Politics

President Donald Trump’s pick to be the next Director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, spent much of his confirmation hearing Wednesday defending the president’s decision to put a 15% cap on indirect research costs dispersed by the NIH.  Bhattacharya, a physician, Stanford professor of medicine and senior fellow at the university’s Institute for Economic Policy Research, would not explicitly say he disagreed with the cuts, or that, if confirmed, he...

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt defended U.S. efforts to negotiate with Hamas to release American hostages during a briefing on Wednesday. There are currently five hostages with U.S. citizenship in Gaza, though most are feared dead.  During the news conference, Fox News senior White House correspondent Peter Doocy asked Leavitt how the plans to negotiate fall in line with the long-standing policy not to negotiate with terrorists. ‘If the U.S. has a long-standing policy...

House Republicans are hoping to affirm that they are on the same page as Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) during a closed-door meeting on Wednesday night. Musk is huddling with Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., and other members of the House GOP Conference around 7 p.m. ET on Capitol Hill, according to an invitation obtained by Fox News Digital. ‘Specifics, you know, on what DOGE has been doing, and how they’ve accomplished...

Federal Judge Beryl Howell is considering whether President Donald Trump’s firing of National Labor Relations Board member Gwynne Wilcox was illegal.  This case is similar to those of Merit Systems Protection Board Chairperson Cathy Harris and Hampton Dellinger, who heads the Office of the Special Counsel. Howell acknowledged that this case seems destined for higher courts, maybe even the highest. ‘I realize for both sides this court is merely a speedbump to get to the...

Four conservative Supreme Court justices penned a blistering dissent Wednesday after the court majority rejected the Trump administration’s request to continue a temporary freeze on foreign aid payments.  ​​Justice Samuel Alito excoriated the high court majority for allowing a lower court judge to single-handedly determine the timeline for the Trump administration to pay nearly $2 million in payments for previously completed foreign aid projects – an order he called ‘too extreme.’  In a scathing eight-page...

The Trump administration’s Treasury Department is in the midst of weighing a ‘wide range’ of possibilities to streamline the Internal Revenue Service amid reports up to half of the IRS staff could be terminated, Fox News Digital learned Wednesday. ‘In line with the Trump administration’s focus on efficiency and deficit reduction, the Treasury Department is considering a wide range of possible streamlining initiatives,’ a Treasury spokesperson told Fox News Digital Wednesday afternoon.  ‘While no plan...

Competing resolutions to censure Rep. Al Green, D-Texas, are causing some division within the House GOP on Wednesday. The Texas Democrat was thrown out of President Donald Trump’s address to a joint session of Congress on Tuesday night after repeatedly attempting to interrupt the speech, minutes after it began. A resolution to punish Green over the incident is likely to pass, even with Republicans’ razor-thin majority in the House. But differing ideas over how to...

The Supreme Court on Wednesday denied the Trump administration’s request to block a lower court’s order for the administration to pay nearly $2 billion in foreign aid money, delivering a near-term reprieve to international aid groups and contractors seeking payment for previously completed projects. In a 5-4 ruling, the justices said that the Feb. 26 deadline imposed by a lower court for the Trump administration to pay the funds had already expired and directed the...

Top brass at the Department of State are questioning if the U.S. government’s role should include working ‘in the philanthropy business’ as the Trump administration uncovers a trove of mismanagement and overspending in recent years.  ‘No one will argue with the philanthropic nature of foreign assistance,’ Pete Marocco, the director of the Office of Foreign Assistance — which sits under the State Department’s federal umbrella — said to a group of faith-based organizations Friday. ‘So,...

The Supreme Court on Wednesday denied the Trump administration’s request to block a lower court’s order for the administration to pay nearly $2 billion in foreign aid money, delivering a near-term reprieve to international aid groups and contractors seeking payment for previously completed projects. In a 5-4 ruling, the justices said that the Feb. 26 deadline imposed by a lower court for the Trump administration to pay the funds had already expired, and directed the...