Trump announced reductions in tariffs on Chinese goods and said China would drop restrictions on rare earth minerals for a year, likely with routine extensions.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., called his Democratic colleagues’ attempt to bring up legislation to extend Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits yesterday a “cynical political ploy” in remarks on the chamber floor this morning as the shutdown goes into its 30th day.
“Democrats are outraged — outraged that they are coming face to face with the consequences of their decision to shut down the government,” Thune said. “They’re flailing around, blaming President Trump for not stepping in to somehow save the SNAP program from running out of money to pay benefits.”
Thune said there is a limit to what Trump can do to alleviate the affects of the shutdown, and specifically the impact on food assistance programs. But Democrats have argued that the Trump administration should release $5 billion in contingency funding to allow the SNAP benefits to continue past this weekend, when funds are expected to run out.
“President Trump did step in to save Democrats from themselves on WIC,” Thune said, referring to the Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children. “He somehow managed to find money to cover the program for the time being. But there is a limit to what he can do.”
He called Democrat messaging that Republicans are responsible for the shutdown “ludicrous,” placing blame on Democrats for demanding that expiring Obamacare subsides be included in any short-term spending measure, as opposed to the GOP-favored weeks-long extension of government funding at current levels.
In remarks at what has become a daily news conference, House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., insisted this morning that there was “no such legal avenue” to access contingency funding for SNAP because the program’s statutory language did not allow for such actions by Trump, unlike the WIC program, which he said was linked to a 1930s-era law related to tariff funds.
Johnson also rejected the idea of passing measures to fund parts of the government, saying the “rifle shot bills that you keep hearing about deviates from the goal.”
Congress has “one singular purpose, and that is to reopen and fund the entire government.”
“The simplest way to end the pain, and the simplest way to make this stop is for the Democrats to do the obvious and right thing and vote for the non-partisan funding measure so that we can turn everything back on,” he added.
The FBI says a proposal by House lawmakers to strip the bureau of its authority over counterintelligence efforts and hand it over to Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard would create confusion and undermine national security.
In a sharply worded letter to Congress, the FBI expressed its “strong objection” to the proposal, exposing a power struggle between Gabbard and the FBI’s director, Kash Patel, and other intelligence agencies.
“The FBI has consistently articulated its strong objection to the proposal, and believes it would cause serious and long-lasting damage to the US national security,” said the unclassified letter. “Furthermore, the FBI is aware of many other objections submitted by other members of the IC,” it stated, referring to the intelligence community.
The New York Times first reported on the letter.
The FBI argued that it has developed decades of experience in countering foreign espionage in the U.S. with a national network of 53 field offices, and that the proposal would create unnecessary bureaucracy and shift authority to officials without relevant expertise.
“The cumulative effect would be putting decision-making with employees who aren’t actively involved in Cl (counterintelligence) operations, knowledgeable of the intricacies of Cl threats, or positioned to develop coherent and tailored mitigation strategies,” it said.
The clash over the FBI’s leading role in counterintelligence marks the latest case of tensions between Gabbard and her counterparts in government, with the intelligence chief seeking a larger profile for her office.
Gabbard has engaged in turf battles with the CIA, blindsiding the spy agency by revoking security clearances for current and former national security employees without consulting with CIA officials, NBC News has reported. Gabbard’s office has denied that the ODNI failed to properly confer with colleagues at the CIA over the security clearances.
CIA and other intelligence officials share many of the FBI’s misgivings about the House proposal, according to two people with knowledge of the matter.
“The ODNI and the FBI are united in working with Congress to strengthen our nation’s counterintelligence efforts to best protect the safety, security, and freedom of the American people,” the two agencies said in an email.
The U.S. government defines counterintelligence as protecting against leaks from U.S. spy agencies, hunting down foreign spies and countering economic espionage.
In its letter, the FBI refers to a draft letter from Gabbard about the House proposal, saying it “vigorously disagrees” with the director of national intelligence’s position. NBC News has not seen the letter from Gabbard cited by the FBI.
The FBI’s letter came as lawmakers in the House and Senate are haggling over an intelligence policy bill. The Senate’s proposal does not call for shifting counterintelligence authority to Gabbard’s office, congressional aides said.
The House bill would grant the director of national intelligence the authority to approve counterintelligence activities, but it does not define precisely what that could mean, the FBI said in its letter.
