Principals

1. Bessent’s regulator power grab
2. Congress returns, divided
3. Debt limit approaches
4. More Ukraine peace talks
5. House moves on China curbs
6. Fannie Mae returns to office
7. Sanders’ anti-Trump tour

PDB: Greenland spars with US over planned visit

Trump to deliver remarks with Louisiana governor … Senate holds confirmation votes for Navy secretary, deputy secretary of state … Protests erupt after Erdogan jails political rival

Treasury moves to cement control over banking rules

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s play for more control over banking regulators, including the Federal Reserve, is about to enter a contentious new phase as his department starts drafting recommendations for how to streamline the agencies, Semafor’s Eleanor Mueller and Rachel Witkowski report. Faced with the likelihood that merging the banking regulators would require Congress’ approval, Bessent has said he instead wants to give his department greater sway over their rulemaking process in pursuit of “safe, sound and smart deregulation,” while still allowing the Fed to retain its independence in crafting monetary policy. But establishing greater oversight of how the Fed supervises banks is nevertheless a new front in President Trump’s battle to rein it in overall — and one that could do little to improve overall efficiency, since banks would still report to the same “alphabet soup” of regulators.

House and Senate tensions increase

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer declared he’s “not stepping down” as Democrats teeter into another week of infighting. Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., said on CNN that plenty of House Democrats are encouraging Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., to run against Schumer, since “people are fed up with the old guard.” That’s all far away: The next Democratic leadership election is in 2026, and Schumer isn’t facing reelection until 2028. So, in the near term, look for Democrats to scrap the circular attacks and turn to fighting Republicans’ tax cuts. Speaking of that: Expect to see more House Republicans pushing senators to take up their budget ASAP. And it’s still not clear when or if the House will take up the DC budget fix unanimously passed by the Senate — a crucial condition of Schumer’s vote to keep the government open.

— Burgess Everett and Kadia Goba

US could hit debt ceiling as soon as July

The Treasury Department will likely exhaust its borrowing authority — leading the federal government to default on some of its obligations — between mid-July and early October, according to a Bipartisan Policy Center projection out this morning. The estimate comes as congressional Republicans remain divided over whether to enact a debt limit increase as part of their sweeping spending package. The so-called X date is dependent on how much the IRS collects in tax revenue by mid-April: Filing extensions due to natural disasters and even staffing reductions at DOGE’s direction could spark a dip in collections that would push it up — potentially to as early as June. “Lawmakers cannot afford to delay action on the debt limit,” said Shai Akabas, vice president of economic policy at BPC, who warned that getting too close to the X date could cause market volatility, higher borrowing costs, and reduced confidence.

— Eleanor Mueller

Trump’s challenges at home and abroad

The Trump administration is continuing high-stakes discussions with Ukraine and Russia this week, after the two countries exchanged deadly drone strikes despite a limited ceasefire agreement. During a Fox News interview, Trump envoy Steve Witkoff predicted there would be “real progress” out of talks today with Russia, specifically with respect to curbing attacks in the Black Sea. Meanwhile, Trump’s legal fight over invoking the Alien Enemies Act is set to continue: The judge presiding over the deportation fight vowed Friday to “get to the bottom of whether” the Trump administration violated his order to turn around planes carrying alleged Venezuelan gang members. An appeals court hearing is set for later today on that issue.

— Shelby Talcott

Republicans push ahead on China investment curbs

Rep. Andy Barr, R-Ky., reintroduced the House’s version of the Senate’s bid to curb investments in China with the backing of key leaders like House Speaker Mike Johnson and Rep. John Moolenaar, R-Mich., the leader of the House select committee on China. Notably absent: House Financial Services Committee Chair French Hill, who is withholding his support until the Treasury Department can weigh in on the proposal, two people familiar with the talks said. Hill’s predecessor, North Carolina Republican Patrick McHenry, privately and publicly fought Johnson and Barr’s decision to push ahead with an earlier iteration last Congress. The agency gave members the green light to reintroduce the proposal before it provides so-called technical assistance, one of the people said. Johnson in a statement called Friday’s rollout “an important step.”

— Eleanor Mueller

Fannie Mae’s anxious return-to-office

Executives at mortgage giant Fannie Mae told workers assigned to locations in Washington, DC, Reston, Va., and Plano, Texas, to return to working in-person today as they seek to avoid an overhaul as dramatic as the one Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Bill Pulte is overseeing at sister firm Freddie Mac, two employees familiar with the directive said. That’s despite the fact they also said there are only about 5,300 seats for some 7,700 workers. Another concern: sufficient parking. “The hope is that if we appease [Pulte] with this, then he won’t look to ‘DOGE’ us as much” after firing Freddie Mac’s CEO and head of HR as they planned for a May 1 return-to-office, one of the employees said. “Clearly, there will need to be some type of rotation, but they really haven’t given clear guidance.” In the meantime, “morale is dead,” the other employee said.

