Trump Administration Live Updates: Republicans’ Sweeping Domestic Policy Bill Is in Peril

Here are some key developments from Mr. Trump’s trip:

• Syria meeting: Mr. Trump spoke with Syria’s new president, Ahmed al-Shara, on Wednesday in an extraordinary meeting that reversed longstanding U.S. policies toward the country and Mr. Shara, a former militant who once led a branch of Al Qaeda. A day earlier, Mr. Trump announced that he would lift U.S. sanctions on Syria, which would offer a significant economic lifeline to a country devastated by years of civil war.

• Deals, deals, deals: The White House has said Mr. Trump’s visit resulted in deals worth hundreds of billions of dollars for U.S. companies, including a large order from Qatar for Boeing passenger jets. But details have been sparse and some of the agreements had already been in the works.

• Iran negotiations: Mr. Trump also suggested that there had been progress in nuclear talks with Iran. While insisting that the United States would not allow Tehran to develop a nuclear weapon, he said his administration was in “very serious negotiations with Iran for long-term peace.”

• War in Gaza: Mr. Trump did not visit America’s biggest regional ally, Israel, and largely sidestepped the conflict in Gaza even as Israeli strikes killed dozens of Palestinians across the territory. On Friday, he said he wanted to see the conflict resolved and made a rare acknowledgment of the civilian suffering there. “There’s a lot of people starving, a lot of bad things going on,” he said.

• Ukraine talks: Mr. Trump kept people guessing over whether he would travel to Turkey to bolster cease-fire talks involving Russia and Ukraine, but ultimately decided not to go. Russian and Ukrainian officials were in Istanbul for talks, along with top Trump administration officials, but President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia was not attending and expectations for a breakthrough were low.

Their public statements have raised significant questions about whether the administration is openly defying the Supreme Court’s instructions — and what, if anything, might be done about that.

But even as those weighty issues simmer in the background, the White House is confronting a more immediate concern: whether it has been abiding by a separate court order to answer questions about the way it has been handling the case.

On Friday, lawyers for the Justice Department are scheduled to appear in Federal District Court in Maryland to defend their latest effort to avoid disclosing details about several key aspects of the proceeding. Those include the diplomatic steps that officials have taken in the past few weeks toward releasing Mr. Abrego Garcia, as well as the nature of the deal between the White House and the Salvadoran government to house deported immigrants in its jails.

The Justice Department has argued that many of those details should not be made public because they amount to state secrets. In fact, in a declaration filed last week mostly under seal, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that the disclosure of such material “could be expected to cause significant harm to the foreign relations and national security interests of the United States.”

Lawyers for Mr. Abrego Garcia have scoffed at the idea that the government’s efforts to free their client from El Salvador should be considered a state secret, especially given that Mr. Trump and some of his top aides have been talking publicly about the man for weeks.

“On its face, there is little reason to believe that compliance with a court order to facilitate the release and return of a single mistakenly removed individual so that he can get his day in court implicates state secrets at all,” the lawyers wrote in a court filing this week. “No military or intelligence operations are involved, and it defies reason to imagine that the United States’ relationship with El Salvador would be endangered by any effort to seek the return of a wrongfully deported person who the government admits never should have been removed to El Salvador in the first place.”

Judge Paula Xinis, who is presiding over the proceeding, will hear both sides of this debate on Friday and eventually determine whether to let the government use what is known as the state secrets privilege and other legal protections to keep its internal deliberations under wraps. The hearing in front of her could become contentious, if only because the administration has for weeks been stonewalling her efforts to get to the bottom of how it has been handling the Abrego Garcia case.

In early April, for example, the judge determined that the White House had failed to comply with the Supreme Court’s instructions to “facilitate” Mr. Abrego Garcia’s release from Salvadoran custody. As an initial remedy, she ordered the government to provide her with daily updates about what steps it had taken and planned to take to secure Mr. Abrego Garcia’s freedom.

