Principals

1. Independent agency limits
2. Labor pick support
3. House budget pressure
4. Tax polling
5. A new (old) Trump hotel in DC?
6. MSNBC fight
7. Town hall pushback
8. AGOA doubts

PDB: US-Europe divide

Hegseth to Guantánamo Bay … Acting IRS commissioner to step down … Bloomberg: Trump aims to tighten Biden chip controls

Independent agency curbs could hit the Fed

The Trump administration’s latest effort to restrain independent regulatory agencies could wind up affecting the Federal Reserve as well, Semafor’s Eleanor Mueller and Shelby Talcott report. At the core of the White House’s effort is its request that the Supreme Court upend a 1935 precedent, known as Humphrey’s Executor, that requires presidents to establish cause before they can fire the heads of many independent agencies. Last week, President Trump also signed an executive order requiring agencies to run proposed regulations by the White House, a move that turns the relationship between the president and the central bank “into one of subordination of the Fed to the White House,” as one scholar put it. In tandem, the two White House moves have Democrats worried: “The system will break if [Chief Justice John Roberts] overrules Humphrey’s Executor,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., told Semafor.

Dem warms to Trump’s labor pick

Trump’s labor pick is on the verge of making bipartisan headway. Sen. John Hickenlooper, D-Colo., told Semafor he’s “leaning” toward supporting former Rep. Lori Chavez-DeRemer in a committee vote this week, but hasn’t made a final decision. “The things I care a lot about, like apprenticeships, she’s a big supporter of. She obviously did a full flip on the PRO Act, but I guess you have to expect that to a certain extent,” Hickenlooper said, referring to her bid to win Republican votes by renouncing her support of the pro-labor measure. GOP Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., wants to talk to Chavez-DeRemer again about that: “It’s just a difficult vote for me to decide,” he told us. “Now she appears to be against it, but is that sort of a deathbed conversion, or is it real?”

— Burgess Everett

House GOP faces pressure over Medicaid

The House is still planning to take up its budget resolution today, despite deep uncertainty over whether it can pass with the incredibly slim GOP majority. As of Monday evening, Speaker Mike Johnson said they were still on track for a vote on the resolution, which has triggered GOP unease about proposed spending reductions to Medicaid. Today is a huge test for Johnson’s leadership, as he tries to pursuade remaining holdouts. Meanwhile, a new ad campaign around Medicaid is revving up in time for the vote. The Coalition to Strengthen America’s Healthcare is launching a seven-figure ad buy today emphasizing that “your neighbors and friends” are among the millions of Americans who rely on Medicaid, which provides health care to low-income Americans. The ads will run in DC as well as in battleground regions of Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, California, Arizona, North Carolina and Nebraska.

— Burgess Everett and Morgan Chalfant

Voters’ tax skepticism

Nearly half of Trump voters think the wealthy pay too little in taxes, according to a survey conducted by Hart Research last week for the nonprofit Families over Billionaires and first shared with Semafor. Even more — 56% — believe the same of large corporations. Meanwhile, the House is considering a budget resolution that would in part pave the way for the renewal of Trump’s tax cuts, a permanent extension of which analysis shows would benefit the highest earners. The ambitious package has also fueled a contentious debate about how to pay for it, and whether to cut a program as popular as Medicaid to make up the gap. According to the poll, 71% of Trump voters say cutting Medicaid is unacceptable, and 60% say the same about SNAP benefits, another program the House GOP has eyed for cuts.

— Kadia Goba

A new (old) Trump hotel in DC?

The current owners of Trump’s former hotel in Washington are quietly shopping the rights to the property, which has reemerged as a watering hole for the MAGA crowd and those looking to influence it. Investment bank BDT & MSD Partners has been sounding out potential buyers for the old Trump International Hotel as it continues to negotiate with the Trump Organization to repurchase the lease for around $300 million, people familiar with the matter said. The hotel, in a landmarked Post Office building, became a hotspot during Trump’s first term. But crowds thinned after Trump left office, and the hotel was sold in 2022 to a Miami investor who reopened it as a Waldorf-Astoria and later defaulted, sending the property into foreclosure. The hotel lost $74 million between 2016 and 2020, financial records show, but its lobby bar is crowded again.

— Liz Hoffman

Maddow fights MSNBC

The highest-rated star on MSNBC is not pleased with the network’s recent programming moves. On Monday, MSNBC and NBC News announced sweeping changes to the cable network’s primetime lineup, as well as that of its broadcast sibling. During a hastily arranged meeting with staff on Sunday, Semafor has learned, host Rachel Maddow said she had privately fought the network’s recent decisions, which included the cancellation of shows hosted by Joy Reid and Alex Wagner, as well as the decision to ask those shows’ employees reapply for new jobs. She made some of her complaints public during her Monday evening broadcast, saying it was a “mistake” to let Reid leave, and making staff reapply “kind of drops the bottom out of whether people think this is a good place to work.”

