Trump Administration Highlights: Republicans’ Sweeping Domestic Policy Bill in Peril (2025)

Trump officials say James Comey, the ex-F.B.I. chief, is under investigation for a social media post.

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.

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Trump officials fire hundreds of journalists and contractors at Voice of America.

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.

A judge blocked the Energy Department from imposing a cap on grants for university research.

In temporarily blocking the planned cuts as litigation continues, Judge Allison D. Burroughs of the Federal District Court in Massachusetts wrote that the policy would jeopardize critical research partnerships “which, by their nature, seek to advance the country’s energy, economic, and national security interests.”

A cap on funds for overhead expenses was also adopted by the National Institutes of Health earlier this year but was blocked by another judge.

Citing one school out of many involved in the Energy Department lawsuit as an example, Judge Burroughs noted that the agency was funding projects at Cornell on research subjects as diverse as the nation’s nuclear weapons stockpile, biodegradable plastics and the emerging field of quantum computing.

Other projects underway at Cornell, she wrote, aim at solving urgent problems such as extracting rare earth minerals, which China has pulled back from exporting to the United States, and simulation tools “to make fusion energy a practical reality.”

“It is beyond dispute that the advancements these universities make can and often do benefit the public in critically important ways, and any setback to that progress is to the detriment of the country as a whole,” she wrote.

Judge Burroughs moved to block the policy from taking effect nationwide, even as the Supreme Court had, just hours before, wrestled with limiting district court judges from issuing such sweeping orders.

Because the policy applied more or less uniformly to universities throughout the country, however, the judge found that it was unreasonable to limit the ruling to only the handful of schools involved in the case.

“Despite awareness that some members of the Supreme Court have expressed concerns about the use of nationwide or ‘universal’ injunctions, as the law currently stands, a nationwide injunction is a reasonable and appropriate remedy in this action,” Judge Burroughs wrote.

President Trump floated a similar cap during his first term. The Trump administration has said that by not covering costs such as building maintenance, waste disposal, and support staff, it could free up billions to fund more research directly.

But universities and laboratories have called that argument disingenuous, noting that indirect costs make up a major share of the expenses incurred in advanced research.

When the N.I.H. proposed imposing the same cap this year on the mostly medical research it funds, universities and hospitals called the policy potentially catastrophic.

In a separate lawsuit related to the changes at the N.I.H., a federal judge permanently blocked that policy from taking effect in April. The Trump administration has appealed that ruling.

Groups suing over the funding caps have explained in court that maintenance and upkeep on a single laboratory building is often necessary to provide working space to multiple teams conducting experiments and projects funded by a number of federal grants.

Schools often undertake those projects based on expectations that they will be reimbursed for 50 percent or more of the amount of the grant they receive, all to cover overhead. In Cornell’s case, Judge Burroughs noted that the school had negotiated a rate of 64 percent.

Those rates are generally negotiated years in advance, and the 15 percent limit the Trump administration has sought means that many drug trials, long-term studies and other research already underway would be canceled or paused, according to schools that filed lawsuits.

The Energy Department awards grants in fields such as materials science, biology and physics. Its Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, or ARPA-E, routinely funds work on biofuels, improved batteries and electric vehicles. During the Biden administration, the agency announced a breakthrough in fusion technology, which it developed in collaboration with universities.

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A military parade on Trump’s birthday could cost $45 million, officials said.

The officials who spoke about the costs said that the estimate, previously reported by Reuters, did not include the cleanup or repairs from damage to Washington’s roads from the tank traffic. They spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal planning

The Army has said the parade will include 150 vehicles, 50 warplanes and the participation of more than 6,600 soldiers.

The thousands of visiting soldiers in Washington for the parade will stay in unused government buildings and sleep on cots, according to the Army. They will be provided three daily meals and a stipend, the Pentagon has said.

The anniversary celebration is expected to include a daylong festival with musical performances and displays of equipment. Mr. Trump also proposed a military parade for Veterans Day in November during his first term, but the notion was derailed by members of his administration over cost concerns.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has said the parade is intended to honor the sacrifice of American troops who helped secure the country’s independence.

“There are a lot of vapid things to celebrate, plenty of reality shows and garbage music and stuff on Netflix,” he said in a speech this month. “How about we hold up our special operations community? How about we recognize the Army and the Marine Corps?”

