New York Rep. Elise Stefanik will return to House Republican leadership after President Donald Trump withdrew her nomination to be U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Speaker Mike Johnson confirmed Thursday.

“I will invite her to return to the leadership table immediately,” Johnson wrote in a post on X.

The speaker will likely have to create a new, honorary leadership position for Stefanik, the former No. 4 House Republican. She didn’t run again for Republican conference chair last December after Trump nominated her to be in his administration.

The sitting GOP conference chair, Rep. Lisa McClain of Michigan, is not planning to step down from her post, according to a person who was granted anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about her plans.

It would not be unprecedented for Johnson to create a new leadership position to solve an internal political quandary. Former Speaker Nancy Pelosi created a role for House Democrats nearly two decades ago that became known as “assistant leader” and “assistant speaker” to allow more close allies at her leadership table.

Trump’s decision to pull Stefanik’s nomination caught many Republicans on Capitol Hill off guard — as did his public acknowledgment that her seat, which Trump won by 21 points in November, could have been in jeopardy for Republicans in a special election.

“With a very tight Majority, I don’t want to take a chance on anyone else running for Elise’s seat,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “The people love Elise and, with her, we have nothing to worry about come Election Day.”

House GOP leaders are racing to head off a vote being pushed by one of their own members on a measure that would allow lawmakers who are new parents to vote by proxy.

Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.) has already gathered enough member signatures on a discharge petition to force a vote. But Speaker Mike Johnson, who argues that proxy voting is unconstitutional, is considering several options to prevent it from happening as Luna mulls the way forward.

They include trying to kill the discharge petition in the Rules Committee next week, according to three people with direct knowledge of the matter who, like others quoted in this story, were granted anonymity to discuss private talks. Some hard-liners are also floating a more drastic option: changing the House rules to effectively block future discharge petitions this Congress by making the process to trigger a fast-track floor vote much more burdensome, the three people said.

“There aren’t many good options here,” said one GOP lawmaker.

Right now, GOP leaders appear focused on trying to peel away some of the 11 Republicans who joined Luna in signing the discharge petition. Majority Leader Steve Scalise, Whip Tom Emmer and others have aggressively whipped members against the effort, according to three GOP lawmakers who have spoken with them.

Luna said Thursday she has been lobbied heavily herself by House Republican leaders to abandon her effort, which would allow for 12 weeks of proxy voting for new parents. She said they offered to bring her bill to the Rules Committee if she would agree to drop the discharge petition, but Luna has so far rejected that deal. She said she heard Republicans on the panel would block it from the floor.

”If you’re going to negotiate, you’re not going to be honest with the negotiations, there is no negotiation,” she said, later adding, “I am not going to destroy democracy by allowing female members to vote when recovering from birth.”

Luna said leaders are also threatening members who are backing her, telling them their bills will not come to the floor and that the party won’t be “helping with fundraising.” She said she was also offered committee assignments she had previously been denied as an enticement to end her proxy-voting push.

One Republican who joined Luna in the discharge effort, Rep. Tim Burchett of Tennessee, said “somebody” offered to bring a bill he sponsored to the floor in exchange for switching his vote.

“Voting against pregnant women, are y’all crazy?” Burchett said he responded.

A spokesperson for Johnson didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on the strong-arm allegations.

Under House rules, Luna’s measure can be called up as privileged business seven legislative days after the completion of the discharge petition. That would tee up the effort for action early next week unless GOP leaders can find an off-ramp.

They aren’t at this point openly pursuing a permanent rules change, something that could invite a slew of other member demands for rules tweaks. One option Johnson and his leadership circle had been considering — changing House rules to make discharge petitions subject to a two-thirds majority rather than the current 218 signatures — is no longer considered likely after at least one Rules Committee Republican warned they wouldn’t support raising the threshold, according to two people with direct knowledge who were granted anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter.

Instead, hard-liners are floating other rules changes that would make it significantly harder to call up a discharged measure as privileged business, allowing for a fast-track vote.

Most Republicans are vehemently opposed to allowing proxy voting, which was widely used under Speaker Nancy Pelosi during the Covid pandemic from 2020 through 2023, when the GOP took back control of the chamber and abolished it.

