Chief Justice John Roberts on Tuesday temporarily kept in place the Trump administration’s decision to freeze nearly $5 billion in foreign aid. The high court order is temporary, though it suggests that the justices will reverse a lower court ruling that withholding the funding was likely illegal.
Roberts acted on the administration’s emergency appeal to the Supreme Court in the case involving billions of dollars in congressionally approved aid. President Donald Trump said last month that he would not spend the money, invoking disputed authority that was last used by a president roughly 50 years ago.
It comes as the Supreme Court has recently handed Trump wins on immigration and oversight of the Federal Trade Commission. The high court on Monday cleared the way for federal agents to conduct sweeping immigration operations in Los Angeles, and Chief Justice Roberts OK’d the firing of FTC commissioner Rebecca Slaughter.
The Latest:
Lawmakers say the White House has asked for a 4-month funding patch
With a partial shutdown looming at the end of the month, the White House has proposed that Congress pass a short-term measure to keep the government funded through Jan. 31.
The continuing resolution would fund agencies at current levels. The White House submitted a list of proposed adjustments to those levels as part of its request.
House Appropriations Committee members from both parties said they would like a shorter extension. And Chairman Tom Cole, R-Okla., said he’d prefer a date that Democrats support.
“We’re not trying to jam them. We’re trying to work together with them,” Cole said.
Still, Democrats seethed at the request. Rep. Rosa DeLauro, the committee’s top Democrat, said the White House is trying to “back Congress into a corner” and delaying work on next year’s spending bills is part of a plan to “never fund it at all.”
Congress has yet to approve any spending bills for the 2026 budget year, which begins Oct. 1.
Trump in social media post pins Doha strike on Netanyahu
“This was a decision made by Prime Minister Netanyahu, it was not a decision made by me,” Trump said of the Monday strike by Israeli forces that has been widely condemned.
The president reiterated comments made earlier on Monday by White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt that he directed his envoy Steve Witkoff to inform the Qataris of the impending Israel strikes after U.S. officials learned about the Israeli plan.
He added that the U.S. warning to Qatar was “unfortunately, too late to stop the attack.”
Israeli-Russian graduate student kidnapped in Iraq has been released, Trump and family say
A Princeton University doctoral student who was kidnapped in Iraq in 2023 while doing research there has been freed and turned over to U.S. authorities, her family and President Trump said.
Elizabeth Tsurkov, who holds Israeli and Russian citizenship, spent more than 900 days in custody after being kidnapped in March 2003 in Baghdad, the Iraqi capital.
In the past few months, officials from several countries, including the Iraqi foreign minister and deputy prime minister, have confirmed she was alive and being held in Iraq by a Shiite Muslim militant group called Kataeb Hezbollah, according to her sister. The group has not claimed the kidnapping nor have Iraqi officials publicly said which group is responsible.
“My entire family is incredibly happy. We cannot wait to see Elizabeth and give her all the love we have been waiting to share for 903 days,” said a statement from her sister Emma in which she thanked, among others, Adam Boehler, the U.S. special presidential envoy for hostage affairs.
The only direct proof of life of Elizabeth Tsurkov during her captivity was a video broadcast in November 2023 on an Iraqi television station and circulated on pro-Iranian social media purporting to show her.
Supreme Court to quickly consider if Trump has power to impose sweeping tariffs
The Supreme Court on Tuesday granted an unusually quick hearing on whether Trump has the power to impose sweeping tariffs under federal law.
The justices will hear arguments in November, lightning fast by the typical standards of the nation’s highest court.
The small businesses and states that challenged the tariffs in court also agreed to the accelerated timetable. They say Trump illegally used emergency powers to set import taxes on goods from nearly every country in the world, nearly driving their businesses to bankruptcy.
Two lower courts have found most of the tariffs were illegally imposed, though a 7-4 appeals court has left them in place for now.
The Trump administration asked the justices to intervene quickly, arguing the law gives him the power to regulate imports and the country would be on “the brink of economic catastrophe” if the president is barred from exercising unilateral tariff authority.
The case will come before a court that has been reluctant to check Trump’s extraordinary flex of executive power.
▶ Read more about the case here
Schumer meets with Mamdani, but declines to endorse him
Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer said Tuesday that he has met with Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee for New York City mayor.
The New York senator has declined to endorse in the race and had not met with Mamdani since he won the Democratic primary in early July.
Schumer told reporters in the Capitol that he met with Mamdani on Monday. “We had a good meeting, we know each other well, we’re going to keep talking,” he said.