But some Democratic lawmakers have cast the planned parade as wasteful and over-the-top. Representative Steve Cohen, Democrat of Tennessee, introduced a bill last month that would bar spending federal money on a military parade in Washington “primarily intended to celebrate the birthday, personal milestone, or private interest of any individual, including President Donald J. Trump.”

Mr. Cohen suggested in a statement that Mr. Trump planned to “waste taxpayer dollars burnishing his insatiable ego.”

Protests of the parade are planned in Washington and other American cities.

Many countries — including France, China and North Korea — put on regular military parades, but such displays are rare in the United States.

Two law firms battling Trump’s retaliation say their lawyers’ security clearances were suspended.

The suspension of clearances is just one of the punishing provisions contained in a series of nearly identical executive orders issued by President Trump in March as part of a broader effort to bend the legal community to his will. A number of firms cut deals with Mr. Trump in order to avoid becoming subject to such directives.

The handful of firms that did not make deals — and were then singled out in orders that accused them of working against the country’s national interest — sued, arguing that the orders amount to blatantly illegal retaliation for representing clients and employing lawyers the president opposes politically.

In at least one instance, a federal judge has agreed, bypassing a trial and permanently blocking the government from enforcing the terms of an order targeting the firm Perkins Coie. In the cases involving WilmerHale and Jenner & Block, judges have temporarily halted the Trump administration from implementing the orders aimed at them while litigation plays out.

Even so, Paul Clement, a lawyer for WilmerHale, said in a filing that two of its lawyers had received letters informing them that their security clearances had been suspended.

“This development underscores that the executive branch stands ready and willing to implement the executive order absent judicial intervention,” Mr. Clement wrote in a notice dated May 9.

A lawyer for Jenner & Block filed a similar notice dated May 14 indicating that it had just learned one of its attorneys had their clearance suspended, as well.

Mr. Trump’s executive orders directed agencies to essentially exile the firms from any work that runs through the federal government, such as by barring their attorneys from entering federal buildings, blacklisting them from federal contracts and taking away any security clearances held by their staff.

As justification, the orders cited the fact that both firms had employed top members of the special unit that investigated Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, and the question of whether Mr. Trump had worked to obstruct that investigation. They specifically named Robert S. Mueller III and Andrew Weissmann, who returned to those firms in the years after the investigation wound down. Both left in 2021, as lawyers for the firms have noted.

Both firms have asked the respective judges in their cases to skip past a trial and decide the relatively straightforward question of whether Mr. Trump’s orders are legal and should be allowed to stand.

Their cases are essentially identical in nature to those brought by other firms that found themselves in a similar position, such as Perkins Coie and Susman Godfrey. When Perkins Coie received its final ruling from a judge earlier this month, the answer to whether the president’s order was lawful was an emphatic no.

The ruling, from Judge Beryl A. Howell of the Federal District Court for the District of Columbia, compared the president’s order to an attempt by a populist mob to destabilize society by rooting out the legal opposition in Shakespeare’s play “Henry VI.”

Judge Howell’s ruling also showed deep disdain for the firms that had cut deals with Mr. Trump to avoid retribution.

Nine firms, including Paul Weiss; Rifkind; Wharton & Garrison; and Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom preemptively offered to take on millions of dollars in free work for largely uncontroversial causes, collectively approaching nearly $1 billion.

But after extracting those deals, the White House moved to consider even more intrusive terms, including enlisting them in legal fights to further Mr. Trump’s agenda.

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Federal officials may limit recommendations for the Covid vaccine.

The advisers are expected to decide on a way forward at a meeting in June. But the debate may have become irrelevant. New requirements for clinical testing of vaccines, announced earlier this month, may delay the availability of shots that had formerly been updated annually without complicated trials.

“Substantial updates to existing vaccines — such as those related to seasonal strain changes or antigenic drift — may qualify as ‘new products’ and therefore require additional clinical evaluation,” the Department of Health and Human Services said in a statement.

That category includes the Covid shots and “may” even include the seasonal flu vaccine, according to Andrew Nixon, a spokesman for H.H.S.

The Food and Drug Administration has already asked Novavax for more clinical data before approving its Covid vaccine. (Currently it has emergency use authorization, not full approval, for people aged 12 and older.)

“We want to see vaccines that are available for high-risk individuals, and at the same time we want some good science, we want some good clinical data,” Dr. Marty Makary, who heads the agency, told reporters at a conference on Thursday.