Then, after a federal appeals court directed officials to take a more proactive role in getting him out of custody, Judge Xinis opened an investigation into what exactly the administration had been doing. As part of that inquiry, she ordered Trump officials to answer questions — both in person and in writing — about the deal they had reached to house deported immigrants in El Salvador and what had been done to free Mr. Abrego Garcia from the notorious mega-prison there known as CECOT.

But that process also broke down and Judge Xinis quickly blasted the government for what she called its “willful and bad faith refusal” to adequately answer the questions. Just as she appeared to be losing patience, the Justice Department asked her for a pause in the question-asking process, suggesting there had been a diplomatic development that justified a seven-day delay.

The New York Times reported that around that time, officials at the State Department had sent a note to their counterparts in El Salvador inquiring about having Mr. Abrego Garcia released, but El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, rejected the offer.

In the end, Judge Xinis granted the Justice Department’s request for a delay, but denied department lawyers when they asked her for a second weeklong pause. Last week, finally faced with having to answer questions about the case, department lawyers countered with their latest legal maneuver: an invocation of the state secrets privilege.

It was not the first time that the administration tried the same tactic in a deportation case.

In late March, the Justice Department invoked the state secrets privilege in an effort to avoid providing data to a federal judge in Washington about three charter planes that flew to El Salvador that month carrying Mr. Abrego Garcia and scores of other immigrants.

The judge in that case, James E. Boasberg, wanted the data in an effort to determine whether the government had flouted his order to turn the planes around. Judge Boasberg’s investigation into the White House’s compliance with his ruling was temporarily put on hold last month by the federal appeals court that sits over him.

The phrase has not previously been described by officials in the current administration as threatening to Mr. Trump, but soon after Mr. Comey made the post on Thursday, Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, asserted that the former F.B.I. director had “called for the assassination” of Mr. Trump and that “D.H.S. and Secret Service is investigating this threat and will respond appropriately.”

Other high-level Trump administration officials soon chimed in to denounce Mr. Comey’s post, which he had already removed and replaced with a new message that he “didn’t realize some folks associate those numbers with violence.” Kash Patel, the current F.B.I. director, announced that his agency would “support the investigation” by the Secret Service, and Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, appeared on Fox News hours later and said that Mr. Comey should be jailed.

“James Comey, in my view, should be held accountable and put behind bars,” Ms. Gabbard said in an interview with Jesse Watters.

Critics calling for the president to be “86’d” goes back at least to Mr. Trump’s first term. Weeks before the 2020 election, Mr. Trump’s re-election campaign seized on a pin that said “86 45” that could be seen on a table behind Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan during a TV interview. Asserting that “86 can be shorthand for killing someone,” the Trump campaign accused Ms. Whitmer of “encouraging assassination attempts against President Trump.”

After President Joseph R. Biden Jr. took office, clothing and signs with “86 46,” referring to Mr. Biden, soon began to appear and continue to be sold online. During the 2024 campaign, Mr. Trump posted a video featuring an image of Mr. Biden hogtied on the back of a truck, imagery that had spread among Mr. Trump’s followers. Mr. Trump had frequently featured violent imagery on his social media accounts during the campaign.

In another sign of the Trump administration’s hostility toward the broadcaster, the federal building in Washington that houses the media organization was put up for sale on Thursday.

Michael Abramowitz, the director of Voice of America, said in an email to his staff on Thursday that the firings were “inexplicable.”

“I am heartbroken,” he said. Mr. Abramowitz has sued to stop the Trump administration from closing the news organization.

Kari Lake, a senior adviser at the U.S. Agency for Global Media, which oversees Voice of America, said that the Trump administration had acted within its legal authority.

“We are in the process of rightsizing the agency and reducing the federal bureaucracy to meet administration priorities,” Ms. Lake, who is leading the efforts to ramp down the operations of Voice of America, said in a statement. “We will continue to scale back the bloat at U.S.A.G.M. and make an archaic dinosaur into something worthy of being funded by hardworking Americans.”

She added: “Buckle up. There’s more to come.”