Hunger Free America drops lawsuit against USDA after winning ‘information clearinghouse’ contract
Hunger Free America has voluntarily dismissed its lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Agriculture after the federal agency renewed the organization’s contract to run a food assistance clearinghouse.
The nonprofit organization filed the lawsuit in June, roughly one month after the USDA abruptly canceled its contract. Hunger Free America said that the cancelation violated the Administrative Procedure Act, and noted that the clearinghouse was required under the Healthy Foods for Healthy Americans Act passed by Congress in 1994.
In response, the USDA told the court that it began seeking new contractors in late June, and hoped to select the new contractor by September. Hunger Free America learned it won the contract on Sept. 5, according to court documents.
Hunger Free America has helped more than 220,000 callers locate local food pantries, food banks and soup kitchens since it first began operating the clearinghouse in 2014.
According to USDA research, there were one million more food insecure households in 2023 compared to 2022. President Donald Trump’s administration significantly slashed funding to some hunger-related programs earlier this year, including halting $500 million of expected food deliveries by the USDA, and cutting $1 billion for hunger relief programs supporting local producers.
Thune won’t commit to Senate vote on Epstein files
Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., won’t commit to a Senate vote on legislation that would require the Justice Department to release files on the sex trafficking investigations into Jeffrey Epstein. But he said that he believes “transparency is always best.”
Asked on Tuesday if the Senate would vote on the bill if it is passed by the House, Thune said “I can’t comment on that at this point.”
Thune said the Justice Department “has already released tons of files related to this matter.”
“I trust them in terms of having the confidence that they’ll get as much information out there as possible in a way that protects the rights of the victims,” Thune said.
Federal deficit totals $2 trillion for first 11 months of FY 2025
The federal budget deficit totaled $2 trillion for the first 11 months of fiscal year 2025, which is $92 billion more than the deficit recorded during the same period last fiscal year, according to a new Congressional Budget Office report released Tuesday.
Income increased by $299 billion, or 7% over the same period last fiscal year, and spending rose by $391 billion, or 6%.
The CBO says a large part of the change in the deficit was influenced by the timing of payments from 2024 to 2025.
If not for those shifts, the deficit so far this fiscal year would have been $11 billion (or 1 percent) more than the shortfall at this point last year, the CBO says.
The CBO currently projects that the deficit for fiscal year 2025 will be $1.8 trillion.
White House spokeswoman says Democrats pushing a ‘hoax’ with Epstein inquiries
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt says Democrats raising questions about Trump’s ties to Jeffrey Epstein are “pretending to care about victims of crime when they do not care about victims of crime, when they have done nothing to solve crimes, when they have done nothing to lock up child pedophiles and child rapist across the country.”
Leavitt did not say when asked if Trump would meet with the survivors of sex trafficking by Epstein. After Congress released files showing a birthday greeting from Trump to Epstein and a picture of Epstein holding up a novelty check bearing Trump’s name, Leavitt said the signatures were fake.
“The Democrats view this story as nothing more than an attempt to distract from the accomplishments and the achievements of this administration, and that is what we mean when we call it a hoax,” Leavitt said.
Trump is a “New Yorker at Heart,” White House press secretary says
The president will mark the anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks by visiting the Pentagon and heading to the Bronx as the New York Yankees host the Detroit Tigers on Thursday.
Leavitt said Trump “looks very much forward” to both, including heading to the Bronx.
“The president is a New Yorker at heart,” Levitt said. “He loves the city.”
White House says it’d support handwriting experts scrutinizing Trump’s signature as part of Epstein scandal
The White House says it’d like to have handwriting experts review Trump’s signature to see if it is consistent with the one on a years-old card to Jeffrey Epstein.
Press secretary Karoline Leavitt said “we would support that.”
She added: “The president did not write the letter. He did not sign this letter.”
Leavitt said Trump’s legal team plans to continue a lawsuit against the Wall Street Journal, which previously published the letter Trump allegedly wrote to Epstein.
The White House had claimed the letter didn’t exist, but it was released to Congress this week.
Leavitt said that the president’s legal team would continue “aggressively pursuing litigation against the Wall Street Journal.”
White House describes Israeli attack as an ‘unfortunate incident’ and says it warned Qatar in advance
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters that the U.S. received prior notice about the pending attack from Israel.
In response, diplomatic envoy Steve Witkoff passed along a warning to the Qataris.