Officials in Washington have also been asking pointed questions of C.D.C. scientists about Covid’s toll on children under 12, an indication that they may be considering an end to the use of the vaccine in that age group, according to an official who did not wish to be identified for fear of retribution.

The Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday that H.H.S. plans to stop recommending the Covid vaccine for children and pregnant women altogether, citing people familiar with the matter.

In May 2021, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. sought to rescind authorization for the shots in a petition to the F.D.A. He has said, falsely, that the vaccines had killed more people than the virus.

The leaders he has installed at the agencies he leads, including Dr. Makary, have also been outspoken critics of annual Covid shots, particularly for children.

On the latter point, many public health experts agree, including some advisers to federal agencies. They have suggested for years now that annual booster shots might offer only marginal benefits to relatively younger, healthy Americans.

“I think what Dr. Makary is saying is that if everybody already has immunity to the virus, then maybe the vaccine doesn’t add that much, or maybe it adds something only in certain subpopulations,” said Dr. Philip Krause, a former F.D.A. vaccine regulator. “I think it’s a reasonable question to want to know the answer to.”

(Dr. Krause resigned from the F.D.A. in the fall of 2021 because he felt there was not enough evidence to support Covid booster shots for adults.)

The C.D.C. already collects data on the benefits of the Covid vaccines, which have decreased over time as more Americans gain greater immunity to the coronavirus.

But the vaccine should remain available to some people, including adults 75 and older, who remain at high risk, Dr. Krause and other experts noted.

“In my opinion, the data from the C.D.C. provide pretty strong evidence that there are some people who are still benefiting quite a bit from the vaccines,” he said. “There are still more Covid deaths than we would like.”

Mr. Kennedy has falsely asserted that none of the vaccines routinely offered to children have been tested in placebo clinical trials, prompting sharp rebuttals from several groups of scientists, and from Senator Bill Cassidy, Republican of Louisiana, whose vote cinched Mr. Kennedy’s nomination as health secretary earlier this year.

Some experts fear that the new federal limits are just the first steps in a campaign to undermine the use of all vaccines, including those in the childhood immunization schedule, by raising doubts about their safety and imposing requirements that make it untenable for companies to keep making them.

“I think that we are in the midst of watching the vaccine infrastructure being torn down bit by bit,” said Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and an adviser to the F.D.A.

Tara Smith, an epidemiologist at Kent State University College of Public Health who tracks the anti-vaccine movement, said there was jubilation among some groups that all vaccines, including the decades-old flu vaccine, might be challenged.

“I think everything is a target,” she said.

Covid fatalities have plummeted each year since the start of the pandemic, although there were still roughly 1,000 deaths per week during last winter’s peak. The vast majority occurred among adults aged 75 and older.

Earlier this month, federal officials sent the C.D.C. an urgent request for the annual number of Covid-related deaths in children under 12, according to an official with knowledge of the matter.

In the year ending in August, the agency reported 150 pediatric deaths, a number comparable to deaths among children in a typical flu season.

“We all, I think, support the pediatric use of flu vaccines,” said Michael Osterholm, an infectious disease expert at the University of Minnesota. If Covid is roughly as risky to children, “I find it hard not to at least allow the vaccine to be available.”

The number of Covid deaths in children seems low only when compared with fatalities in adults, said Sean O’Leary, chair of the infectious disease committee for the American Academy of Pediatrics.

“That’s the wrong way to look at it, because pediatric deaths are actually quite rare,” he said. If the vaccine were withdrawn for young children entirely, “I would have a big problem with that. Those kids do remain at higher risk for hospitalization.”

Dr. Krause said he was puzzled that the pediatric vaccine had not been moved to full approval from emergency authorization, while the adult versions were fully approved years ago by the F.D.A.

It may be that the F.D.A. has access to data that has prevented them from approving the shot, he said. “That being said, I think there probably are some children who would benefit from the vaccine,” he said.

The F.D.A. has not elaborated on what additional testing of Covid vaccines might entail. But officials may offer some clarity before the agency’s scientific advisers meet next week to discuss vaccines for the fall.

It would be unethical to offer a placebo to participants in a randomized trial if the virus still poses risks. And the results of any new trials would not be available in time for the fall, experts noted.

“In order to create new requirements for vaccines, there would have to be evidence that that would have any benefit for the public,” said Dr. Eric Rubin, one of the F.D.A.’s advisers and editor in chief of the New England Journal of Medicine.

“The issue, of course, is when you go into this having decided what the answer is, rather than looking at the data objectively,” he said.