Some of the journalists who were terminated on Thursday were from countries with repressive governments that persecute journalists for independent reporting, Mr. Abramowitz said in the email to employees on Thursday.

Those journalists now have to leave the United States by the end of June, as their immigration status is tied to employment at the news organization.

In a letter sent on Thursday to employees who had been fired, the Trump administration cited “the government’s convenience” as a reason for the terminations. The employees were under so-called personal services contracts, making them easier to let go than regular full-time employees with full civil service protections.

Mr. Trump has accused the outlet, which delivers news to countries with repressive regimes — including Russia, China and Iran — of spreading “anti-American” and partisan “propaganda.”

In March, Ms. Lake, a Trump ally and unsuccessful candidate for governor and Senate in Arizona, had declared her own workplace “unsalvageable.” She has also claimed that the U.S. Agency for Global Media and its newsrooms were rampant with “waste, fraud and abuse,” without providing evidence.

Ms. Lake said last week that Voice of America would incorporate content from One America News Network, a pro-Trump television channel that has endorsed falsehoods about the 2020 presidential election.

Voice of America, which was founded in 1942, halted operations on March 15, a day after Mr. Trump signed an executive order seeking to gut the U.S. Agency for Global Media. Its news programming has been partly restored since the April court ruling that stopped the Trump administration from dismantling the agency and other newsrooms it oversees.

The Trump administration has challenged the April ruling, claiming that the lower court had gone too far in halting other firings that took place in March.

In early May, a federal appeals court paused parts of the April lower court order that required the Trump administration to rehire the employees.

The Trump administration did not appeal parts of the April order that mandated the resumption of Voice of America’s news programming. The lower court found that Congress had required the executive branch to keep the network as “a consistently reliable and authoritative source of news.”

The Trump administration has since kept most of Voice of America’s operations shuttered while restoring parts of its service. Its Mandarin and Persian services, for example, were restored. But the news organization’s English website has stopped updating since March 15.

Lydia DePillis contributed reporting.

Major portions of the sprawling package remain unresolved, amid Republican divisions over cuts to Medicaid and details of the tax plan, among other issues. But the emerging package provides a newly detailed picture of the party’s policy priorities, as well as a road map of the sticking points that could derail what Mr. Trump calls the “big, beautiful bill.”

Republicans are pushing the package through Congress using a special process known as budget reconciliation that allows them to steer around a filibuster and win approval without a single Democratic vote. But with tiny majorities in both chambers, they can afford to lose no more than three Republican votes in both the House and Senate. The first test will come in the House, where leaders want to bring it up before Memorial Day.

Here’s a look at the bill, and the biggest remaining areas of disagreement within the party:

Cutting taxes

The bottom line: The heart of the bill is a roughly $3.8 trillion tax cut that would lock in many of the tax cuts Republicans passed in 2017, including lower marginal income rates, a larger standard deduction and a higher threshold for the estate tax, with some tweaks.

The measure also includes several new, temporary tax cuts that Mr. Trump campaigned on, including his promises not to tax tips or overtime. His pitch not to tax Social Security benefits takes the form of a bonus $4,000 deduction available to Americans over 65, with the benefit shrinking at higher income levels. Americans would also be able to deduct interest on car loans from their taxable income, though the car has to be made in the United States.

The reductions would last only through 2028, as would a $1,000 addition to the standard deduction and a $500 bonus to the child tax credit, which now maxes out at $2,000. Children born over the next four years would receive $1,000 deposited in a so-called “MAGA account” that is invested in the stock market.

Businesses would receive several tax cuts, including valuable deductions for research and investment spending, as well as a new tax break for building factories. A deduction available to the owners of many businesses would become slightly more generous and be extended indefinitely.

The bill also includes tax hikes on universities, noncitizens and some families with children. A tax on the investment income that university endowments earn would rise substantially, from 1.4 percent to as high as 21 percent. Immigrants authorized to live in the United States — but who are not citizens or green card holders — would be barred from receiving tax credits covering the cost of health insurance premiums. And tighter eligibility rules for the child tax credit would take the benefit away from roughly two million children.

