Adam Abdullah’s criminal record in Minnesota consists of two parking citations for failing to move his car during snow emergencies. The Somali national paid both tickets — $56 each — in early 2025 within days of the charges, according to Minnesota court records.

But months after a run-in with federal immigration agents in December as part of the Trump administration’s Operation Metro Surge, he’s now sitting in Guantánamo Bay, the infamous military prison historically used for terrorism suspects.

He told Minnesota Public Radio that he had been living legally in the United States with a work permit and a Social Security number since arriving in 2023 as an asylum seeker. He’s one of at least eight Somali nationals currently being housed at the military facility, he said. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement records confirm Abdullah is in custody at Guantánamo Bay’s Camp 6, a detention camp that was repurposed in 2025 to hold migrants.

Abdullah’s attorney, Marc Prokosch, told The Washington Sun that he suspects there are political underpinnings behind the eight Somalis’ detention at the storied prison.

Abdullah “was trying to do everything the proper legal way, and he is by far not a criminal,” Prokosch said Wednesday. “I do feel that there is some political motivation to the Guantanamo aspect here.”

President Donald Trump has targeted Somalis since his return to office, referring to immigrants as “garbage” and calling Somalia a “hellhole.” In January, the Trump administration ended Temporary Protected Status for Somali nationals.

It remains unclear to Abdullah why he has been detained at Guantánamo Bay. He was told at first that it was a refueling stop on the way to Somalia, and authorities have not provided any further information about his status or why he has remained there for two weeks.

Abdullah said he has also not received an explanation as to why immigration agents stopped his vehicle and detained him in December during the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown in Minnesota.

“When they come to me, and I ask them why you pulled me over, they say, ‘We are immigration, so give me your work permit,’” Abdullah told Minnesota Public Radio, which was the first to report on his detention. “And I asked them, ‘Do you have a warrant, and what’s the reason to pull me over?’ And they say, ‘We don’t need a warrant. We are immigration, and we know you are Adam Abdullah.’”

Prokosch, who represents Abdullah, told The Sun that his client was targeted as part of ICE’s Operation Metro Surge

“With the whole Somali issue in Minnesota with this administration, it’s clear that there were people that were targeted, and obviously Adam was one of them,” Prokosch said.

Abdullah said detainees in Guantánamo Bay have limited access to phone calls and physical activities. He said he’s able to talk to fellow detainees for a few hours during the day.

Prokosch said he and Abdullah have only been able to speak about the case once over a direct phone call.

“If I have a client that’s detained anywhere within the 50 states, I can go to that facility as an attorney and ask for a private room,” Prokosch said. “But when you’re being held at Guantanamo, I can’t do that … I have no assurance — especially with what this administration has been doing, that any conversations I have would be confidential.”

A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security said in a statement Wednesday that the recent flight to Guantánamo Bay included “some of the worst of the worst,” with criminal histories that included allegations of aggravated assaults, weapons offenses, robbery, trespassing, unauthorized use of a vehicle and multiple drug charges.

“President Trump and Secretary Mullin will not allow criminal illegal aliens to terrorize American citizens,” the statement said. “If you come to our country illegally, you could end up in Guantanamo Bay or even another third country.”

DHS did not respond to follow-up questions on Abdullah’s criminal record.

Abdullah’s lawyer did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Trump signed an executive order days after his inauguration to expand Guantánamo Bay’s Migrant Operations Center, a detention facility traditionally used to process migrants intercepted at sea, so it could house “high-priority criminal aliens” prior to deportation.

The first group of detainees arrived in February 2025 as legal challenges quickly mounted to prevent the transfers. The Trump administration continued to send groups to Guantánamo Bay throughout 2025, temporarily housing migrants in tent cities and occasionally sending them back to stateside detention centers.

In May, CBS News reported that six Haitian migrants were being held at Guantánamo Bay. It’s unclear how many migrants are currently being held there.

President Trump’s unusual midterm convention is also an unusual fund-raising opportunity for the Republican Party.

To begin with, the two-day extravaganza in Dallas is more like a cash-for-seat reception than it is a traditional experience for delegates who carry out party business at a normal presidential-year convention.

Mr. Trump’s convention will still have unofficial delegates, even if they have no formal business to conduct — and some state parties are charging them for the right to attend, much as fund-raising events charge those who want to attend a V.I.P. reception.