President Donald Trump spoke to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu after the attack, Leavitt said, and “made his thoughts and concerns very clear.”
She said Trump believes the attack was an “unfortunate incident” that didn’t advance peace in the region.
Newsom blasted Trump in his State of State address
The Democratic governor is calling out President Trump for a “relentless, unhinged obsession with California” in a pre-recorded letter Tuesday. Newsom opted to send the letter to the state Legislature instead of delivering it publicly.
Newsom didn’t mention Trump by name.
“We are facing a federal administration built on incompetence and malicious ignorance, one that seeks the death of independent thinking,” Newsom said in the letter.
California has been a battleground for the Trump administration over a number of policies including those on immigration, climate changes and transgender athletes, among other things. The state has sued the administration 41 times since January.
Trump says cities need federal help with crime: We have to be vicious
On Tuesday, the White House released a video of Trump in the Oval Office addressing the case of Zarutska and accusing Democrats for adopting policies that release offenders too easily.
“In Charlotte, North Carolina, we saw the results of these policies when a 23-year-old woman who came here from Ukraine met her bloody end on a public train,” he said. “She was slaughtered by a deranged monster who is roaming free after 14 prior arrests.”
He said authorities must respond with “force and strength” and said Chicago and other cities need help.
“We have to be vicious just like they are. It’s the only thing they understand,” he said about criminals.
Vance and wife Usha to visit ground zero on Sept. 11 anniversary
Vice President JD Vance and his wife, second lady Usha Vance, will travel to New York to attend the 24th anniversary commemoration of the worst terrorist attack on the United States.
The White House has not announced Trump’s plans as yet.
US forces not involved in Doha strike
The U.S. military did not participate in the Israeli strikes that took place in Doha, according to a U.S. official, who was not authorized to comment publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.
The Pentagon has directed questions to the White House, where officials didn’t immediately respond.
— Konstantin Toropin
The rich get richer — and women fall behind
“It’s not hard to see why middle-class Americans are frustrated,” said Heather Long, chief economist at the Navy Federal Credit Union. “The frozen job market, tariffs and Medicaid cuts are going to put even more of a squeeze in 2025 on middle and lower-income households.”
For richest 10% of households, incomes rose 4.2% to $251,000, while for the poorest one-tenth saw a 2.2% rise to $19,900. A household is defined by Census as a family unit or an individual living alone or living with people who aren’t relatives.
Earnings for women barely rose, while male earnings increased, widening the gender wage gap for the second straight year after two decades of narrowing. Women on average now earn 80.9% of what men earn, down from 82.7% in 2023.
Typical US households are earning like it’s 2019
The income for the typical U.S. household barely rose last year and essentially matched its 2019 peak, the Census Bureau said Tuesday, as stubbornly high inflation offset wage gains. Highest-earning households received healthy inflation-adjusted income increases, while middle- and lower-income households saw little gain.
The Median household income, adjusted for inflation, rose 1.3% in 2024 to $83,730, the Census Bureau said. This illustrates why many Americans have been dissatisfied with the economy since the pandemic, even as unemployment has been historically low: Median household incomes are essentially unchanged from five years earlier, the report showed. It’s a sharp contrast from the preceding five-year period, 2014 to 2019, when median household income rose nearly 21%.
▶ Read more details from the Census report on U.S. incomes
New reports suggest a weaker economy during Biden’s final year
And now the Trump White House is saying it inherited a far worse economy than initially believed.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics issued benchmark revisions that found there were 911,000 fewer jobs than first reported for the year ended in March 2025. The Census Bureau said that median household income rose just 1.3% last year to $83,730.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt seized on the data to say that “Biden’s economy was a disaster and the BLS is broken.”
Trump fired the head of the BLS last month after downward revisions to the monthly jobs report showed a far weaker economy than what Trump had been claiming.
DC college students hold walkouts over US military intervention
Students at four universities in the nation’s capital are staging walkouts to protest Trump’s military policing surge. Roughly 100 demonstrators crowded a plaza at Georgetown University on Tuesday with chants to “free D.C.” and keep federal immigration officers away from the private campus.
Speakers called on Congress to end the deployment of National Guard troops in the city and urged university leaders not to cooperate with federal law enforcement. Speakers included Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., and Sen. Edward Markey, D-Mass. He said the city is “under assault” and called Trump’s crackdown political theater.
Students at Howard University staged a similar demonstration, and others were scheduled at George Washington University and American University.