The sticking points: The biggest problem for the tax plan, for now, is the state and local tax deduction. The bill would triple the current $10,000 limit on the cap to $30,000. But a group of holdout Republicans from high-tax states like New York have demanded an even higher increase to the cap, a challenging prospect for Republican leaders who also need the support of conservatives who hate the expensive tax break.

Scaling back Medicaid

The bottom line: The bill makes major changes to reduce the cost of the health insurance program for the poor and disabled. The centerpiece of those efforts is a strict work requirement for childless adults without disabilities, which would require beneficiaries to document 80 hours of monthly work, or prove they qualified for an exception, or else risk losing their benefits. Those new rules would not kick in until 2029, after the next presidential election.

More immediately, the legislation would make it easier for states to cancel people’s coverage by allowing them to increase paperwork requirements and drop those who don’t respond to requests to verify their income or residency. It also would require states to impose co-payments for a wide array of medical services for adults on Medicaid who live above the poverty line, a policy some Democrats described as a “sick tax.”

Another provision would reduce Medicaid funding to states that use their own tax revenues to provide health coverage to undocumented immigrants, a change that could affect financing for 12 mostly Democrat-controlled states. The legislation would bar Medicaid from providing funding to Planned Parenthood as long as the organization continued to provide abortions. And the bill would limit strategies that states have developed to tax medical providers and pay them higher prices for Medicaid services.

Taken together with policies that would affect private Obamacare coverage, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that the legislation would cause 8.6 million more Americans to be uninsured at the end of a decade, while reducing federal spending on health care by more than $700 billion. That estimate may be updated in the coming weeks as the office continues to analyze the bill.

The sticking points: Democrats have made the Medicaid changes the main focus of their critique of the bill, arguing that Republicans are slashing health coverage for poor Americans to finance tax cuts for the rich. In an effort to insulate their most vulnerable incumbents from backlash, G.O.P. leaders omitted overhaul proposals that would have permanently changed the structure of the program. But one populist Republican, Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri, has called the cuts a nonstarter, saying they amount to “taxing the poor to give to the rich.” And some conservative lawmakers in the House who wanted much larger reductions are disappointed with the scale of the changes and the delayed implementation of the work requirement.

Ending clean energy programs

The bottom line: The bill would sharply curtail most of the big tax credits for clean energy contained in the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022. Many of those incentives were expected to last a decade and have so far led businesses to announce more than $841 billion in investments, from wind farms in Wyoming to battery factories in Georgia.

Among the major changes: A $7,500 tax break for buyers of electric cars would largely phase out by the end of 2025, with a one-year extension for automakers that have not sold many models yet. Tax credits for low-emissions electricity sources like wind, solar, nuclear and geothermal power would be available in full only to power plants in service before the end of 2028, and then would zero out within three years. A credit for making hydrogen fuels would end this year.

The bill would also impose new “foreign entity of concern” restrictions on tax breaks for both power plants and factories that build solar panels, batteries or other low-carbon technologies by disqualifying companies that use components from China. That’s a steep hurdle, since China dominates global supply chains. The bill would also end by 2028 a practice that allowed smaller firms with little tax liability to claim the credits and sell them for cash, making the incentives more widely accessible.

Not all energy sources were affected. A tax credit for biofuels, which is popular in farm states, received a four-year extension in the bill. And a credit for capturing carbon dioxide from polluting facilities and burying it underground, which is backed by oil and gas companies, was mostly kept intact.

Other portions of the bill would expedite federal approvals for oil and gas projects in exchange for up to $10 million in fees, scrap Biden-era rules on tailpipe pollution from cars and trucks and repeal an E.P.A. program aimed at curbing methane leaks from oil and gas operations. The legislation also pulls back unspent funds from the Energy Department’s Loan Programs Office, which has nearly $400 billion in lending authority for emerging technologies.