“The speaker needs to kill it,” said Rep. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.), a Freedom Caucus member who also sits on the Rules Committee.

Luna said the position of Norman, Johnson and other GOP opponents of proxy voting is at odds with the family friendly policies of President Donald Trump. She noted that his daughter Ivanka previously worked to enact parental leave for federal workers with the president’s support.

”I have a feeling President Trump is probably aware of the situation,” said Luna, who attended a White House Women’s History Month event Wednesday. “And I have a feeling that yesterday, his speech was pretty straightforward on what he feels, that people should be inclusive with families.”

Three big developments are poised to give Republican lawmakers long-sought clarity on how they can get moving on President Donald Trump’s legislative agenda — and when they need to finish.

Time to punt: As they rush to settle on a budget framework before Easter recess, Speaker Mike Johnson and Senate Majority Leader John Thune are signaling that they’ll move forward without resolving some major disputes over how to pay for Trump’s tax, border and energy policies — including controversial Medicaid cuts.

They’ll do that by approving a budget resolution that defers to each chamber’s respective committees for how much money they will need to trim from programs under their jurisdictions, and then try to merge the approaches later.

Tax clarity: The Senate parliamentarian is expected to decide in the coming days whether Republicans can use an accounting approach known as “current policy baseline” that would allow them to extend Trump’s 2017 tax cuts in a costless fashion.

Thune said in an interview that Republicans need to know if the parliamentarian will green-light their strategy before taking their budget resolution to the floor, which they want to do as soon as next week.

Separately on Wednesday, House GOP tax writers met in private with Joint Committee on Taxation chief Thomas Barthold to discuss next steps on their tax package. The non-partisan JCT will have to weigh in on the cost of extending tax cuts and Trump’s other tax pledges, including eliminating taxes on tips and overtime work.

X marks the deadline: CBO announced Wednesday that the U.S. will default on its debt around August or September if Congress doesn’t act — in effect setting a new deadline for Republicans to pass Trump’s mega-bill if they stick with a plan to include a debt ceiling increase.

House Republicans are hoping the updated “X-date” lights a fire under the Senate GOP to speed things up.

“We all know Congress needs a deadline to get anything done,” said a senior House GOP aide granted anonymity to speak freely. “This is the new deadline.”

What else we’re watching:

• Schumer’s staying: Despite fury across the party over the shutdown fight, Democratic lawmakers and frustrated donors are making the calculation that Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer is here to stay. There’s no obvious alternative nor any appetite among most Senate Democrats for a messy leadership contest. Schumer is working to convince his members that he understands the need to ramp up their tactics, though it’s clear he still has some work to do.
• What’s next for Signalgate: Senate Armed Services Chair Roger Wicker says he and his Democratic counterpart Jack Reed are looking into an expedited probe of the Signal chat breach involving top Trump administration officials. They are requesting a Pentagon inspector general review and a classified briefing for their committee.
• Trump’s SEC pick testifies: Paul Atkins, Trump’s pick to lead the SEC, will tell Senate Banking on Thursday that establishing a “firm regulatory foundation” for cryptocurrency would be a top priority of his chairmanship. The nomination hearing is poised to be the latest illustration of the crypto industry’s ascendance in the Trump era, after it faced a regulatory crackdown from the SEC under President Joe Biden. Atkins, a longtime financial industry consultant and former SEC commissioner, is expected to face scrutiny from Democrats over his Wall Street ties.

The GOP’s crusade against public media entered new territory Wednesday, as leaders of NPR and PBS testified before House Republicans keen on defunding their organizations.

In a hearing before the House Oversight Subcommittee on Delivering on Government Efficiency, Katherine Maher and Paula Kerger — the CEOs of NPR and PBS, respectively — defended their federal funding, responding to Republican concerns about their coverage and emphasizing the value of their services to local communities.