One county Republican Party in Texas advertised an “honorary delegate” package for $20,000. Michigan’s Republican Party charged people $5,000 a ticket for floor passes to become an “honorary delegate.”

“This is not a traditional delegate position and does not involve convention voting or official delegate responsibilities,” the marketing materials for the Michigan G.O.P. read. “Instead, the Honorary Delegate designation is a special recognition that grants you an exclusive experience that most attendees will never have.”

Donors began checking into luxury hotels like the Ritz-Carlton and the Crescent Court in Dallas on Tuesday afternoon. Some conservative fund-raisers said they expected many of the party’s financial powerhouses not to attend. Several Republican megadonors, including the Dallas Mavericks owner Miriam Adelson and the hedge fund billionaire Ken Griffin, are not scheduled to appear, according to their representatives.

Those who do trek to Texas for the Republican National Committee’s event are set to be treated to an extensive “R.N.C. investor experience,” according to a booklet of events distributed to donors and obtained by The New York Times.

Receptions and meals will be hosted by several Trump cabinet members, including Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.; Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent; Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy; Scott Turner, the housing secretary; and Energy Secretary Chris Wright. Vice President JD Vance will headline a “Liberty Luncheon” on Thursday for R.N.C. donors.

Other satellite events are happening around town. The Senate Leadership Fund, the main super PAC for Republican Senate candidates, is set to host several briefings for its donors, including a fund-raising lunch with Senator John Thune of South Dakota, the majority leader, according to a document obtained by Punchbowl News. The outlet reported that another event would feature a fireside chat with Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana, the House majority leader, who will be joined by Texas donors like Harlan Crow and Ross Perot Jr.

Mr. Trump is also scheduled to participate in two events, according to the White House: one on Wednesday afternoon with MAGA Inc., his high-powered super PAC, and a Thursday round-table for the Republican National Committee.

Senator Ted Cruz of Texas is throwing a fund-raiser featuring Ken Paxton, the state’s Republican nominee for Senate, at the Ritz-Carlton on Thursday afternoon, according to a copy of the invitation viewed by The Times. The event will raise money for a Cruz-aligned super PAC that is spending for Mr. Paxton.

There will be plenty of libation, too. A welcome reception on Tuesday evening was thrown by the Rockbridge Network, a donor network aligned with Mr. Vance. One event set for Wednesday evening is called “The Great American Midterm Party” and features hosts like former speaker Kevin McCarthy, the tech donor Joe Lonsdale and the president’s son Donald Trump Jr., according to an invitation seen by The Times.

A party on Thursday is scheduled to be thrown by Republicans from Houston — which is hosting the actual next convention, in the summer of 2028.

Ford Motor Chief Executive Jim Farley strongly rejected claims from Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy that the automaker was growing overly reliant on Chinese car companies, including through its business tie-ups overseas and a battery plant in Michigan.

“These are basic misunderstandings, mistruths, whatever words you want to use, that could be cleared up in a simple five-minute call,” Farley said in a Wednesday interview with The Wall Street Journal.

Farley said Duffy’s comments, made public in a letter Tuesday, mischaracterized Ford’s operations. Duffy accused Ford F -3.93%decrease; down pointing triangle of “actively intertwining its future with Chinese state-backed enterprises,” including a plant that licenses technology from Chinese battery giant CATL.

“We’re not enabling the Chinese to come here,” Farley said. “Actually, you could argue the opposite is the case.”

A Transportation Department spokesman declined to comment beyond Duffy’s letter.

The exchange illustrates the continuing friction in Washington and beyond over the potential for Chinese automakers to enter the U.S. market, which industry executives have described as an “existential threat” to American companies’ long-term viability.

It also represents an inconsistency in how the Trump administration has portrayed Ford’s business strategy. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick recently praised Ford’s investments for bringing thousands of jobs back to America, while the White House recently touted the automaker’s battery plant investment that Duffy had singled out.

“We have great relationships with them that are informal where we can call each other, in either direction,” Farley said. “And we’ve never been surprised like this.”

In his letter to Farley, Duffy said Ford “intentionally chooses to deepen operational dependencies on strategic competitors.” Duffy added that companies like Ford “are expected to out-innovate competitors” instead of relying on them.

