When Republican leaders return to Washington, D.C., on Monday after a two-week recess, they will face a series of Herculean tasks in the House of Representatives: uniting their razor-thin majority behind efforts to fund the Department of Homeland Security and passing an agreement on federal surveillance powers. The Future of Funding The Department of Homeland Security—which handles vital responsibilities such as border security, the Coast Guard, and the Secret Service—has been shut down since Feb. 14, and it is unclear whether Congress will reach an agreement to fully fund it soon. Right before leaving town for recess, the Senate passed a bill that would have funded the whole department except for border security and immigration enforcement. The plan was to include funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection in a party-line budget reconciliation bill that would require no Democrat votes. The House of Representatives promptly rejected this plan, as Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, R-La., described it as an effort to “defund the police.” But days later, President Donald Trump, Johnson, and Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., agreed to return to this piecemeal approach of funding the agency. The battle is not over yet. The House Freedom Caucus, a conservative faction of the House of Representatives, is agreeing to the budget reconciliation strategy, but says members want the entire department funded for the rest of Trump’s presidency via this process. We cannot leave ICE and CBP hanging with nothing but hopes and prayers that reconciliation 2.0 comes together.That’s why we must use reconciliation to fully fund ALL of the Department of Homeland Security!We can tightly control this process with strict instructions to the…— House Freedom Caucus (@freedomcaucus) April 7, 2026 “We cannot leave ICE and CBP hanging with nothing but hopes and prayers that reconciliation 2.0 comes together,” the group wrote in an April statement. “We can fund DHS for the rest of the President’s term to ensure Democrats can never again take our nation’s security hostage. We will never hand Democrats their ultimate prize: A defunded ICE, handcuffed CBP, and criminal aliens terrorizing our communities.” Funding an entire department via a party-line reconciliation bill would be a shock to the normal business of Congress, where the annual funding process is usually based on bipartisan compromise. The way that Johnson handles this issue could determine the future of government funding in Washington. Moreover, Republicans will have to come to a consensus on their next reconciliation bill, as Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., and Rep. Jodey Arrington, R-Texas, have mentioned, including ambitious entitlement reforms and defense spending in a potential bill. Surveillance Republican leaders are in for a tough legislative push next week, as they try to gather the votes to reaffirm the federal government’s controversial authority to surveil foreigners without warrants. The authority expires April 20. Many House Republicans and Trump have argued in the past that this power is easily abused, resulting in the inadvertent surveillance of American citizens. Trump has called for a clean extension of the authority. Back in 2024, Congress agreed to extend Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Several members of the House Republican Conference demanded reforms to the authority, some of which were ultimately granted. Johnson has argued that the current reforms suffice and have protected American citizens.“Last time it was up for reauthorization, we instituted 56 substantive reforms to FISA,” Johnson has said. “By every measure and review, those are working just as we planned. We’ve not had the abuses that were happening before those reforms,“ he said. But some members want more safeguards included, including a warrant requirement that failed to gather enough support in a 2024 amendment vote. Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Colo., called herself a “a NO on FISA reauthorization without warrants” in an X post on Friday. Rep. Warren Davidson, R-Ohio, similarly urged “reforms to close the loophole that allows the federal government to purchase citizens’ private data.” If House Republican leadership holds the line and refuses to alter FISA, it may need to rely on Democrat votes to pass an extension.  Leadership can probably pass the bill via this strategy, since Rep. Jim Himes, D-Conn., the top Democrat on the House intel committee, has given an extension of the authority his blessing. The post As House Returns Next Week, Giant Tasks Loom appeared first on The Daily Signal.