But Republicans were unimpressed, repeatedly accusing them of peddling misinformation and political bias. And their criticism comes at a high-stakes moment for both media organizations, with President Donald Trump saying just yesterday he would “love” to deprive NPR and PBS of government assistance and new FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr investigating the outlets for violating rules around advertising.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Georgia Republican who chairs the so-called DOGE Subcommittee, told reporters following the hearing that defunding the organizations was “widely supported” within the House Republican Conference.

During the hearing, she singled out a drag queen who appeared on a PBS-affiliated program as a “child predator” and a “monster.”

“NPR and PBS have increasingly become radical left-wing echo chambers for a narrow audience of mostly wealthy, white, urban liberals and progressives who generally look down on and judge rural America,” Greene said. “For far too long, federal taxpayers have been forced to fund biased news. This needs to come to an end. And it needs to come to an end now.”

And Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), the chair of the full Oversight Committee, took the opportunity to air his own personal grievances over how NPR covered his handling of an impeachment investigation into then-President Joe Biden.

“I think you’ve abused the privilege that you had with receiving federal funds,” Comer said.

If lawmakers were to halt funding through the congressional appropriations process to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which distributes resources to NPR and PBS, the decision would be a major blow to local stations that depend on that money. It’s not currently clear whether Republicans have the votes to do this; in the past, efforts to restrict appropriations for public media have fallen short.

The return of the Trump era, however, has scrambled expectations for what the executive branch can and cannot do when it comes to federal funding, daring lawsuits against its unilateral actions to shift or withhold money Congress has already approved. The administration also last week moved to shutter the U.S.-funded outlets Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Voice of America and Radio Free Asia.

At times, the PBS and NPR leaders appeared to be repentant. Maher said NPR was “mistaken” for failing to aggressively cover the saga around the laptop that Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, allegedly left at a Delaware repair shop. Kerger pointed to the PBS program Firing Line with political commentator Margaret Hoover, which is a reboot of the show with conservative writer William F. Buckley, to show the ideological range in programming.

Democrats came to Maher and Kerger’s defense, extolling the virtues of public media by highlighting beloved characters from children’s education television hallmarks like Sesame Street. Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.) called to “fire Elon Musk and save Elmo.”

“I’m sad to see that this once proud committee, the principal investigative committee in the House of Representatives, has now stooped to the lowest levels of partisanship and political theater to hold a hearing to go after the likes of Elmo and Cookie Monster and Arthur the Aardvark,” said Rep. Stephen Lynch (D-Mass.), “all for the unforgivable sin of teaching the alphabet to low-income families’ children and providing accessible local news and program.”

Top Democrats are seizing on Signalgate in campaign fundraising appeals — highlighting how the party hopes the fallout of the national security issue can resonate beyond Washington.

The news that top Trump administration officials discussed a planned attack on Houthi rebels in a Signal chat that accidentally included an Atlantic journalist has rocked national security circles, with some top Democrats calling for the resignations of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and national security adviser Mike Waltz.

Democrats have pointed to the sequence of events as an example of the Trump administration’s incompetence — and the potential consequences for the military and broader U.S. security — but it is less clear how the issue will resonate beyond Washington. The new fundraising messages indicate Democrats believe it will at least energize its base of online donors.

“Do you feel safe under the Trump administration?” asked an email from the campaign of Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand on Tuesday, which featured the headline of The Atlantic article and called it one of the Trump administration’s “most egregious and dangerous actions yet.”

“This is amateur hour. We’re damn lucky the pilots on that mission and the sailors and marines on ships offshore didn’t make the ultimate sacrifice that day. The Trump Administration’s carelessness and incompetence put their lives at risk,” said a Tuesday email from the campaign of Sen. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.), which included a link to a petition calling on Hegseth to resign.

An email from Justice Democrats, a progressive group, said the Trump administration was “out here talking about unconstitutional war plans via a texting app called Signal” while criticizing the strikes on Yemen and Trump’s broader agenda.

The White House acknowledged this week that the texts were legitimate but has largely defended the officials involved in the group chat.

The real enemy? The Atlantic journalist who published the story, whom Waltz called “the bottom scum of journalists” in an interview on Fox News on Tuesday.

A Republican lawmaker is rejecting White House efforts to downplay the inadvertent sharing of military attack plans with a journalist on an unclassified group chat.