Some of the C.D.C.’s advisers had mixed feelings even about moving to risk-based vaccine recommendations.

Such guidelines make sense in countries with universal health coverage, they said. But in the United States, insurance companies are not required to pay for an immunization that is not recommended by the C.D.C.

That may leave a vaccine that is too expensive for some who need it and are not explicitly included in a risk-based recommendation. A blanket recommendation may be more effective, some experts said.

“Vaccinations for children who have never been vaccinated, people with risk factors, are critically important,” said Dr. Denise Jamieson, one of the C.D.C. advisers.

It’s unclear whether the advisers retain much sway, however. Recommendations they made in April for use of several vaccines, which are typically promptly accepted by the C.D.C., have still not been endorsed by an agency leader.

The C.D.C. does not have a permanent director. Matthew Buzzelli, whom Mr. Kennedy pointed to on Wednesday as an acting director, is an attorney. Another official at H.H.S., Dr. William Archer, has sent the C.D.C. multiple questions about the advisers’ recommendations.

Dr. Archer has repeatedly discussed the “limitations” of the Covid vaccine on social media, according to Reuters.

In one query viewed by The New York Times, he told agency staff he needed “more justification” for a recent recommendation to expand use of the respiratory syncytial vaccine.

Christina Jewett contributed reporting.

Outsourcer in chief: Is Trump trading away America’s tech future?

The administration revealed the agreement on Thursday in an announcement unveiling a new A.I. campus in Abu Dhabi supported by 5 gigawatts of electrical power. It would be the largest such project outside the United States and help U.S. companies serve customers in Africa, Europe and Asia, the administration said. The details about the chips weren’t disclosed, and it’s not clear if they could still be subject to change.

As Mr. Trump traversed the region in recent days, the United States also struck multibillion-dollar agreements to sell advanced chips from Nvidia and AMD to Saudi Arabia. The United States and Saudi Arabia are also still in discussions on a larger contract for A.I. technology, five people familiar with the negotiations said.

The A.I. deals have caused people inside and outside the White House to wrestle with an unexpected question. Is the Trump administration, in its zeal to make deals in a region where Mr. Trump and his family have financial ties, outsourcing the industry of the future to the Middle East?

The question speaks to divisions over A.I. policy that are rippling through the Trump administration. The deals were negotiated in the Middle East by David Sacks, the administration’s A.I. czar, and Sriram Krishnan, its senior policy adviser for A.I., who are both longtime venture capitalists. Leading figures in the A.I. industry, like Sam Altman of OpenAI and Jensen Huang of Nvidia, have also been involved in talks that have continued on the sidelines of the president’s trip in recent days.

These men believe that companies — and countries — succeed by creating a network of partnerships to support their interests. They are optimistic the deals will boost business for American A.I. companies and widen the nation’s lead in artificial intelligence.

“We want American A.I. to spread,” Mr. Krishnan said.

But as details of the deals have flowed back to Washington, they have been met with skepticism and alarm. The New York Times spoke with nine current and former U.S. officials who expressed concern that the deals may have inadequate protections to prevent the technology from benefiting China, and that they could mean that the world’s biggest data centers are in the Middle East at the end of the decade, instead of the United States.

The tensions capture some of the contradictions of Mr. Trump’s policies. The president has long criticized how U.S. industries were moved offshore, and in recent months he has tried to bring them back by introducing steep tariffs. But in his first major diplomatic trip, he has shown a globalist’s interest in allowing American A.I. companies to thrive by going offshore.

The announcements of the two deals followed reports that $2 billion has flowed to Trump companies over the last month from the Middle East, including an Emirati-backed investment in Mr. Trump’s cryptocurrency and plans for a new presidential airplane from Qatar.

Klon Kitchen, a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, said it was possible to respect the administration’s effort to ensure “American technologies are the rails on which all A.I. runs” while also worrying about the risk they may export A.I. development overseas, much as the United States did with the energy industry.

“In foreign policy, there are often no solutions, only trade-offs,” he said.

The United States has led the world in developing A.I. because its companies pioneered much of the technology. Countries around the world are now lining up to buy Nvidia chips and strike agreements with American A.I. providers. Few nations have clamored for chips more than the Emirates and Saudi Arabia, which want to build A.I. industries to lessen their dependence on oil.

But the U.S. government must approve these foreign chip sales. That’s because the United States wants to prevent that technology — which can also be used to coordinate militaries and develop autonomous weapons — from going to adversaries like China.