The White House called lawmakers in Missouri and Tennessee about their artificial intelligence guardrail bills in its two latest attempts to intervene in state AI legislation. In Missouri, the White House had a call with the conservative sponsor of an AI safety bill to discuss softening it, the legislator said. The legislation would establish the harms caused by an AI system as the responsibility of its owner or operator. In Tennessee, a state senator admitted on the Senate floor that the White House had called and asked him to strike multiple provisions from his child safety and transparency bill. “It will happen in every state,” a source close to AI policy told The Daily Signal.  “We are proud of the President’s National AI Framework,” a White House official told The Daily Signal. “The Trump Administration is eager to work with partners who will help us implement that policy and achieve a comprehensive AI framework that serves all Americans. This approach will protect children, prevent censorship, respect intellectual property, and safeguard communities while ensuring America remains the undisputed leader in AI and technological innovation.” In February, the White House contacted Florida Speaker of the House Daniel Perez and his staff members about opposing Gov. Ron DeSantis’ bill to establish limits on artificial intelligence, including protections for minors, The Daily Signal first reported. A week before that, the White House sent a letter pressuring a Utah lawmaker to kill his bill requiring tech companies to publish safety and child-protection plans. Missouri Republican state Sen. Joe Nicola introduced the Missouri bill that would prohibit AI from having the legal status of personhood and ban harmful deepfake videos. He said he is discouraged by the White House’s intervention in his bill but said he will not give up on regulating AI. “I’m very frustrated, to be quite honest,” he told The Daily Signal. When Nicola presented the bill for floor debate, he said two fellow Republicans stalled the process by raising concerns about President Donald Trump’s executive order preempting state laws that place “onerous” guardrails on AI innovation.  The senators told Nicola they were concerned about the federal government withholding almost $90 million in Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment Program funds, which their constituents in rural Missouri depend on for internet access, he noted. Nicola responded that other states like Texas had passed AI protection bills without the White House withholding any funding.  The state senator said he then called White House Intergovernmental Affairs Director Alex Meyer to advocate for his bill. “I told him my purpose for it, and that I didn’t want to hinder innovation,” he said. “We want to leave growth, but we’ve got to start from some guardrails, and I would prefer that the U.S. government and Congress do it, but since they’re not, I’m elected to do what I can to preserve freedom and liberty for the people in Missouri,” he said. Meyer said his bill was overly broad and that some of the penalty provisions were “a bit steep,” Nicola said, and expressed concerns that the bill would impose overly strict limits on developers, hindering innovation.  “I disagree,” Nicola said. “I’ve had lawyers look at this. I’ve worked with some other AI organizations, told them what I wanted to do, what I wanted to accomplish, and I think we have a good piece of legislation.” Nicola is now working on the 11th version of his bill to address the White House’s concerns.  “I’m willing to soften it for the developers, but we still need to hold people accountable for these deepfakes,” he said.  Nicola says he was promised a conference call with the White House AI policy shop, but a week later, the meeting has not materialized.   “I’d take great offense that the president would threaten us by withholding federal funds from protecting our people,” the Missouri Republican said. “That’s why I was elected, it’s what I’m doing here, and to be told I can’t do that, that ‘they’re gonna threaten you,’ that makes me want to push back even harder.” Tennessee The White House appeared to follow a similar playbook in Tennessee after Republican state Sen. Ken Yager introduced a bill prohibiting misleading statements by AI developers and chatbot providers about major safety risks. His bill would also require transparent child safety plans.   “The White House called this morning about the bill,” Yager said on the Senate floor April 7. He presented a new amendment to his bill “at the suggestion of the White House” that deleted portions of the legislation to focus instead on child safety and transparent reporting.  The Daily Signal reached out to Yager’s office for comment, but did not hear back by publication time. A source involved in the Tennessee legislation said he was surprised that the White House involved itself in AI policy in the home states of Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., and Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., key players in Senate negotiations over the National Framework on AI.  “The idea that you would go into Hawley’s state and Blackburn’s state, who are critical people to get on board with the national framework, that are pretty far off now from the weaker standards in the House, this sabotaged a lot of negotiation,” he said.  The post White House Pressures Lawmakers in Missouri, Tennessee on AI Safeguard Bills appeared first on The Daily Signal.