The sticking points: Slashing the energy credits has been contentious even among Republicans, since more than three-quarters of the investments driven by the Inflation Reduction Act have occurred in red districts. At least three dozen Republicans in the House and four in the Senate have spoken out in favor of preserving at least some of the incentives, such as for nuclear power or domestic manufacturing, to protect jobs and bolster U.S. energy security.

Slashing food stamps

The bottom line: In a bid to save money and restrict benefits, the bill would make a series of changes to scale back the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, which provides monthly aid known as food stamps to about 42 million low-income people.

Under the proposal, food stamp recipients between the ages of 18 and 64 would have to obtain work in order to receive federal aid. That mandate would also apply to parents with children 7 and older. Current law subjects only beneficiaries up to age 54 to work requirements, and carves out parents with dependents.

Additionally, the bill would force states to shoulder some of the costs of SNAP, which historically has been funded by the federal government. It would limit the ability of future administrations to raise food stamp benefit amounts. And SNAP would be restricted to U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents.

By Wednesday, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office had not released an analysis about the full effects of these and other changes. Past reports about similar proposals have found that strict work requirements could result in millions of food stamp recipients losing access to benefits.

The changes to SNAP would also have indirect effects on school nutrition programs. Many children automatically qualify for free lunches because their families are eligible for SNAP. Poor children whose parents lose SNAP coverage under the legislation would have to individually apply. Reductions in SNAP enrollment would also affect which public schools qualify for universal free lunch programs, which rely on the share of neighborhood families with nutrition benefits

The sticking points: Some Republicans from districts with high concentrations of food stamp recipients have balked in the past at cuts to the program, and insisted on allowing states to relax work requirements, which the bill would limit their ability to do. But so far, there has been no outcry in the G.O.P. against the SNAP cuts.

Boosting national security and immigration enforcement

The bottom line: The plan would devote an additional $150 billion in military spending, to help boost shipbuilding efforts, and to build a new space-based missile defense system Mr. Trump has proposed that the military is calling Golden Dome.

It also includes about $175 billion in new spending to enforce Mr. Trump’s ambitious anti-immigration agenda, including for bulking up the barriers at the nation’s southern border and for additional Border Patrol agents and facilities. Those measures are considered the least controversial in the legislative package and are meant to entice Republicans to vote for it.

Cutting education programs

The bottom line: The bill would slice $330 billion out of student loan spending over a decade. The biggest change would eliminate for new borrowers the Biden-era student loan repayment program known as SAVE — which ties loan payments to income and household size — as well as the Pay As You Earn plan and the Income-Contingent Repayment plan.

It would replace those with a single repayment plan that would be more costly for many students.

Total federal loan amounts would be capped by year and by program for graduate student loans, and new limits would be placed on how much parents can borrow to pay for their children’s tuition.

The bill also would make it more difficult for part-time students to obtain Pell Grants, increasing the number of credits per semester required for the maximum award from 12 to 15, and requiring them to be enrolled at least half of the time to qualify at all. But it would allow Pell Grants to be used for shorter-term programs that earn students professional certifications.

Raising the debt ceiling

The bottom line: The legislation would increase the nation’s statutory debt limit by $4 trillion. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said earlier this month that the United States could run out of money to pay its bills by August if Congress does not raise or suspend the nation’s debt limit.

Many ultraconservative Republicans have long prided themselves on refusing to back any increase to the nation’s borrowing cap, and refused to do so in December even at Mr. Trump’s urging. But some have conceded they would rather raise the debt limit through the reconciliation bill — which allows them to pass legislation without a single Democratic vote — to deprive the minority party of any negotiating leverage.

Mr. Roy and Mr. Norman’s opposition alone would be enough to block the measure from reaching the floor, upending the party’s drive to push the legislation through the House before a Memorial Day recess. A number of other conservative, anti-spending Republicans sit on the panel, and suggested they could follow suit.

“Right now, the House proposal fails to meet the moment,” Mr. Roy said. “It does not meaningfully change spending. Plus, many of the decent provisions and cuts don’t begin until 2029 and beyond. That is swamp accounting to dodge real savings.”

