House lawmakers return to Capitol Hill as Republicans hope to pass stopgap spending bill
The US House is back after a five-week recess. And this week, Republicans are focused a key legislative agenda item: passing a stopgap spending bill to stave off a possible government shutdown.
Currently, funding is guaranteed through 30 September, but after a year marked by record-breaking shutdowns, GOP House speaker Mike Johnson is hoping to advance a bill that would extend funding spending at its current levels until after the November midterms.
Johnson is expected to put a vote on the House floor this week, using a fast-track procedure that requires a two-thirds majority to pass.
Prior to the Senate heading home for their August recess, the upper chamber approved its own continuing resolution to keep the government until 11 December, this also included provisions like preventing political appointees having approvals over federal grants.
The House is set to leave Washington again at the end of this week for Labor Day recess, provided it can get through its to-do list.
Key events
Vice-president JD Vance will shortly be speaking at a manufacturing facility in Sterling Heights, Michigan.
He is there campaigning on behalf of several Republican nominees in key statewide races, including Mike Rogers, who is running for Senate in a closely watched race against Democrat Abdul El-Sayed, and congressman John James, who is running to replace Gretchen Whitmer in the governor’s race. James will face Jocelyn Benson, Michigan’s secretary of state, in the November general election.
I’ll bring you all the key lines from Vance’s remarks when it gets going.
Pentagon plays down report of Hegseth regularly overruling military advice
Joseph Gedeon
Pete Hegseth regularly receives formal objections from senior commanders and proceeds anyway, the Pentagon’s top spokesman has said, as he tried to discredit a Washington Post report that four generals and admirals had advised against prolonging the war against Iran.
“Of course, we demand candid military advice,” Sean Parnell wrote on X. “Non-concurs are standard. The Secretary sees them constantly. That’s how you run a real military.”
Parnell was responding to the Post’s account of four four-star commanders who had lodged formal “non-concurs” against a plan to keep more than 50,000 US troops in the Middle East through September, with some deployments potentially running into 2027.
In dismissing the story, Parnell did not dispute that the objections had been filed, or that Hegseth fields such dissent on an ongoing basis.
“Publishing highly classified assessments from the Secretary’s orders book is a crime,” he wrote. “It’s a betrayal of the force. And much of what they’re publishing is inaccurate … We are in great shape around the world. This story isn’t about readiness. It’s TDS and PDS – they hate President Trump and Secretary Hegseth more than they love America.”
It was unclear which parts of the story the Pentagon deems to be inaccurate. A community note attached to the X post noted that, while leaking classified material is illegal for government employees, the US supreme court ruled in 1971 that the first amendment protects the press’s right to publish classified information of public interest.
Here’s Joseph’s full report:
Kalshi permanently bans George Santos after he bet on his State of the Union plans
Prediction market platform Kalshi has issued its first lifetime ban on none other than the disgraced former Republican congressman George Santos, who bet against his own announced plans to attend Donald Trump’s State of the Union address.
In a filing, Kalshi said of the affair: “The Compliance Department found that Santos made these statements with the intent to manipulate the price of the Yes or No contracts that he intended to purchase. Ultimately, these statements did in fact manipulate the price of said contracts.
“The Compliance Department has issued a penalty permanently suspending Santos from direct or indirect access to Kalshi and has imposed a penalty of $71,356.”
The company said he had made $17,839.57 from his wagers.
Santos responded in a post on X this morning: “Hey @Kalshi thanks for the lifetime ban from your gambling platform. Let’s see how much longer you guys are around for.”
Santos was released from prison in New Jersey in October after Donald Trump commuted his seven-year, three-month sentence for wire fraud and aggravated identity theft.
The former congressman was revealed to have fabricated much about his life during his congressional campaign and was expelled from Congress while under federal investigation for fraud in 2023.
Following his release, Santos returned to X in February to tell his millions of followers that he planned to attend Trump’s speech. “I’m gonna be in the gallery,” he wrote.
But he didn’t attend the event. “I guess people lost money,” he said on his podcast in March. “Some people made unexpected money. That’s to show you how fragile these markets are.”
He was also fined $35,000 and received a three-year trading ban from the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission last month for alleged market manipulation over the incident.