The Biden administration greenlit some chip sales to the Emirates, but officials were reluctant to meet all of the country’s demands because they feared the sales might be significant enough to eventually help the Emirates outstrip the United States in A.I. They also questioned whether they should give such pivotal technology to an authoritarian government that has strong relations with China.

In 2024, Tahnoun bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the chairman of G42 and the national security adviser of the Emirates, pitched a plan to the Biden administration that is similar to what the Trump administration has approved, a person familiar with the talks said. The proposal would have built a computing cluster requiring 5 gigawatts of electrical power in the Emirates. But Biden officials rejected the plan because they thought it would send A.I. jobs overseas and outsource vital national security infrastructure.

But after Mr. Trump took office, his advisers worried that continuing to block sales to the Middle East could backfire, a senior administration official said. Huawei, China’s leading chip maker, has been improving the performance of its A.I. chips, though it hasn’t yet exported any. But Trump officials worried that if the United States continued to limit the Emirates’ access to American technology, the Persian Gulf nation would try Chinese alternatives.

“The president challenged us and tasked us and said, ‘We have to win the A.I. race,’” Mr. Sacks said during a conference on Tuesday in Saudi Arabia. “We need our friends like the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and other strategic partners and allies to want to build on our tech.”

In negotiations, the Emiratis and Saudis pitched using U.S. chips and A.I. models to help those U.S. companies reach new customers across the region, two people familiar with the talks said. The governments said they would provide security guarantees on the chips, allowing the United States to account for their physical location and how they were used.

U.S. officials also pressed the Emiratis and Saudis to balance big chip sales with investment in the United States, people familiar with the talks said. The Emiratis have agreed to a reciprocal investment requirement, in which every data center built for a U.S. company in the Middle East is offset by financial support for a data center in the United States, these people said.

In a separate announcement Thursday, the Trump administration said the governments would work together to make the process of Emirati investment in the United States “more efficient” and would establish a working group to monitor that.

The details of these agreements, or how they might evolve over time, remain unclear. It appears that G42 would still be subject to licensing agreements and other pending approvals to receive its chips.

Other A.I. experts are sympathetic to the view of some in the administration that the United States doesn’t have the energy resources to build all the data centers the world needs. The constraints have made it difficult for companies like OpenAI to fulfill customer demand, leading the company to limit a popular new feature to create animated images.

J.J. Kardwell, the chief executive of Vultr, a data center provider, said U.S. companies had begun looking to build data centers abroad because the maximum amount of power available this year would be about 50 megawatts, enough to support about 25,000 of Nvidia’s newest A.I. chips. In contrast, the oil-rich Gulf States have ample energy and the ability to quickly build data centers that support 100,000 chips or more.

“The U.S. can’t be the data center provider for the entire world,” Mr. Kardwell said.

But these views are not uniformly shared throughout the Trump administration, which is otherwise focused on an “America First” economic agenda of revving up energy production and bringing industries back onshore. Some officials have accused Mr. Sacks and Mr. Krishnan of freelancing around other advisers to negotiate details with Middle Eastern governments that others did not support.

One Trump administration official, who declined to be named because he was not authorized to speak publicly, said that with the G42 deal, American policymakers were making a choice that could mean the most powerful A.I. training facility in 2029 would be in the United Arab Emirates, rather than the United States.

In the eyes of America First critics, each data center built abroad represents another project not built in the United States. That means fewer jobs for electricians, pipe fitters and construction workers, and less tax revenue for local and state governments. It also means the U.S. government would have less immediate influence over any economic or military gains from A.I.

Jimmy Goodrich, senior adviser to RAND for tech analysis, said setting up A.I. data centers abroad was “taking the easy way out.” He understands why companies are frustrated with permitting and the lack of nuclear power, but he said the solution wasn’t to say, “Screw this. Let’s go to the Middle East.”

Mr. Goodrich said the United States still had the best A.I. engineers, companies and chips and should look for ways to speed up permitting and improve its energy grid to hold on to that expertise. Setting up some of the world’s largest data centers in the Middle East risks turning the Gulf States, or even China, into A.I. rivals, he said.

“We’ve seen this movie before, and we should not repeat it,” Mr. Goodrich said.

Sam Winter-Levy, a fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said the huge chip sales did “not feel consistent with an America First approach to A.I. policy or industrial policy.”