As the day began on Thursday, Mr. Roy was alone in declaring his intention to tank the bill in committee — a declaration that came roughly half an hour after the Texas Republican entered a meeting in Speaker Mike Johnson’s office meant to assuage holdout lawmakers.

But by the afternoon, a growing number of Republicans on the panel were venting their frustrations with the measure, and it appeared that House G.O.P. leaders lacked the support, for now, to push the legislation carrying Mr. Trump’s domestic agenda over its next hurdle.

“It’s clear we don’t know the true cost of this bill or whether it adheres to the Budget blueprint,” Representative Josh Brecheen of Oklahoma wrote on social media. “We have a duty to know the true cost of this legislation before advancing it. If we are to operate in truth, we must have true numbers — even if that means taking some more time to obtain that truth.”

Another, Representative Glenn Grothman of Wisconsin, declined to say how he planned to vote in committee, but said the legislation “doesn’t seem that sincere” in its efforts to cut spending.

The bill would extend Mr. Trump’s 2017 tax cut and temporarily enact his campaign pledges not to tax tips or overtime pay. Cuts to Medicaid, food stamps and subsidies for clean energy would partly offset the roughly $3.8 trillion cost of those tax measures, as well as increased spending on the military and immigration enforcement.

Republicans like Mr. Roy are demanding changes to the bill, arguing that their leaders did not go far enough to cut federal spending. Some had earlier insisted that the final product add nothing to the deficit. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a nonpartisan group that calls for lower deficits, estimated that the bill would add roughly $3.3 trillion to the deficit over the next decade.

They are also unhappy that a number of the provisions in the legislation to cut spending — chief among them a measure imposing work requirements on childless Medicaid recipients without disabilities — would not kick in until 2029.

“On Medicaid work requirements: Start ‘em now,” Representative Scott Perry of Pennsylvania wrote on social media. “The American People are sick of half measures. Some of my congressional colleagues want to do anything but LEGISLATE…”

G.O.P. leaders had toiled to structure the legislation to protect their most politically vulnerable members from accusations that the party was moving to gut popular health care programs like Medicaid. They stopped short of a structural overhaul that would have made deep cuts to the program.

House Republican leaders were discussing rewriting the work requirements so they would take effect sooner in a bid to appease conservatives. But it is a treacherous balancing act for Mr. Johnson, who must try to satisfy both his most conservative members agitating for significant spending cuts, and his swing-seat members who say voting for legislation taking an ax to widely used federal programs would send them to an early political retirement.

He was sanguine emerging from the meeting in his office on Thursday.

“Not everybody’s going to be delighted with every provision in a bill this large, but everyone can be satisfied, and we’re very, very close to that,” Mr. Johnson told reporters.

But conservatives like Mr. Roy are not the only Republicans who have concerns about the legislation.

A small group of Republicans from New York and California are threatening to torpedo the bill over the state and local tax deduction. Others have called on Republican leaders to kill some of the most aggressive provisions in the legislation roll eliminating clean energy tax credits.

And even if the House can clear the legislation, a number of Republican senators have been unsparing in their criticism of the bill and suggested they would want to impose significant changes.

But first, the legislation must clear the Budget Committee.

The panel’s role is mainly procedural but significant for complying with the special reconciliation rules that protect the legislation from a filibuster in the Senate. The committee is responsible for merging the legislative proposals produced by 11 committees who have written various pieces of the reconciliation package into a single bill and sending it to the House floor through the Rules Committee.

Members of the Budget Committee don’t have the power to make any changes to the legislation at this point, but they must approve it to allow the bill to move forward.

With Democrats unanimously opposed, Republicans on the panel need near unanimity to make that happen.

Any attempt to skirt the committee could lead to trouble in the Senate even if the House were to approve the bill. The reconciliation rules require that the measure be a product of the Budget Committee for it to qualify for a majority-only vote. Working around the Budget Committee could violate that rule and allow Democrats to filibuster the legislation, effectively killing it.

Carl Hulse contributed reporting.