Trump Hits Canada With New 50% Tariffs

Trump attended the World Cup final on Sunday. (DPA / Picture Alliance)
DPA / Picture Alliance
By Yuval Rosenberg and Michael Rainey

Happy Monday! Not gonna lie, we're already missing having daytime World Cup matches on in the background here at TFT global headquarters. At least we still can watch the House of Representatives, where this is shaping up to be an eventful week.

Here's what we're monitoring.

Trump Slaps Canada With New 50% Tariffs

President Trump slapped tariffs of 50% on some Canadian goods Monday, just days after threatening to punish the country for allowing heavy wildfire smoke to drift into the United States.

"Our air has been poisoned," Trump said Sunday, referring to the Canadian wildfire smoke. "[M]aybe they should pay us some damages or something, or we should do some tariffs."

Although Trump's remarks suggest there is a connection between the wildfires and the tariffs announced today, the Trump administration is framing them as a response to "discriminatory" trade measures put in place by Canada against American motor vehicles, dairy and alcohol. The administration said the Canadian products affected by the new tariffs range from "wine to hockey sticks to cement."

"Over the past year, Canada has retained substantial retaliation against the United States as the U.S. imposes trade actions to reindustrialize, reshore, and support its manufacturing," an administration official told reporters. "Specifically, Canada has to be held accountable for this continued discrimination."

The tariffs are being imposed under Section 338 of the Tariff Act of 1930 and will take effect in 30 days, The Hill reports. There are no exceptions for goods covered by the current United States-Mexico-Canada free trade agreement.

Trump Calls on House Republicans to Back $95 Billion Budget Framework

Speaker Mike Johnson has set an ambitious agenda for this week, which is set to be House lawmakers' final one in session before a five-week August break.

Johnson and GOP leaders are looking to move past intraparty differences that have ground legislative business to a halt recently. They hope to pass several major pieces of legislation: the annual defense policy bill; a budget framework setting up another $95 billion spending package, including $60 billion for the Pentagon; an extension of federal funding until December 4; and a stock-trading ban that also includes a voter ID measure.

The House Rules Committee began work this afternoon to tee up those bills for consideration on the House floor.

The budget resolution may face the hardest path. It could face opposition from fiscal conservatives angry that it doesn't include any cuts to offset the spending being added. Some lawmakers reportedly also say that the Pentagon has failed to make a clear case for why it urgently needs this additional funding after Republicans provided an infusion of extra funding in an earlier party-line bill.

President Trump on Monday urged Republicans to back the budget resolution. In a social media post, he thanked many House Budget Committee members by name "for launching an effort to get AS MUCH of THE SAVE AMERICA ACT as possible" in the resolution. The post seemed to acknowledge that the entire package he wants can't survive the special reconciliation process Republicans are using.

"I am asking all House Republicans to VOTE YES this week on the Budget Resolution, which is an important first step towards getting a Budget Bill," Trump wrote. "House Republicans must UNIFY, and fight for THE SAVE AMERICA ACT!"

Even if the framework is adopted in the House, which would represent a big win for GOP leaders, its fate in the Senate remains unclear, especially because the Senate Budget Committee will be under new leadership. Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin is poised to take that gavel after the sudden death of Sen. Lindsey Graham. Johnson, a noted deficit hawk, will face a test in trying to shepherd the GOP plan through some opposition. "A host of Senate Republicans and leadership sources have told us the House' plan is 'half-baked,' 'not a serious attempt' and ultimately 'not viable,'" Politico reports.

The NDAA: Rep. Adam Smith, the top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, announced on Friday that he will likely vote against the $1.15 trillion National Defense Authorization Act, the annual defense policy bill that typically passes with bipartisan support.

"Our country faces threats and DoD has modernization needs, but I cannot and do not support meeting these needs by making massive cuts to critically important domestic programs and slashing taxes," Smith said in a statement, referring to the Department of Defense. "We need to be more fiscally responsible and DoD needs to become more innovative and efficient in terms of developing capabilities to meet our national security needs in a more cost-effective manner. We also need to develop a realistic national security strategy and approach that doesn't require a $1.15 trillion discretionary budget request and another partisan budget reconciliation process that includes an additional $60 to $350 billion for defense."

Smith said that the bill is also likely to get loaded up with culture war amendments.

If it passes, the defense bill would be merged with the SAVE America Act, the package of voter restrictions that President Trump has made his top priority. The Senate would be expected to remove the election-related elements of the bill and other hardline conservative amendments that might get adopted.

