The Latest: House GOP pushes ‘big’ budget resolution to passage
With a push from President Donald Trump, House Republicans have sent a GOP budget blueprint to passage, a step toward delivering Trump’s “big, beautiful bill.” The bill includes $4.5 trillion in tax breaks and $2 trillion in spending cuts, despite a wall of opposition from Democrats and discomfort among Republicans.
Meanwhile, Trump’s effort to suspend the system for resettling refugees in the U.S. is on hold after a federal judge in Seattle blocked it.
Here's the latest:
The bug within the dictation feature on some iPhones briefly suggests the word “Trump” when a word with an R consonant is spoken.
The company is responding to the controversy after some iPhone owners posted videos on social media this week to detail how the glitch works.
When users activated the dictation feature and said the word “racist,” the word “Trump” appears in the text window before quickly being replaced by the correct word, according to various videos posted online.
“We are aware of an issue with the speech recognition model that powers Dictation and we are rolling out a fix today,” Apple said in a statement sent to The Associated Press on Wednesday.
▶ Read more about the iPhone dictation glitch
Trump on Tuesday directed the government to consider possible tariffs on copper, the latest move by the White House to tax a wide array of imports and reshape global trade.
“It will have a big impact,” said Trump before signing the executive order to study copper imports.
On a call with reporters, White House trade adviser Peter Navarro portrayed the move as an effort to stop China’s build out of its copper sector and to address a broader national security vulnerability. There is also a desire to restore the domestic mining, smelting and refining of copper given potential military and technological needs.
Trump has long said his trade goals are to ensure that imports are equal in size to exports, so that the United States doesn’t run trade deficits. But America runs a surplus with copper and the administration sees a national security risk from the forecasts of supply and demand.
▶ Read more about Trump’s request for tariffs on copper
The turmoil that enveloped the federal workforce over the last few days is unlikely to cease anytime soon as the U.S. government’s human resources agency considers how to fulfill Elon Musk ’s demands.
The Office of Personnel Management told agency leaders Monday that their employees did not have to comply with a Musk-inspired edict for workers to report their recent accomplishments or risk getting fired. But later that evening, OPM sent out another memo suggesting that there could be similar requests going forward — and workers might be sanctioned for noncompliance.
OPM originally sent employees an email over the weekend with the subject line “what did you do last week?” Recipients were asked to respond with “approx. 5 bullets of what you accomplished.”
President Donald Trump did little to clear up the situation while talking to reporters in the Oval Office on Tuesday.
“It’s somewhat voluntary,” he said, but added that “if you don’t answer, I guess you get fired.”
▶ Read more about Musk’s demands for the federal workforce
House Republicans Tuesday night sent a GOP budget blueprint to passage, a step toward delivering his “big, beautiful bill” with $4.5 trillion in tax breaks and $2 trillion in spending cuts despite a wall of opposition from Democrats and discomfort among Republicans.
House Speaker Mike Johnson had almost no votes to spare in his bare-bones GOP majority and fought on all fronts — against Democrats, uneasy rank-and-file Republicans and skeptical GOP senators — to advance the party’s signature legislative package. Trump made calls to wayward GOP lawmakers and invited Republicans to the White House.
The vote was 217-215, with a single Republican and all Democrats opposed, and the outcome was in jeopardy until the gavel.
▶ Read more about the passage of the budget resolution
Trump said Tuesday that he plans to offer a “gold card” visa with a path to citizenship for $5 million, replacing a 35-year-old visa for investors.
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said the “Trump Gold Card” would replace EB-5 visas in two weeks. EB-5s were created by Congress in 1990 to generate foreign investment and are available to people who spend about $1 million on a company that employs at least 10 people.
Lutnick said the gold card — actually a green card, or permanent legal residency — would raise the price of admission for investors and do away with fraud and “nonsense” that he said characterize the EB-5 program. Like other green cards, it would include a path to citizenship.
Trump made no mention of the requirements for job creation. And, while the number of EB-5 visas is capped, Trump mused that the federal government could sell 10 million “gold cards” to reduce the deficit. He said it “could be great, maybe it will be fantastic.”
▶ Read more about Trump’s “gold visa” plan
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