“The White House is in denial that this was not classified or sensitive data,” said Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.), a former Air Force brigadier general and member of the House Armed Services Committee, on Wednesday. “They should just own up to it and preserve credibility.”

Bacon’s criticism is a sign that the explanations and deflections coming from President Donald Trump’s administration could be falling flat as new details emerge about the stunning disclosures to Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg.

Bacon spoke soon after The Atlantic published additional excerpts of the Signal group chat involving Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, national security adviser Michael Waltz and other top Trump aides. In those messages, Hegseth shares detailed timing, targeting and weapons information for a military strike on Houthi forces in Yemen roughly a half-hour before they were set to begin.

Hegseth and other members of the Trump administration are denying that any classified information was shared.

Testifying Wednesday to the House Intelligence Committee, Gabbard said “it was a mistake” that Goldberg was added to the chat but that “there were no sources, methods, locations or war plans that were shared.” She called it a “standard update … provided alongside updates that were given to foreign partners in the region.”

Waltz said much the same Wednesday in an X post after the new Atlantic reporting: “No locations. No sources & methods. NO WAR PLANS.”

One crucial administration ally on Capitol Hill, Senate Intelligence Chair Tom Cotton, also echoed that response Wednesday.

“There’s no locations listed there. There are no sources and methods. There’s no specific targets,” Cotton (R-Ark.) told reporters. “Certainly, there’s nothing called war plans, which was an embellishment and exaggeration by known left-wing partisan opponents of the president.”

Democratic Sen. Tammy Duckworth of Illinois, a former Army helicopter pilot, rebutted Republicans in a sharply worded X posting Wednesday: “Pete Hegseth is a f*cking liar. This is so clearly classified info he recklessly leaked that could’ve gotten our pilots killed. He needs to resign in disgrace immediately.”

Ben Jacobs and Amy Mackinnon contributed to this report.

Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) is gearing up for perhaps the most difficult election battle of his long career, securing an early endorsement from Senate Majority Leader John Thune on Wednesday, his one-time opponent in the fight for the chamber’s top job.

“I’ve been honored to work alongside @JohnCornyn—one of the most effective and respected conservative leaders in the country,” Thune wrote on X hours after Cornyn officially launched his reelection campaign. “He was tireless and instrumental in building our majority. We need to keep him in the Senate & in the fight to deliver on President Trump’s agenda.”

While Thune’s endorsement is widely expected — it would be almost unheard of for a chamber leader to not back one of their members — Cornyn faces what could be a difficult primary challenge, with Texas Attorney General and MAGA firebrand Ken Paxton likely to throw his hat in the ring as the candidate closer to President Donald Trump.

“The people of Texas know John Cornyn,” Paxton told Tucker Carlson in a February interview. “And I don’t think he’ll survive another primary.”

The two have been duking it out for years.

“To me, he’s been in Washington too long,” Paxton told Carlson back in 2023. “He’s been there, what, for 14 years or so? And I can’t think of a single thing he’s accomplished for our state or even for the country.”

This, after Cornyn called Paxton’s legal difficulties an “embarrassment” — the attorney general was impeached by the GOP-controlled Texas House (but acquitted by the state Senate), and has faced criminal investigations for years.

A Paxton run could challenge Cornyn’s grip on the Senate seat he’s held since winning it in 2002, with the state attorney general popular among the party’s MAGA base.

Speaker Mike Johnson and Senate Majority Leader John Thune indicated there was at least one point of agreement from their White House meeting Tuesday: Adding a debt ceiling hike to their party-line tax, border and energy bill.

That’s a gamble some Senate Republicans fear could sink the whole package. And while President Donald Trump told GOP lawmakers that was his preference earlier this month, he’ll now have to convince several skeptical Republicans to get behind the idea.

Johnson called it “everybody’s preferred outcome at this point.” Thune said it was “clearly a preferable outcome,” though he acknowledged he still needs to “determine whether or not the Senate can get on board with that idea.”

Still, plenty of sticking points remain as both chambers hope to work out a deal on a reconciliation bill framework they hope to adopt by the week of April 7.

