Donald Trump’s cabinet picks are facing more resistance from bureaucracy than policy or politicians. But first, you should know:
- Large swaths of Republicans never once voted for a federal debt limit hike — a hurdle to the party’s go-it-alone strategy.
- Republicans see wins in President Joe Biden’s energy-focused effort to scale up AI infrastructure.
- Speaker Mike Johnson removed Mike Turner as House Intelligence chairman, and plans to announce a replacement today.
Some Trump Picks Sail in Senate, Paperwork Slows Others
Trump expected nominees Marco Rubio for secretary of State, John Ratcliffe for CIA director and Pam Bondi for attorney general look set for success when their names come up for conformation votes in the Senate.
Rubio (R-Fla.) has bipartisan support — unlike some of Trump’s more controversial cabinet picks — which allowed the Wednesday hearing to quickly delve into foreign policy minutiae. A longtime China hawk, Rubio said he would revisit some Biden administration policies, including the current president’s decision to rescind Cuba’s designation as a state sponsor of terrorism. Read More
He also said he would seek new ways to apply pressure to adversaries, including reexamining US oil company licenses to operate in Venezuela and using US liquefied natural gas exports to China as “leverage” in talks with Beijing. Read More
Bondi’s hearing was dominated by questions about how independent she’ll be from Trump and White House pressure, and how she’d handle politically explosive matters like calls by conservatives to prosecute political enemies. She wouldn’t rule out investigating prosecutors who carried out criminal probes into Trump’s conduct.
Bondi often didn’t provide direct answers and declined to say she would advise Trump against pardoning individuals who assaulted cops during the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol.
Ratcliffe stressed the need to collect more information from human sources abroad to prevent what some senators called a string of intelligence failures, like the spy agency’s failure to anticipate the collapse of Syria’s Assad regime.
Ratcliffe said it’s “absolutely essential” the CIA chief be apolitical and pledged he “would never” take reprisals against staff for their views.
Chris Wright — who’s vying to lead the Energy Department — praised the work of US national laboratories and also voiced support for solar energy, carbon capture systems and efforts to build more transmission lines to make the US power grid more stable.
Sean Duffy — tapped to lead the Transportation Department — told senators he would review penalties US aviation regulators proposed against Elon Musk’s SpaceX. But he said he wouldn’t interfere with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s ongoing probe into Tesla. Duffy also said he backs developing a federal framework for self-driving cars — something Musk supports. Read More
But PAPERWORK is proving more of a holdup for the cabinet than senators, Lillianna Byington reports.
Nomination hearings for the proposed secretaries of Veterans Affairs, Interior, and Homeland Security all faced punts this week. Committee leaders blamed the delays on the need to finish FBI background checks or get disclosures from the Office of Government Ethics. The full paperwork for those reviews wasn’t sent to committees in time for the original hearing dates. Read More
GOP Debt Plan Needs Dozens of ‘No’ Voters
More than a third of House Republicans never supported a debt-ceiling hike — a big obstacle for Donald Trump’s push to raise the federal borrowing limit, Jack Fitzpatrick and Ken Tran report.
Four dozen House Republicans always voted against debt limit hikes signed into law, while 33 new Republicans never voted at all on raising the nation’s borrowing authority, according to a Bloomberg Government analysis of more than four decades of House votes.
The bloc could force Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) to seek Democrats’ support, which creates another problem — they’ll aim to use the vote as leverage over tax policy if Johnson can’t rally near-unanimous support among his conference. That could disrupt the party’s broader legislative agenda to package the debt limit increase with a major tax bill, border wall funding, and other top priorities in one massive budget reconciliation package.
Johnson already acknowledged the difficulty, telling reporters Tuesday he’s “not really wed to” the plan to raise the debt limit through reconciliation, and leaders are still working with members. Read More
Read BGOV’s Congress Tracker for our breakdown of lawmakers’ agenda and the politics driving it.
Republicans See Wins in Biden AI Order
The president-elect and the president don’t see eye-to-eye on many energy issues. President Joe Biden’s new executive order on AI infrastructure may be an exception.
Federal agencies should accelerate energy permitting processes and free up federal lands for companies to build new AI data centers, according to the order released Tuesday. Even the requirement that companies leasing the federal lands find new clean energy sources to fuel the centers might be palatable to the GOP.
- The Trump White House should “look carefully” at Biden’s AI policies broadly, but “certainly, there’s a lot of good stuff in this one,” Rep. Jay Obernolte (R-Calif.) said in an interview.
Some parts of the order are still drawing ire from Republicans. Companies would have to cover the costs of building the AI data centers on federal land, for example, and to allow the artificial intelligence models developed on site to be evaluated for national security risks. These could prove costly for businesses, a Trump-era Federal Trade Commission staffer said.
- The overall deal is “not very strong,” said Neil Chilson, former chief technologist at the agency during Trump’s first administration. He added that Trump could improve on it. Read More
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