— Eleanor Mueller

Sanders’ challenge to Democrats

Tens of thousands of voters rallied with Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez over the weekend, on a five-city tour that challenged both Trump and Democrats. “What you’re seeing in an unprecedented way is people standing up and saying: ‘No, we are not going to become an oligarchy,’” Sanders said in an interview in Greeley, Colo. The crowds were among the largest he’s ever had — more than 30,000 in Denver, according to the Sanders team, half of them not on the supporter list built over Sanders’ two presidential bids. Local union leaders and a member of the FTC suspended by Trump joined Sanders onstage, with every speaker denouncing Elon Musk and most demanding Democrats do more to stop him. “We are going to do our best to get people to run as progressives,” Sanders told Semafor.

— David Weigel

Debatable: Does the Alien Enemies Act apply to today’s migration issues?

Trump’s use of an obscure 1798 law to justify the removal of Venezuelan migrants from the US, many of them alleged gang members, is his latest test of the bounds of executive power. The law, known as the Alien Enemies Act, has only been used a handful of times in US history and allows for the deportation of noncitizens during wartime without having them go before a judge. At the core of the dispute around Trump’s use of it is whether the law applies even when Congress hasn’t declared the US at war. Katherine Yon Ebright of the Brennan Center for Justice says it doesn’t because the Alien Enemies Act is “a wartime authority, not a peacetime immigration statute.” But Josh Blackman of the South Texas College of Law Houston argues that Trump’s declaration of an invasion could be enough.

Beltway Newsletters

Punchbowl News: House Speaker Mike Johnson and Senate Majority Leader John Thune will meet on Tuesday along with House and Senate committee leaders to begin working out the differences between their budget resolutions paving the way for passing President Trump’s agenda through reconciliation.

Playbook: All eyes will be on the two Republican appointees on a three-member appeals court panel who will consider Trump’s use of the Alien Enemies Act to deport migrants this afternoon.

WaPo: Johnson is trying to chart a path forward on punishing judges who rule against Trump, as some in his conference “express unease with going as far as impeaching judges.”

White House

• President Trump’s allies want Elon Musk to scale back his media interviews. — NBC
• The White House is soliciting corporate sponsors for the annual Easter Egg Roll. — CNN
• An order Trump signed late last week to facilitate better information-sharing between government agencies doesn’t mention DOGE by name, but is meant to grant the cost-cutting entity unrestricted access to unclassified federal data.

Congress

• Sen. Steve Daines, R-Mont., visited China.
• Former Utah Rep. Mia Love, the first Black Republican woman elected to the House, died after being diagnosed with brain cancer.

Outside the Beltway

• Pope Francis made his first public appearance since leaving the hospital.

Economy

• President Trump is planning a more targeted push for his reciprocal tariffs on Apr. 2. — Bloomberg
• China and Japan held their first economic talks in six years in Tokyo over the weekend, a meeting the Japanese foreign minister described as “fruitful.” The two had sought to ease their historically fraught relationship amid global trade instability brought on by the White House. South Korea also attended talks.

Health

• CNN’s Dana Bash asked Education Secretary Linda McMahon on Sunday if HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a vaccine skeptic, would have any sway over school vaccine mandates following the department’s reorganization. McMahon declined to rule it out.
• Kennedy played tennis with Serbian tennis champ Novak Djokovic, who was barred from several competitions during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic after he refused to be vaccinated. The two posed in a photo posted Sunday.

Courts

• The Justice Department is considering legal action against US Institute of Peace officials who attempted to block DOGE from accessing the organization’s building. — Daily Caller
• A memo issued by the White House Friday night instructs Attorney General Pam Bondi to sanction law firms that engage in “frivolous, unreasonable and vexatious litigation” against the government, including by stripping them of their security clearances and cancelling their federal contracts.

National Security

• The White House is seeking to revoke the legal status of more than 500,000 migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela.
• The IRS is closing in on an agreement with ICE to “use tax data to confirm the names and addresses of people suspected of being in the country illegally.” — WaPo
• FBI Director Kash Patel is planning to move some 1,000 ATF agents to the FBI. — CNN

Foreign Policy

• Venezuela agreed to resume accepting deportation flights from the US, and the first flight in weeks carrying 199 migrants arrived in Venezuela overnight, a DHS official told Semafor’s Shelby Talcott.
• Second lady Usha Vance and national security adviser Michael Waltz are headed to Greenland this week, plans that Greenland’s Prime Minister Mute Egede panned as “aggressive.”

Technology

• Elon Musk’s SpaceX is “positioning itself to see billions of dollars in new federal contracts.” — NYT

Media

• A coalition of big-name progressive grassroots groups — MoveOn, Indivisible and Working Families Power, the advocacy arm of the Working Families Party — is launching a new media outlet, called How We Fight Back, Semafor’s Max Tani writes. The publication will be hosted on Substack and will feature guest essays and videos from elected Democrats.

Principals Team

Edited by Morgan Chalfant, deputy Washington editor

With help from Elana Schor, senior Washington editor

And Graph Massara, copy editor

Contact our reporters:

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

Marlin Stutzman is a Republican congressman from Indiana.