The days of peak DOGE may be over, but Trump’s quiet transformation of the federal bureaucracy continues. The Trump administration shrank the federal workforce to its smallest number since the launch of LBJ’s Great Society. This incredible stat, little remarked upon by the media, was dredged up by X user Christian Heiens. “Since Trump took office, over 352,000 Federal employees have been fired, resigned, or retired and were not replaced,” Heiens wrote on X. “The Federal workforce is smaller today than at any point since 1966.” Since Trump took office, over 352,000 Federal employees have been fired, resigned, or retired and were not replaced.The Federal workforce is smaller today than at any point since 1966. pic.twitter.com/6YPGxCaCfQ— Christian Heiens ? (@ChristianHeiens) April 9, 2026 Pew Research also noted this considerable decline in the federal workforce in March. “A total of 348,219 people quit, retired, were laid off or otherwise left federal employment last year – an 80.8% increase from 2024,” Pew wrote. “At the same time, 116,912 people started working for the federal government – a 55.6% decrease from the year before.” Pew noted that the biggest cuts hit the Department of Education and USAID. Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, celebrated this all around good news. I voted for thisDid you? https://t.co/splW2mrwEm— Mike Lee (@BasedMikeLee) April 9, 2026 A quick look at numbers provided by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics shows the figures to be correct. Since President Donald Trump retook office, his administration has done more to reduce the federal workforce than pretty much any president ever. That includes Trump 1.0. The only larger drop-off in government personnel occurred at the end of World War II, for obvious reasons.  Of course, FDR and Harry Truman were in no way small government presidents. It was the New Deal in the 1930s that mushroomed the size of the federal government beyond anything the Founders could have imagined. The Great Society in the 1960s grew the government even more and arguably created the far more pernicious federal leviathan that we have today. One could argue this administration marks the first serious curtailment of that governmental transformation. Even the limited-government minded President Ronald Reagan failed to seriously reduce the size of the federal government despite some considerable tactical victories. This is much more significant. Early on in Trump’s return to the White House I called this Trump’s “Dark New Deal.” His administration isn’t just reducing the federal workforce—a gargantuan task given the level of civil service protections and inertia in its favor—he’s specifically targeting the most noxious parts of the bureaucratic perma-state. My wife Inez Stepman, a policy analyst for the Independent Women’s Forum, correctly noted this fact. This is one of the most important victories in a century for the right, but the losers on here would have you never know it https://t.co/XnYmSuByWL— Inez Stepman ????? (@InezFeltscher) April 10, 2026 This is a historic counterrevolution against the deep state. It’s happening because the administration is fundamentally changing how the bureaucracy functions. Don Devine, Reagan’s “terrible swift sword of the civil service,” explained some of what’s going on in Law & Liberty. Devine wrote in September that Trump is not just “cutting the size of government by firing good civil servants” as the media suggests. Instead, the administration appears to be “fundamentally reforming the federal bureaucracy with the legal support essential to change how government is actually administered.” The changes came as the result of a few Supreme Court decisions, including the reinstatement of the Professional and Administrative Examination test in August, which allows the federal government to bring an element of “merit” back to civil service hiring. Several agencies, including the Department of Justice, are already reviving merit-based hiring. It was blocked by courts since 1981 because they ruled that it caused black and Hispanic applicants to be hired at lower rates. DEI has been in our federal hiring practices for some time. This change is happening while Trump is clearing out the Left’s patronage networks within the federal government whereby federal bureaucrats shovel money at various leftwing NGOs and favorable programs often right under the noses of Republican presidents. There’s a reason Trump’s return to office was met with panic in Washington. While this is perhaps bad for the economy in the nation’s capital, it’s a good thing for the future of limited government and an even better thing for the American people. This is good. The DC economy shrinking is a sign that the federal government and, maybe, the lobbying apparatus is contracting. https://t.co/yjJqTH16gM— John Carney (@carney) April 10, 2026 It’s not often that you can say that our president does anything quietly, but this rarely remarked upon revolution could pay dividends not just today, but in the decades ahead. While the next Democratic administration will undoubtedly try to return things to how they were, this administration is laying down structural changes that will be hard to immediately undo. When you combine that with the Supreme Court’s abandonment of the so-called Chevron doctrine, in which courts deferred to federal agencies, you can see through squinted eyes something that actually resembles republican governance. That’s worth celebrating. The post Trump Is Quietly Shrinking the Federal Bureaucracy—and It’s Historic appeared first on The Daily Signal.

During the 2024 campaign, Donald Trump repeatedly promised to “end birthright citizenship” for children born in the U.S. to non-citizen parents. After winning by an electoral landslide, on Jan. 20, 2025, President Trump issued his executive order to fulfill that promise. The American Civil Liberties Union promptly filed a lawsuit challenging President Trump’s executive order. That executive order was the subject of oral arguments in the Supreme Court on April 1, 2026. President Trump attended in person. For reasons explained below, the court should sustain President Trump’s executive order because the people elected President Trump, and any ambiguities in the 14th Amendment should be construed in favor of the people—which is different than construing the amendment in favor of President Trump. The purpose of President Trump’s executive order is clearly stated: “The privilege of United States citizenship is a priceless and profound gift. The Fourteenth Amendment states: ‘All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.’ That provision rightly repudiated the Supreme Court of the United States’s shameful decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. (19 How.) 393 (1857), which misinterpreted the Constitution as permanently excluding people of African descent from eligibility for United States citizenship solely based on their race.” President Trump’s executive order also acknowledged that, “The Fourteenth Amendment has always excluded from birthright citizenship persons who were born in the United States but not ‘subject to the jurisdiction thereof.’” On April 1, 2026, the lawyer representing the American Civil Liberties Union in its challenge to President Trump’s executive order relied primarily on the 1898 Supreme Court ruling in United States v. Wong Kim Ark for her arguments in favor of birthright citizenship for the children of parents not in the U.S. legally. She suggested that this “landmark decision” established that children born on U.S. soil are citizens regardless of their parents’ status. As the parents of the child at issue in Wong Kim Ark were in the U.S. legally, to suggest that this “landmark decision” established birthright citizenship for the children of parents not legally allowed to reside in the United States defies logic. The issue argued in the Supreme Court on April 1, 2026, centered around ambiguities in the phrase in the 14th Amendment, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” Even though the final Section of the 14th Amendment, Section 5, grants Congress “the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation,” the 14th Amendment, Congress has never enacted legislation clarifying the ambiguities in the phrase, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” When dealing with ambiguities in the 14th Amendment, unless or until Congress exercises its powers under Section 5 of the 14th Amendment to clarify ambiguities by legislative enforcement, the Supreme Court should construe the ambiguities in favor of the people, who re-elected President Trump. Thirty years ago this month, the American Legislative Exchange Council published my article, “The Forgotten Preamble: Introduction to the Bill of Rights Gives More Meaning to the Tenth Amendment.” In it, I pointed out how the Preamble of the 1789 Bill of Rights explains the purpose of the Bill of Rights as “in order to prevent misconstructions or abuses of its power,” i.e., abuses of powers delegated by our Constitution to our federal government. In this light, I suggested: Whenever federal courts and agencies are forced to “legislate” by construing legal ambiguities, they should utilize the final Article of the Bill of Rights – “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people” – as an interpretive rule to construe ambiguities against the proffering party, i.e., against Congress (See United States v. Heth, 1806.). … [A] Tenth Amendment rule of construction would provide a practical safeguard against federal encroachments on powers that neither the states nor the people have ever delegated to the national government. Justice Neil Gorsuch explained in his June 28, 2024, concurring opinion in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, which struck down decades of “Chevron deference” to unelected government bureaucrats: “Chevron deference sits in tension with many traditional legal presumptions and interpretive principles, representing nearly the inverse of … contra preferentem.” President Trump repeatedly promised to “end birthright citizenship” for children born in the U.S. to non-citizen parents, and then did just that on the first day of his second term. Now, the Supreme Court should resolve ambiguities in the 14th Amendment using contra preferentem and thereby avoid frustrating the will of the people. It’s our government after all. The post Principled Solution to Ambiguities about Birthright Citizenship appeared first on The Daily Signal.

New Department of Labor statistics indicate inflation rose sharply amid the United States’ military campaign against Iran, but the White House argues the rise in costs will only be temporary. “President Trump has always been clear about short-term disruptions as a result of Operation Epic Fury, disruptions that the Administration has been diligently working to mitigate,” White House spokesman Kush Desai wrote in a Friday statement on the March inflation report. The report suggests the Consumer Price Index—the benchmark price of a bundle of common consumer goods—was 3.3% higher than a year before. President Trump has always been clear about short-term disruptions as a result of Operation Epic Fury, disruptions that the Administration has been diligently working to mitigate. Although gas and energy prices are seeing volatility, prices of eggs, beef, prescription drugs,…— Kush Desai (@KushDesai47) April 10, 2026 This annualized rate of inflation is a .9% uptick from the 2.4% rate in February. Core inflation—which excludes the volatile categories of food and energy—is up 2.6% year-over-year, a .2% increase from February. Desai argued the report paints an overall positive picture of the economy amid volatility in energy costs. “Although gas and energy prices are seeing volatility, prices of eggs, beef, prescription drugs, dairy, and other household essentials are falling or remain stable thanks to President Trump’s policies,” Desai said. He added, “As the Administration ensures the free flow of energy through the Strait of Hormuz, the American economy remains on a solid trajectory thanks to the Administration’s robust supply-side agenda of tax cuts, deregulation, and energy Abundance.” JUST IN: Inflation soared in March to 3.3% y/y–> the highest annual rate since May 2024. The war in Iran is squeezing middle income and lower income households.**Inflation in March alone rose 0.9%. That’s the biggest one-month jump since June 2022**Gas jumped +21% in March… pic.twitter.com/tp4EHnEGIg— Heather Long (@byHeatherLong) April 10, 2026 Operation Epic Fury, the joint U.S.-Israeli operation in Iran, commenced on Feb. 28, meaning the report should reflect war-time price shocks. Traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, a key oil waterway, has been stalled ever since. Democrats are likely to attack Republicans for the inflation numbers as midterms approach. “Skyrocketing inflation, the highest in years, all because of Donald Trump’s unnecessary, ill-planned, reckless war of choice,” Schumer said in a post on X. “It’s another reason we must end this war now. Americans are paying the price for Trump’s idiocy every day.” Both Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., have announced they intend to advance war powers resolutions to force Republicans to support or oppose Trump’s authority to continue the Iran operation. The post White House: Inflation Hike Amid Iran Conflict Is Temporary appeared first on The Daily Signal.