The Senate eyes its own stopgap: House Republicans' plan would see the chamber dump a stopgap funding bill on the Senate and then leave town. Senate Republicans appear to have their own ideas on government funding. They have reportedly discussed a spending bill with Democrats and are also working with the White House on anomalies - changes to current spending levels - for a bill that would prevent a government shutdown once current funding expires at the end of September.

Time is tight: The House agenda for the week is jam-packed because the calendar leaves little time for legislating from now until the November midterms. While the House is set to leave on Thursday, the Senate is scheduled to stay in session until August 7 before starting its own recess, which stretches until mid-September. So this is the last week that both chambers are in town until September 14.

The bottom line: House Republicans are rushing to get as much of their agenda done as they can before their long break, but intraparty divisions and differences with the Senate GOP likely remain obstacles.

In an effort to get his party members in line and prevent another failure on a procedural vote, Johnson reportedly told some lawmakers that Republicans will try to pass a fourth budget reconciliation bill focused on cutting waste, fraud and abuse once the elections have passed.

Quote of the Day

"Reconciliation 1 increased the debt and deficit in this country. Reconciliation 2 increased the debt and deficit in this country. This is reconciliation 3, and guess what? Third time's a charm. They are increasing the debt and deficit of this country once again."

− Rep. Morgan McGarvey, a Kentucky Democrat, discussing Republicans' latest budget reconciliation package at a Monday hearing of the House Rules Committee. The GOP plan includes $95 billion in funding for the Pentagon, intelligence services, farm aid and election security.

Republican Rep. Jodey Arrington, who chairs the House Budget Committee, responded by noting that Democrats have supported supplemental funding to help foreign countries but are now questioning the cost and lack of offsets for emergency funding for U.S. troops in conflict. "This is bombs, bullets and battlefield readiness," Arrington said.

Trump Funding Cuts Have Delayed Response to Cyclosporiasis Outbreak: Report

The federal lab responsible for identifying parasitic outbreaks saw dramatic funding cuts under the second Trump administration, according to a new report by CNN's Blake Ellis, Brenda Goodman, Audrey Ash and Melanie Hicken. As a result, the federal response to an outbreak of cyclosporiasis has been behind the curve for weeks, even as thousands of people have experienced severe intestinal symptoms thought to be linked to shipments of lettuce.

As a result of the Trump administration's funding cuts, an 11-member team at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was reduced to just three by last September. Dr. Joel Barratt, the former head of the lab, said those cuts have made it more difficult to respond to the current outbreak.

"The response is being hampered by the loss of specialized staff and the loss of hands-on-deck needed to identify the source of the outbreaks," Barratt told CNN.

The funding and staffing cuts include $29 million that was lost at the CDC when DOGE and Elon Musk, Trump's designated efficiency expert, eliminated the U.S. Agency for International Development. ("We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper," Musk declared on his social media platform in February 2025.)

A complex system: The Trump administration has portrayed USAID spending as wasteful and focused on unworthy foreigners. In response to a question about funding for the lab that is focused on parasitic outbreaks, a White House spokesperson denied to CNN that there was a connection, saying, "The referenced USAID funds that were administered by the CDC supported overseas programs, not domestic disease response."

But the CNN reporters say the monitoring system housed in the CDC's Division of Parasitic Diseases and Malaria covers both domestic and international outbreaks, with shared personnel and equipment. "The domino effect of that lost funding is still being felt in the lagging cyclospora response today," the reporters write. "Public health experts told CNN that warnings to doctors and efforts to home in on a specific source, among other actions, have taken much longer than they should have."

Even fully staffed, the CDC had just a few cyclospora experts, who before the severe funding cuts would have pulled together from various groups to form a task force dedicated to the outbreak. Now, some of those experts are gone, having been eliminated during the Trump administration's roughly 25% reduction in staffing at the CDC.

"The people who've led this work last year and maybe the 10 or 20 years before that no longer work at the agency," a source told CNN. "A lot of that knowledge is lost, and some people are doing this for the very first time in their careers."

Serious delays: The staff shortage at the CDC can be seen in the numbers. The state of Michigan alone has reported more than 5,000 cases during the outbreak, but the CDC has confirmed only 1,645 in the whole country - an historic gap. The first cases were reported in May, but the CDC did not provide notification to the public until mid-July.

Communication between state health agencies and the CDC has also fallen behind. In the past, scientists would have met to discuss the problem and clarified how to collect and report data. The Trump administration has limited those types of conferences, hampering those efforts.

The bottom line: Slashing public health funding creates new costs, it turns out, and a subpar response to a parasitic outbreak appears to be one of them.

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