“Why would we want to offshore the infrastructure that will underpin the key industrial technology of the coming years?” he asked.

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Here’s what’s in Republicans’ big domestic policy bill to deliver Trump’s agenda.

The legislation would slash taxes, providing the biggest savings to the wealthy, and steer more money to the military and immigration enforcement, while cutting health, nutrition, education and clean energy programs to cover part of the cost.

Major portions of the sprawling package remain unresolved amid Republican divisions over cuts to Medicaid and details of the tax plan, among other issues. The changes that the hard-liners on the Budget Committee have called for — including speeding up when new work requirements for Medicaid would kick in and a wholesale repeal of the Inflation Reduction Act — could alienate more moderate Republicans whose support is also crucial to passing the legislation.

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 the Senate if all Democrats oppose it, as expected, and every member is present and voting.

Here is 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 Democratic-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 about $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.

In farewell email, Ed Martin discloses that he faces an ethics investigation.

In March, Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee asked the disciplinary group to investigate Mr. Martin, a legal and political defender of Trump supporters who ransacked the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. They accused him of abusing his office to attack political opponents and of violating professional standards by failing to recuse himself from a case involving a Capitol rioter.

Mr. Martin, in an email on Wednesday to employees whose morale plunged under his brief tenure, accused officials on the nonpartisan panel of improperly disclosing the inquiry to staff members in the office. He claimed that an official in the group engaged in actions that were “personally insulting and professionally unacceptable.”

Last week, Mr. Trump chose the Fox News personality Jeanine Pirro, a former judge and prosecutor whose false statements about the 2020 election were part of a lawsuit against the network, as the new interim U.S. attorney in Washington, hours after he was forced to pull Mr. Martin’s name from consideration.

He also announced that Mr. Martin would move into new roles at the Justice Department, as associate deputy attorney general and pardon attorney. The Trump administration fired the previous pardon attorney after a dispute about whether to restore the gun rights of the actor Mel Gibson, who carries a misdemeanor domestic violence conviction.

Mr. Martin will also oversee the so-called Weaponization Working Group, an effort Attorney General Pam Bondi said would root out “abuses of the criminal justice process” by local and federal law enforcement officers. The group appears to provide the president a lever to exact retribution against his perceived enemies.

“I hope to see you around,” Mr. Martin wrote at the conclusion of his email. “Please know that you, your work and this office will be in my daily prayers.”

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Senate rejects bid to force administration to submit a human rights reports on El Salvador.

Supporters said the resolution was intended to determine if U.S. security assistance had gone to support the detention of U.S. residents in a country that might be violating human rights. It would have amounted to a strong rebuke of President Trump and a challenge to his aggressive deportation drive, which Democrats see as an unlawful overreach.

Though the measure had little chance of success in the Republican-controlled Senate, the Democratic minority forced a vote anyway, their latest maneuver to resist the president’s policies and make Republicans cast votes on highly charged political issues. Democrats used the same tactic to force votes on a number of the Mr. Trump’s previously announced tariffs.

There has been growing consternation among Democrats in Washington over the deal Mr. Trump struck to pay the government of El Salvador millions of dollars to imprison a group of Venezuelan and Salvadoran migrants the administration claims are transnational criminal gangs.

Frustrations erupted when Mr. Trump and top officials in his administration said they would not repatriate Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran national who had been living in the United States and was mistakenly deported to his home country even though a court had forbade returning him there.

A group of Democratic senators banded together to push for a legislative response after the administration defied a Supreme Court and lower court rulings instructing the U.S. government to facilitate Mr. Abrego Garcia’s return and Mr. Trump mused repeatedly on television about sending U.S. citizens who commit violent crimes to prisons in El Salvador.

Thursday’s resolution was introduced by Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia and cosponsored by Senators Chris Van Hollen of Maryland and Alex Padilla of California. It also had the backing of Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the minority leader.

“The courts have spoken, and now the Senate needs to ensure that the Trump administration is listening. Senate Democrats will not rest until we have answers,” Mr. Schumer said in a statement before the vote.

Republicans called the measure a misguided defense of criminal migrants.

“Senate Democrats are voting once again to defend illegal immigrant criminals — they seem to like to do that. It’s hard to believe, but it’s true,” Senator John Barrasso, Republican of Wyoming, said ahead of the vote.

The Foreign Assistance Act allows Congress to request a human rights report from the State Department on any nation that is receiving U.S. assistance to determine whether American funding may be going to a country that is violating human rights.