Senate GOP Drops Trump Ballroom Money, Advances ICE Funding Bill

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Reuters
By Yuval Rosenberg and Michael Rainey

Good evening. The House just dealt President Trump a significant rebuke, voting 215-208 to approve a war powers resolution that would block further military action against Iran without congressional approval. Four Republicans joined with all Democrats in support of the resolution, which has mostly symbolic importance given that the Senate likely does not have the votes to pass it and Trump is unlikely to sign it.

Here's what else is happening.

Senate GOP Drops Trump Ballroom Money, Advances ICE Funding Bill

Senate Republicans are pushing ahead with their partisan $70 billion bill to fund immigration enforcement, but the effort faces some uncertainty because of lingering concerns about the Trump administration's scuttled plans for a $1.8 billion "anti-weaponization" fund.

The Senate on Wednesday afternoon voted 53-46 along party lines to kick off debate on an updated version of Republicans' budget reconciliation bill, which would fund Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Border Patrol through fiscal year 2029.

Prior to the vote, Republicans removed a proposed $1 billion in Secret Service security funding, including money for President Trump's new White House ballroom, from the package. They also took out roughly $1.5 billion in funding for the Justice Department, a change that Republican leaders reportedly made with an eye toward making it harder to modify the text of the bill to limit or prohibit the Trump administration's controversial $1.8 billion "anti-weaponization" fund. GOP leaders reportedly fear that such language could scuttle the whole package.

The Senate Judiciary Committee's revised portion of the bill now provides just over $31 billion for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, $13 billion for Customs and Border Protection and another $2.5 billion for the Department of Homeland Security.

Wednesday's vote comes after Republicans faced infighting and a two-week delay in their path to taking up their partisan funding package. They initially faced sharp pushback on the ballroom funding in the bill, forcing them to backtrack on that proposal. Then they were forced to cancel a planned vote on the reconciliation bill last month amid fierce blowback to the Trump administration's "anti-weaponization" fund, which critics called a slush fund that would benefit allies of the president who claim to have been harmed by the Biden administration.

Some Republicans still fuming: Anger over the settlement fund could still derail the bill.

The budget reconciliation process that Republicans are using to pass their bill and avoid a potential Democratic filibuster allows for a flurry of amendment votes known as a "vote-a-rama." Republican Sen. Thom Tillis told reporters that he plans to introduce an amendment to permanently block the $1.8 billion fund.

"We've got to either eliminate, streamline it, guardrail it," Tillis told reporters. "It can't go in its current form, and if that's the only choice we should have, we should eradicate it."

Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy indicated to reporters that he would back the Tillis amendment. "I want to make sure it's not mostly dead, that it is truly dead," Cassidy said of the payout fund. And Sen. John Cornyn reposted a Wall Street Journal editorial that called on Republicans to kill the settlement fund for good by blocking money for its use. "The way to ensure the Trump retribution fund is more than mostly dead would be for Congress to put a stake through it," Cornyn wrote.

Tillis, Cassidy and other lawmakers remain concerned even after Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche told a congressional panel Tuesday that the administration won't move forward with the fund and was permanently dropping the idea. Blanche, however, dismissed Democratic calls to put his pledge in writing.

Trump says he loves the fund: President Trump on Wednesday was far less definitive than Blanche had been, heightening concerns that the fund could eventually be resurrected. Asked if the fund was dead or just on hold, Trump told reporters in the Oval Office that he does not know and would "have to ask the lawyers." He also called the fund a "beautiful thing" and defended the idea of compensating his allies and the rioters who attacked the Capitol on January 6, 2021. His comments suggested he hasn't given up on the "anti-weaponization" fund.

"I love it. I think it's so important," he said.

Those comments echoed an earlier defense of the settlement fund. In a Tuesday interview with the New York Post that was posted this morning, Trump repeated his baseless claim that the 2020 election was rigged against him and endorsed the idea of a fund to benefit people who he said had been victimized by the government.

Asked by the Post if he had dropped the anti-weaponization fund, Trump said, "No, a court ruled against it." He went on to again defend the January 6 rioters: "But just so you understand, these are people that have been decimated. These are people that lost their lives over nonsense ... There's never been anything like this, what happened to those people. And these were many great people, and I gave them pardons. I'm very proud to have given them pardons. And I think they should be reimbursed for a crooked government."

