administration claimed the State Department was “expected” to pay $4 million it owes for work done prior to the freeze and said United States Agency for International Development has released over $11 million.

Plaintiffs in the lawsuit, which was brought by nonprofits and contractors alleging harm by the blanket freeze on foreign assistance, argued that the Trump administration has “undertaken no meaningful efforts whatsoever” to make the payments. They said the administration’s dismantling of the USAID workforce make it ““extremely difficult, if not impossible” to comply with the orders.

Judge Amir Ali issued a temporary restraining order nearly two weeks ago partially pausing the blanket funding freeze and ordering the revival of funding for contracts that existed at the end of Biden administration, but the funding hasn’t restarted.

At an emergency hearing on Tuesday, a Justice Department lawyer could not point to any particular programs that had their funding restored, nor could the lawyer elaborate on how the State Department and USAID were carrying out the judge’s order.

The judge responded by ordering payment by midnight tonight of all foreign aid work that had been completed by the time of his original order.

Senate Republicans are signaling they’re ready to take a buzzsaw to the House’s plans for President Donald Trump’s first major legislative package in a high-stakes clash that is likely just the start of the obstacles Hill Republicans will face this spring.

Just hours after Speaker Mike Johnson and the House GOP passed a hard-fought blueprint that allows lawmakers to start drafting Trump’s sweeping agenda, key Senate Republicans, including Majority Leader John Thune, signaled they won’t simply accept that same plan.

Other GOP senators were more blunt about the House’s starkly different approach. Asked whether the Senate should simply adopt the House plan, Sen. John Kennedy told CNN: “Short answer is likely no. Long answer is hell no.”

: The urgent — and politically fraught — discussions on how to settle those differences have already begun. Thune and Johnson are meeting with Trump this afternoon, after the two Hill GOP leaders huddled earlier in the morning.

Both chambers need to adopt identical blueprints to unlock the procedural powers that would allow Republicans to pass their priorities without Democratic votes. If the two chambers fail to pass identical blueprints, Republicans fear that key pieces of Trump’s agenda will be stalled for good.

President Donald Trump held the first official Cabinet meeting of his second term on Wednesday at the White House.

Seated alongside agency leaders in a long wooden table, the president took questions from reporters on a range of topics, including his government overhaul, Ukraine and immigration.

Elon Musk, who is not a Cabinet member but has led the Trump administration’s effort to shrink the federal workforce and remake the government, was also in the room.

The tech billionaire tried to clarify that his email blast requiring federal workers to detail their past week’s work was not a performance review, but a “pulse check.” However, Trump was quick to interrupt to claim those federal workers who have not replied to the email “are on the bubble” and at risk of getting fired.

Here are some other top lines from the meeting:

Most of President Donald Trump’s Cabinet members were confirmed by the Senate in time for his first Cabinet meeting on Wednesday.

Four members requiring Senate approval had not yet been confirmed, including US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer, who was voted in by the Senate the same day.

It is common for presidents to convene the first meeting while the Senate approval process continues. In Trump’s first term, he convened his first Cabinet meeting on March 13, 2017, before convening the full Cabinet later that year in June.

In the midst of the mass firings of thousands of federal workers, the Trump administration is taking another step to reshape federal agencies by increasing the number of employees who would be loyal to the president’s policy agenda.

In a memo, sent to to agency heads on Monday, the Office of Personnel Management instructed the agencies to begin the process of reclassifying top career positions as political positions appointed by the president.

This move would potentially impact thousands of current career positions government wide. By law, there must be at least 3,571 career reserved positions government wide, OPM says, but that there are now more than double that amount.

The Senior Executives Association, a union that represents the interests of career federal executives, puts the number of these workers at more than 8,000.

“The Trump Administration is now making moves to further politicize the senior levels of our government by converting nonpartisan executive positions to jobs where he can place loyalists and partisans. This is yet one more big step towards the return to the spoils system, which will lead to corruption and incompetence in our government,” said Max Stier, president of the Partnership for Public Service, a nonpartisan organization focused on the federal government.

The memo points to over 200 positions involved in policy making decisions that are currently handled by career executives rather than political appointees.

“Major policies of the President or agency head are filtered through appointees with reduced democratic accountability,” Charles Ezell, OPM’s acting director wrote in the memo, adding the positions were not intended “to supplant that leadership.”

OPM instructs agencies to respond with their own proposals by March 24.