— Max Tani

Republicans stick with DOGE after town halls

On Monday morning, Daniel Scharpenburg drove from his home in the Kansas City suburbs in Kansas, to a coffee shop in Missouri where Rep. Mark Alford was holding a town hall. “I wanted him to understand that investments in IRS lead to increased revenue,” said Scharpenburg, 45, a longtime IRS employee. “Firing people from the IRS increases the deficit.” Alford, one of a handful of safe-seat Republicans who held town halls during the recess, was not moved: “Any time that you have cuts, any time that you are looking for savings, anything you’re cutting back, there’s going to be chaos.” Some of the conservatives facing blowback, like Alford, have held their ground, defending DOGE’s cuts to federal agencies and suggesting that they could prevent more painful reductions in health care spending. One factor in their confidence: The most skeptical and raucous town hall attendees usually come from liberal areas.

— David Weigel

Uncertainty surrounds US-Africa trade pact

A key trade deal between the US and Africa may not survive in its current form, Semafor’s Yinka Adegoke reports. A key source of doubt about the future of the African Growth Opportunity Act (AGOA) is Trump’s pursuit of tariffs against free trade partners: The US president signed a January executive order that calls on his administration to review all US trade deals, and some analysts are awaiting the April outcome of that review for clues as to AGOA’s future. “The idea of a preferential trade deal is a difficult one in the current environment,” one expert said. The trade pact still commands bipartisan support on Capitol Hill, with sources telling Semafor that Sens. James Risch, R-Idaho, and Chris Coons, D-Del., plan to introduce updated legislation on the act.

Blindspot: Buildings and chargers

Stories that are being largely ignored by either left-leaning or right-leaning outlets, curated with help from our partners at Ground News.

What the Left isn’t reading: President Trump is looking to sell a federal building in San Francisco named after former speaker Nancy Pelosi.

What the Right isn’t reading: The Trump administration is shutting down electric vehicle charging stations at federal buildings.

Explore Foreign Affairs Today: Expert essays on today’s most pressing geopolitical debates curated by the editors of Foreign Affairs. Delivered directly to your inbox every weekday. Sign up for free.

Beltway Newsletters

Punchbowl News: Sens. Steve Daines, R-Mont., and Mike Crapo, R-Idaho, met with President Trump in the Oval Office yesterday to push him on making the 2017 Trump tax cuts permanent, which the House’s budget resolution can’t currently do. “At the end of the meeting, the president said ‘I support this,’” Daines said.

Playbook: Trump’s team was presented with a $25 billion proposal to use private military contractors for deporting undocumented immigrants before he was inaugurated.

WaPo: Progressive groups are launching a campaign to push back on the GOP tax plans that is “aimed just as much at helping Democrats not ‘lose spine.’”

Axios: Trump advisers are privately complaining that the media is too fixated on Trump’s misstatement about who started the Ukraine war and should be focused more on how the West “antagonized” Russian President Vladimir Putin in the years before the Russian invasion.

White House

• President Trump and French President Emmanuel Macron made nice during their White House meeting on Monday, but the divide between the US and Europe is wide. The same day, the US sided with Russia against a resolution calling for an immediate withdrawal of Moscow’s forces from Ukraine.
• OPM told federal agencies they can ignore Elon Musk’s demand that employees justify their work or be fired. — WaPo

Congress

• Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., the top Democrat on the Senate Banking Committee, is hosting a forum this afternoon to shine a light on the Trump administration’s targeting of the CFPB. The event will feature Americans who have benefited from the CFPB’s work (Warren’s office says she also extended an invitation to Elon Musk to appear).

Outside the Beltway

• New York’s congestion pricing toll raised $48.6 million in its first month.
• Trump endorsed Vivek Ramaswamy for Ohio governor last night in a post on Truth Social.

Business

• Starbucks is planning about a thousand layoffs on its corporate team.
• The fabric store chain Joann is shutting down.

Economy

• The European Union is drawing up broader plans to target the US with retaliatory tariffs if President Trump makes good on his threat to impose steel and aluminum duties. — Bloomberg
• Trump said he would move forward with tariffs on Canada and Mexico next month.

Courts

• A federal judge temporarily blocked DOGE from accessing sensitive information at the Education Department.
• A judge declined to intervene to restore The Associated Press’ access to presidential events amid a blockade from the White House.

Foreign Policy

• President Trump rescinded a Biden-era directive meant to ensure US allies do not commit violations of international humanitarian law with US-made weaponry. — WaPo

Technology

• Apple committed to spending $500 billion in the US over four years, in an effort to avoid the Trump administration’s tariffs on Chinese imports (though it’s unclear how much of that is actually new spending).

Media

• Lester Holt is leaving NBC Nightly News.

Principals Team

Edited by Morgan Chalfant, deputy Washington editor

With help from Elana Schor, senior Washington editor

Contact our reporters:

Burgess Everett, Kadia Goba, Eleanor Mueller, Shelby Talcott, David Weigel

French President Emmanuel Macron leaving the White House Monday after speaking with President Trump.