Tom Ambrose
Vance also said that Trump was sending a message to Iran with his AI-generated social media video, posted over the weekend, that shows the US bombing Kharg Island.
“The president likes to switch it up on social media a little bit. He would be the first to say he doesn’t make announcements about military actions on social media, but I think that he’s sending a message to the Iranians,” Vance said when asked about Trump’s post.
A US official said on Monday the military had not targeted Kharg Island in overnight strikes. An Iranian official dismissed Trump’s post as “laughable”.
Speaking to reporters before he took off for Detroit, JD Vance defended the Donald Trump’s earlier comments about Americans who oppose datacenter construction, but attempted to underscore the need for tech companies to subsidize the higher energy costs that come with the AI expansion.
“I think probably 99% of the backlash to datacenters has come in areas where building a datacenter means higher utility and higher electricity for the people on the ground,” Vance said. “If you build a datacenter – you should be putting power back into the grid, not taking it out. And if that is happening, I don’t think the datacenters are that controversial. It’s when the utility bills get so much higher that’s when it’s a real problem.”
Chris Hippensteel
Bessent also briefly touched on the new Iran sanctions earlier this morning, before his opening remarks in Asheville.
Speaking to reporters, Bessent predicted that, under the latest round of sanctions, Iran’s economy could collapse within “weeks or months”. But he also suggested that a deal, not collapse, was the administration’s primary goal.
“The economy doesn’t have to collapse, we just have to have the regime come to their senses,” Bessent said.
Bessent accuses Carney of turning US-Canada trade fallout into ‘political shouting match’
Chris Hippensteel
Asked on CNBC about the escalating US-Canada trade war with Canada, Bessent spoke dismissively of Canada’s ability to economically retaliate against US tariffs. “I don’t think you can be in a tit-for-tat with someone 13 times larger than you are,” Bessent said.
He also accused Canadian prime minister Mark Carney of turning a trade dispute into “a political shouting match”. This comes after Donald Trump signed an executive order ordering the US interior department to rename Lake Ontario as “Lake America” in response to the back-and-forth of tariffs between the two countries.
“[Carney] is doing what’s best for the Liberal party, what’s best for Mark Carney. And in the long run, the Canadian people are going to see through that,” Bessent said today.
“They were offered the best trade deal of any country on the globe,” Bessent added, “and he chose to walk away from it at the last minute.”
Trump says ‘only reason’ Americans would oppose datacenters is if they ‘want to end up being backwards and poor’
In another Truth Social missive today, Donald Trump has taken aim at the Americans who oppose the construction of datacenters – the power-demanding warehouses that tech companies use to house their computer servers and systems.
The president said that the “only reason” communities would not want datacenters is “if they want to end up being backwards and poor”.
“If they want to be successful and rich, with far lower taxes and jobs all over the place, let Data Reign,” Trump wrote. “The good news is that there are plenty of other places that want them. If we kill the Golden Goose, you will only have yourselves to blame.”
Across the country anti-datacenter animus has galvanized many areas – both Democratic and Republican. According to recent polling, 75% of Americans oppose a new datacenter being built near where they live.
Meanwhile, more than a dozen states have weighed temporary bans on new datacenter construction, and New York last month became the first to enact one. Progressive stalwarts Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio‑Cortez are now pushing for a national moratorium. And in Texas, even Governor Greg Abbott – a hard‑right Republican – has called for halting datacenter development in rural parts of the state.
Trump, for his part, is politically boxed in: he’s pushing to make the US a leader in artificial‑intelligence innovation – a goal that depends on rapid datacenter expansion – while also promising to bring down electricity costs for consumers, who are already facing higher bills.
“China could not be happier with this anti‑Data Center movement,” Trump wrote in a social‑media post. “Actually, they can’t believe it is happening!”
As my colleague, Dharna Noor has reported, so far the president’s answer to this bind is the “Ratepayer Protection Pledge” – a voluntary agreement he says will prevent families from paying for the AI boom. Nearly 200 companies, utilities, datacenter developers and states have signed on, the administration announced last month. But several environmental groups have dismissed the pledge as “toothless”, noting that it carries no legal force.