Some Republicans agree with Trump. Sen. Lindsey Graham posted on X Tuesday evening that he still believes that the Biden Justice Department improperly victimized many Americans and that those people should be able to pursue claims for compensation. "Therefore," he wrote, "I am proposing that we create a weaponization fund that will be available to those who can prove their claim against the federal government through the Federal Tort Claims Act. We have a legal system already in place for people to make claims against the government."

Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward, Jr. reportedly responded to Graham's post by writing, "We're on it." That post was later deleted.

What's next: The Senate will hold a marathon voting session that Republicans hope will end with the passage of their stalled immigration enforcement funding. Democrats are looking to force Republicans to cast some difficult amendment votes and they could join with Tillis and a small band of Republicans to rein in or explicitly kill the settlement fund, which would jeopardize the larger bill. Any such amendment may have to clear a 60-vote threshold, depending on a ruling from the Senate parliamentarian, which would make it far less likely to succeed. The ultimate outcome of the amendment votes and the fate of the funding package remain uncertain.

Trump Admin Plans New Tariffs on Dozens of Trading Partners

In a report released late Tuesday, U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer accused 60 foreign economies of failing to guard against products made with "forced labor," paving the way for the imposition of new tariffs on their exports to the United States.

The trade representative's proposed tariffs - which would apply to 99% of U.S. imports and affect virtually every major trading partner, including the European Union, China, Mexico and Canada - would vary depending on whether a given country has or plans to impose prohibitions against the importation of goods made with forced labor. Countries that do have such rules would face a 10% tariff, while those that do not would see a 12.5% tariff.

"The failure of our most important trading partners to address the importation of goods made with forced labor is unacceptable," Greer said. "This creates a dynamic where American workers are forced to compete globally on an unlevel playing field. We will no longer tolerate this disparity."

Rebuilding the tariff wall: The Trump administration has been looking for ways to revive its tariff policies ever since the Supreme Court rejected the "Liberation Day" levies President Trump rolled out in April 2025 on countries around the world.

In February, the high court ruled that the tariffs Trump imposed under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977 violated the separation of powers, sparking a new effort in the administration to find new legal justifications for the higher tariffs that Trump has long called for. If enacted, the new tariffs would be authorized under Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974, which empowers the U.S. trade representative to retaliate against foreign countries whose policies place a discriminatory or otherwise unfair burden on U.S. commerce.

Although the new tariffs may pass muster with U.S. courts, critics are already making it clear they have questions about them. "Washington is desperately searching for new legal grounds to sustain its tariff policy," Bernd Lange, who leads the European Parliament's trade committee, said on social media. "Accusing the EU of all places of insufficient action against forced labor is absurd. The EU has adopted the world's most stringent rules against products made with forced labour. This looks very much like trying to make the facts fit a legal justification for tariffs that has already been decided."

Number of the Day: $48 Million

The Trump administration is dismantling the Ocean Observatories Initiative, a $368 million project that has been monitoring the deep ocean for the last 10 years. The goal of the project is to better understand the role of the ocean in global climate change, with a focus on deep water flows, marine heatwaves and coastal flooding.

The National Science Foundation has announced that, starting this month, it will use ships to remove more than 900 scientific instruments that are anchored at various depths off the coasts of Oregon, Washington, Alaska, North Carolina and Iceland. The removal process is expected to take up to 15 months to complete.

The project, which was scheduled to run for 25 years, costs about $48 million a year to operate. The Trump administration has repeatedly sought to end or sharply reduce the effort, proposing to slash its funding in the president's annual budget requests. Congress has rejected those proposals.

The Trump administration hasn't provided much by way of an explanation for bringing the project to a premature end, though President Trump has repeatedly dismissed climate science as a "hoax." Experts say ending the project will be a loss for science and for the industries that rely on marine systems.

"Sustained ocean observations are how we detect emerging risks in real time, from shifts in circulation to changes in chemistry and ecosystem health," Helen Findlay, a biological oceanographer at the Plymouth Marine Laboratory in England, said, per Scientific American. "Without them, we are effectively choosing to navigate an increasingly volatile ocean with diminishing visibility."

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