House Republicans are digging in on the spending cuts their budget blueprint would prescribe for the reconciliation process, with Energy and Commerce Chair Brett Guthrie defending the $880 billion in cuts his committee has been tasked with finding as “realistic.” But Republican senators have aired doubts on that point, fearful of major reductions to Medicaid benefits. Many of them want to adjust the level of savings the committee would be tasked with finding to spare slashes to the popular safety net program.

“I’m not going to vote for something that would lead to Medicaid cuts,” said Sen. Josh Hawley.

That’s not a position all Senate Republicans share, however. Some conservatives want even deeper spending cuts. Thune is hoping to appease those lawmakers by pointing out all the federal funding reductions already undertaken by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.

Senate Republicans also want to make the expiring 2017 tax cuts permanent — something that wasn’t included in the House GOP blueprint. And Republican senators are making clear they intend to tweak the House-passed budget resolution on that point.

“They said they needed time to do one big, beautiful bill,” Senate Budget Chair Lindsey Graham told reporters, referring to House Republicans. “They had a chance; the product is woefully inadequate.”

What else we’re watching:

• X-date projection: The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office is planning to release its projection for when the U.S. will breach the debt limit at 10 a.m. The Bipartisan Policy Center predicted Monday that the so-called X-date would occur sometime between mid-July and early October if Congress doesn’t act.
• Discharge petition drama: Rep. Anna Paulina Luna is pushing her discharge petition to allow new parents in the House to vote remotely, which has secured the necessary 218 signatures. Hard-liners and GOP leaders both want to kill Luna’s proposal, and hard-liners engaged in a brief standoff with leadership on the floor Tuesday as a way to push for Johnson to find a way to table the effort.
• NPR and PBS face the DOGE spotlight: The heads of NPR and PBS are set to appear Wednesday in front of the House Oversight Subcommittee on Delivering on Government Efficiency, chaired by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene. The Federal Communications Commission is actively investigating both public media broadcasters over their corporate sponsorships, and Trump has said he would “love to” defund both organizations.

Jordain Carney, Ben Leonard, Benjamin Guggenheim, Meredith Lee Hill and Hailey Fuchs contributed to this report.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune said he plans to use the cuts undertaken by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency initiative as he tries to get Republican fiscal hawks on board with a budget blueprint paving the way for a massive party-line tax, border and energy bill.

The strategy, confirmed in a brief interview Tuesday, comes as Senate GOP leaders face a growing challenge in convincing a handful of conservatives members who want to go beyond the $2 trillion in cuts contained in the House budget framework.

“In the end, a lot of our folks who want to see a more aggressive approach to that realize that there are political considerations, and it’s all [about] what you can get the votes for,” Thune said.

Thune said that in addition to the massive domestic policy bill, “hopefully we’ll get other opportunities to” cut spending, naming DOGE as one of “a lot of good opportunities to get our country on a more sustainable fiscal path.“

Asked if the DOGE cuts could help sell a deal to conservatives, Thune said, “Anything that complements efforts to demonstrate that we are making serious headway in reducing spending and getting the deficit and debt under control is going to be progress. So however we get there, we want to get there.”

Senate Republicans haven’t aligned internally — much less with the House — on how deeply they want to cut spending. Even as Thune deals with demands from his right for more sweeping cuts, he’s got concerns in other corners of his conference that the House blueprint would require politically unpopular cuts to Medicaid.

The DOGE cuts aren’t expected to be a part of the final party-line megabill. But GOP senators, including Thune allies, have previously suggested that they could be included in the overall accounting showing fiscal hawks that Republicans won’t be adding to federal budget deficits.

Many Senate Republicans are pushing President Donald Trump to send them a so-called “rescissions” package — one that would allow Congress to vote on codifying Musk’s work.

While some Republicans doubt Trump will do so while his administration fights to defend DOGE’s work in court, Trump himself told reporters at the White House on Tuesday that he supported the idea of rescissions: “That would be great. I think we’re going to do that,” he said.

Meredith Lee Hill contributed to this report.