“Would a counterintelligence related prosecution be considered an ‘activity’ that must receive approval from this new Director, outside of the current DOJ (Department of Justice) chain? Would that give the new Director of the Counterintelligence Center authority over the FBI/Attorney General for all counterintelligence investigations?” the letter stated.
“This entire provision will ultimately cause confusion among agencies and will not yield whatever intended benefits are sought,” it said.
Sen. Mark Warner, of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said he was open to a review of how counterintelligence activities are managed but opposed dismantling the FBI’s leading role and giving the ODNI operational control.
“That’s not what ODNI was created for, and it puts it in direct tension with the agencies it’s supposed to support. This approach risks creating turf battles and undermining the effectiveness of our Intelligence Community. ODNI should be a force multiplier, not a competing agency,” Warner said in an email.
The chair of the House Intelligence Committee, Republican Rep. Rick Crawford of Arkansas, last month praised the House intelligence policy bill that would empower Gabbard as “the first major reform Congress has pursued of our nation’s counterintelligence posture in over two decades,” which he said was long overdue.
“While our adversaries in the Chinese Communist Party, Russia, Iran and terrorist groups operate on a war footing against the United States, too often we have remained reactive, complacent and risk-averse,” Crawford said.
Crawford’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The director of national intelligence position was created in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in an attempt to improve coordination and information sharing among the country’s spy agencies.
Just days before federal SNAP funding is set to lapse, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, declared a state of emergency, saying she’ll direct $65 million in state funds for emergency food assistance.
“Unlike Washington Republicans, I won’t sit idly by as families struggle to put food on the table. Today, I’m declaring a state of emergency and am committing additional state funds for emergency food assistance to ensure New Yorkers don’t go hungry. Donald Trump and Republicans in Congress have the power to stop this crisis — millions of families depend on it,” Hochul said in a statement.
JD Vance will host a roundtable at the White House this afternoon on how the government shutdown is affecting aviation and airports around the country, a White House official said.
The vice president will be joined by Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, Airlines for America CEO and former New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu and other industry leaders, the official said.
“The aviation industry has been gravely impacted by the Democrat Shutdown,” the White House official said. “Air traffic controllers did not receive a paycheck this week. Many pilot and aviation unions have called on Senate Democrats to open the government and pass the clean CR,” referring to the House-passed short-term government spending bill backed by Republicans.
Air traffic controllers and other federal workers deemed essential employees received their first zero-dollar paycheck earlier this week, and some took to handing leaflets out at airports to bring attention to the impact the shutdown is having on aviation workers.
About 27,000 commercial flights carry 2.7 million passengers per day into and out of the U.S.
Behind a large glass wall, a worker in full protective gear watches as hundreds of tiny glass bottles whizz by every minute, sterilized, filled and packaged by a ballet of robotic arms.
Inside each ampule is the substance at the heart of the geopolitical strife between the United States and China: fentanyl, the deadly opioid that was at the top of the agenda at today’s meeting between Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping.
NBC News got exclusive access to the headquarters of Yichang Humanwell Pharmaceutical, the largest producer of the drug in China, and indeed Asia, at its sprawling complex in the central city of Yichang.
Read the full story here.
Radio Free Asia announced yesterday that it was pausing delivering news “for the first time in our history” because of “uncertain funding.”
Executive editor Rosa Hwang announced the move on the news outlet’s website, calling it “an excruciating moment.”
“And make no mistake, authoritarian regimes are already celebrating RFA’s potential demise,” Hwang said.
The announcement, near the end of Trump’s Asia trip, came after the U.S. Agency for Global Media, led by Kari Lake, moved over the summer to slash jobs at government-funded outlets, which include Radio Free Asia, Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, amid the Trump administration’s efforts to slash the size of the federal government.
“When the initial funding disruption earlier this year forced RFA to furlough the majority of our editorial staff, the handful of journalists who remained launched RFA Perspectives, determined to fulfill RFA’s congressionally mandated mission to provide uncensored, accurate news and information in regions across Asia hostile to a free press,” Hwang said. “That program, too, will end.”
Allowing China to buy Nvidia’s latest-generation chips, even a modified version, could drastically reduce the United States’ AI advantage, analysts say, as the American artificial intelligence government lobbies the U.S. government to expand its export control permits to also include the upcoming B30A chip.
“Minimizing the export of powerful AI chips to China is the best way to maximize the United States’ AI compute advantage in the short term,” said analysts at the Institute for Progress, a Washington-based think tank.