Chris Hippensteel
Scott Bessent told CNBC that he’d met the previous night with Pan Gongsheng, the governor of China’s central bank.
Their meeting – of which Bessent revealed few details – came amid speculation that the US would struggle to successfully isolate Iran under its latest sanctions without buy-in from China.
Bessent pushed back on those criticisms during his CNBC interview. He said that the US and China are largely aligned on their goals for Iran, including reopening the strait of Hormuz and keeping nuclear weapons out of the regime’s hands. But he also argued that the US could succeed in crippling Iran’s economy with or without China’s cooperation.
The treasury secretary declined to share details of his conversation with Pan Gongsheng, or to speak in any depth about what direction the US and China are trending in – be it toward cooperation or standoff – behind closed doors.
Chris Hippensteel
Speaking with CNBC after his opening remarks in Asheville, Bessent said that the goal of the latest round of sanctions on Iran was to force the Iranian regime to the negotiating table.
Pressed on whether the hardline Iranian leadership could be moved by the economic strangulation of its people, Bessent appeared to suggest that the threat of popular uprising in response to those conditions might motivate the regime to make a deal.
“The main thing they care about is their head staying attached to their neck,” Bessent said.
Donald Trump previously expressed hope that the US’s initial strike on Iran, which killed the nation’s ageing supreme leader, would prompt such a revolt. That prediction has, so far, not come to pass.
Today we’ll also be tracking vice-president JD Vance’s trip to Detroit, Michigan, where he’ll be speaking at a manufacturing facility and campaigning on behalf of several Republican nominees in key statewide races.
This includes Mike Rogers, who is running for Senate in a closely watched race against Democrat Abdul El-Sayed, and John James, a congressman who is running to replace Gretchen Whitmer in the governor’s race. James will face Jocelyn Benson, Michigan’s secretary of state, in the November general election.
Kevin Warsh, speaking briefly after Bessent in Asheville, described the current global financial landscape as one of surging investment and growth – with little mention of the headwinds facing the economy.
“The future is already here, but we’re all experiencing it somewhat different,” the new Federal Reserve chair said.
Last week at the Jackson Hole symposium, Warsh did not indicate where the Fed will take interest rates in the coming months, despite US inflation remaining stubbornly above the central bank’s 2% target amid the war in Iran.
‘We’re going to hit them hard’: Trump vows retaliation after Tehran targets US bases in Jordan
Yohannes Lowe
Donald Trump has told Fox News’s chief foreign correspondent, Trey Yingst, that the US will respond to Iran targeting US military bases in Jordan overnight.
“We’re going to hit them hard,” Trump told Fox News. “There will be a response,” he added, after Jordan’s army confirmed it had intercepted eight missiles early this morning.
In response to the US assault on Larak Island late on Sunday, the IRGC “targeted technical infrastructure, maintenance facilities and enemy fighter jet positions at the US-operated King Hussein and al-Azraq airbases in Jordan” with ballistic missiles, causing “heavy damage”, according to state TV.
In the interview with Fox News on Monday, Trump said all of the missiles were intercepted by American air defence systems, except one which was allowed to pass through the airspace because it was identified as not on course to hit anything “significant”, according to Yingst.
Bessent thanks EU for support of US sanctions on countries continuing to trade with Iran
Chris Hippensteel
Before turning the microphone over to Kevin Warsh, Bessent thanked the European Union and the European Central Bank for their support of US plans to further isolate Iran from the global economy. That plan – dubbed Operation Economic Outcast – requires the US to win the cooperation of allies and adversaries alike, with a threat of punishment to states and companies that continue to do business with the regime.
Bessent said, without offering specifics, that the plan would lead to the toppling of the Iranian leadership, a goal that the Trump administration has been vowing to bring about since the war’s opening days.
Chris Hippensteel
Bessent opened his remarks by pointing to the host city of Asheville, North Carolina, as a beacon of economic recovery in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, before promptly pivoting to praise for Trump.
“Under President Trump, we are entering a new season of national strength,” Bessent told the assembled global leaders.
Bessent criticized the G20 as having lost its founding priorities in fostering economic growth, and said Trump was bringing the G20 back to that original purpose.
