Congress

The Trump administration’s shake-up of the United States’ public health apparatus in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic has public health experts concerned about the country’s ability to respond to emerging disease outbreaks like hantavirus and Ebola. Whether that’s a concern for Congress, however, often depends on the member’s party — a reaction that should […]

The Homeland Security Department would get a new influx of funding to investigate child exploitation cases, including to identify victims of sexual abuse material online, under the GOP budget reconciliation bill.  The $108.5 million added in a substitute amendment Tuesday would support hiring additional investigators and forensic analysts within the department. The roughly $72 billion immigration […]

Senate Republicans used a hearing Tuesday to push the Trump administration to file lawsuits challenging congressional maps in California, Illinois and other Democrat-controlled states in the wake of a Supreme Court decision rolling back the Voting Rights Act. The hearing comes weeks after the Supreme Court’s six-justice conservative majority in Louisiana v. Callais overturned a […]

Former Rep. Barney Frank, the first member of Congress to voluntarily announce he was gay, who rose to lead the House Financial Services Committee at a seminal moment in American economic history, died Tuesday night. He was 86. The progressive Frank had among the sharpest wits of members of the House and was known at […]

Senators at a Commerce Committee panel hearing aired concerns Wednesday about rapidly growing prediction markets, appearing largely unswayed by industry arguments that they are not a form of betting subject to state regulation.  Members of the committee’s Consumer Protection, Technology and Data Privacy Subcommittee were in agreement at a hearing that sports “event contracts” on prediction […]

​The House voted 396-13 to pass housing legislation Wednesday after two key senators said the House bill would need work to pass the Senate. The House vote on the measure was procedurally to adopt a resolution concurring in a Senate amendment, a move that effectively swapped in House text to the bill passed by the […]

As the House faces growing calls to ban trading on prediction markets by members and staff, some are taking things into their own hands. When Rep. Seth Moulton, D-Mass., announced a new internal policy for his office in March, he described it as a way to make a stand as platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket […]

The House Appropriations Committee advanced a draft fiscal 2027 Legislative Branch spending bill on Wednesday that would slash the budget for the Government Accountability Office by nearly one-quarter and give a boost to Capitol Police. The party-line vote of 34-28 came after a contentious markup stretching late into the evening, as Democrats argued the GAO […]

A federal judge ruled Wednesday that a group of current and former congressional lawmakers are not barred from recovering damages in a case over whether members of Congress are owed back pay for years of suppressed cost-of-living increases.  The lawmakers’ legal team has argued that Congress and the president have violated the 27th Amendment with […]

Congressional leaders are closing up shop for the week without voting on their long-sought immigration budget bill, as Senate Republicans struggled to agree on legislative text amid an 11th-hour fight over a new Justice Department “anti-weaponization” fund. While Republican leaders had hoped to push the bill through both chambers on strictly party-line votes before leaving Friday […]