The U.S. currently allows limited exports of Nvidia’s H20 GPU chips, the semiconductors at the heart of AI infrastructure buildout across the world. That chip was already a less powerful, last-generation version that was specially designed for the Chinese market.
Nvidia has, however, lobbied the Trump administration to now allow the export of B30A, built on the latest Blackwell architecture and a cheaper and less powerful version of the B300. The company argues that it would rather be a U.S. player that is dominant in the Chinese market than allow domestic players in China to catch up.
But even at that reduced performance, analysts at IFP say, the new chip is roughly “12 to 17 times the computing power of H20.”
“In the most aggressive export scenarios involving sales of the B30A chip and comparable AI chips from all other US AI chip companies, this advantage would flip, with China gaining a 1.1x advantage over the United States,” they wrote.
The Senate confirmation hearing for Trump’s pick for surgeon general, Dr. Casey Means, has been postponed after she went into labor, a spokesperson for the Senate committee set to consider her nomination said.
Means was supposed to appear virtually before the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee this morning for lawmakers to consider her nomination for the top health role.
Read the full story here.
Even though Trump says “all of the rare earth has been settled,” analysts say the U.S. remains overly reliant on China for strategically crucial rare earth materials and that it will take years to address that.
“Building new mines and, especially, expanding processing capacity — which is the real bottleneck — requires years of sustained effort and substantial investment,” Patrik Andersson, an analyst at the Swedish National China Centre at the Swedish Institute of International Affairs, told NBC News.
Mining the minerals and their processing is a highly specialized and environmentally toxic process — one that China has honed over decades, resulting in a near monopoly on the global supply.
There is also the matter of ensuring there is enough demand to counter China’s overcapacities, said John Seaman, a research fellow at the French Institute of International Relations. “We’ll need to see more coherent industrial policies and greater policy coordination across jurisdictions,” he said.
Trump has responded to criticism by Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer that his Asia trip was a “total dud,” calling it “almost treasonous.”
Chuck Schumer called Trump's Asia trip a 'dud.' Brendan SmialowskiMIALOWSKI / AFP – Getty Images
“President Trump is about to congratulate himself, patting himself hard on the back, for cleaning up a mess that he created,” Schumer said on the Senate floor yesterday, referring to trade talks with Chinese leader Xi Jinping.
Rather than using his visit to Malaysia, Japan and South Korea to “make progress with America’s vital trading partners,” Schumer said, Trump’s trip “has been a total dud.”
In a Truth Social post, Trump said he “Worked really hard, 24/7, took in Trillions of Dollars, and Chuck Schumer said trip was ‘a total dud,’ even though he knows it was a spectacular success. Words like that are almost treasonous!!!”
Trump said yesterday that he had instructed the Defense Department to “immediately” start testing nuclear weapons “on an equal basis” with other nations.
“Because of other countries testing programs, I have instructed the Department of War to start testing our Nuclear Weapons on an equal basis,” Trump said on Truth Social shortly before his highly anticipated meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping in South Korea. “That process will begin immediately.”
The last confirmed nuclear test by the United States was in 1992, when President George H.W. Bush announced a moratorium on underground nuclear testing. The United States has the ability to resume tests at a federal site in Nevada.
Read the full story here.
From fentanyl to rare earths, Trump’s highly anticipated meeting with Chinese leader Xi Jinping on the last leg of his three-country Asia tour saw the world’s two biggest economies ease their trade tensions, or at least some of them.
“A lot of finalization,” Trump told reporters on Air Force One after departing Busan, South Korea, where he met with Xi today for about an hour and 40 minutes, saying he would rate the “amazing” meeting a “12” on a scale from zero to 10.
While the two leaders did not ink a finalized agreement, Trump said a deal could be signed “pretty soon” and that there were “not too many major stumbling blocks.”
Trump said that he would visit China in April, and that Xi would visit either Florida or Washington “some time after that.”
Read the full story here.
Trump said after meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping that he was lowering tariffs in exchange for a crackdown on fentanyl and that he would visit China in April.
Speaking to reporters on Air Force One on his way back to Washington, Trump said he would reduce his fentanyl tariff on China to 10% from 20%, effective immediately, after Xi agreed to intensify China’s efforts to stem the illicit international flow of precursor chemicals for the deadly opioid.
He said his meeting with Xi was “amazing,” rating it a “12” on a scale of one to 10, and said that with few major obstacles remaining, a sweeping trade deal would soon be ready.
Read the full story here.
NBC News