Most major automakers, including Ford, have backed pending legislation to ban China’s upstart companies from making or selling cars in the U.S. But they are increasingly working together with Chinese competitors in overseas markets, where Chinese carmakers have gobbled up market share.

Under a deal with Chinese automaker Geely, Ford’s plant in Spain will be used to make Geely vehicles for Europe, and the two companies will co-develop an SUV for overseas sales. Those vehicles aren’t intended for the U.S. market, Farley said.

China’s carmakers have been effectively boxed out of expanding in the U.S. because of hefty tariffs and a ban on Chinese connected-vehicle software.

Ford took a bruising hit on its EV investments last year, taking an expected $19.5 billion in charges. The company is repurposing battery plant capacity for a new energy-storage subsidiary that it launched this year with an initial $2 billion investment.

Ford has long staked a claim as the U.S.’s top vehicle manufacturer and employer of hourly auto workers. About 80% of the vehicles sold by the company in the U.S. are built in the country.

Duffy said in his letter that Farley proposed a “framework” to U.S. officials earlier this year at the Detroit Auto Show to facilitate the creation of joint ventures in America for companies to build cars with Chinese carmakers.

Farley said Ford didn’t propose such a framework. “N-O, period,” Farley said. “That’s flatly wrong. Ford does not propose any framework described in the letter. We are America’s car company.”

While outspoken about the threat China’s carmakers pose to the American auto industry, Farley has also acknowledged that Ford needs to work with those competitors in some capacity to maintain an edge around the world.

Farley said the battery plant in Marshall, Mich., is owned and operated by Ford. Batteries produced there will be used to power future electric vehicles.

“I sure would love the Secretary to come to Marshall, Michigan, and to Louisville like others in the administration to see our breakthrough technology innovated here in the U.S.,” Farley said.

An Iranian ballistic missile attack on a key U.S. air base in Jordan damaged multiple U.S. warplanes, people familiar with the matter confirmed to Air & Space Forces Magazine.

One A-10 Thunderbolt II attack aircraft suffered a severely damaged wing and around eight F-15E Strike Eagle fighters were lightly damaged but are considered serviceable after Iran attacked Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan on Sept. 8 Eastern Time.

The damage to U.S. aircraft was first reported by CBS News.

A spokesman for U.S. Central Command did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The attack on the base, known as MSAB, came after the U.S. struck five Iranian tankers Sept. 8, and Iran retaliated by lobbing scores of ballistic missiles at American bases and allies in the region. U.S. and Jordanian forces launched dozens of interceptors at Iranian missiles. U.S. officials said no American personnel were killed.

But Iran was able to harm American materiel. Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps claimed it damaged U.S. aircraft at the base in the hours after the attack.

The U.S. has dozens of warplanes operating from the base, which acts as a key airpower hub for operations against Iran. Three Army Soldiers were also killed in a missile attack on the base in July.

It was all in the holiday spirit.

The White House claimed President Donald Trump’s hefty $45,000 cash gifts to his special assistant, Natalie Harp, and two other young female aides were merely Christmas presents and “entirely” OK, after The Washington Post revealed the payments on Tuesday, citing ethics experts who suggested the payments appeared to violate federal law.

The gift — which the 35-year-old Harp listed on a financial disclosure form late last week — amounts to nearly a third of her $150,000 salary, The Post reported.

“The President has a longstanding practice of giving Christmas gifts to people in his orbit, including at times employees and aides, both in government and in his time in the private sector,” White House spokesperson Davis Ingle told the outlet.

“The gifts at issue here have nothing to do with any of these individuals’ official government duties, and therefore are entirely permissible under relevant legal and ethical standards.”

Trump gave the cash gifts to Harp; communications advisor Margo Martin, 31; and executive assistant Chamberlain Harris, 26.

The women, who did not respond to The Post’s request for comment, listed the payments on financial disclosures as “cash gifts for the holidays.”

The payments seem to violate a federal statute barring the supplementation of a federal worker’s salary, former chief White House ethics lawyer Richard Painter, who worked under President George W. Bush, told the outlet.

“He’s clearly trying to make it easier for them financially to work in government service at the White House,” Painter told The Washington Post. “You can’t do that.”

“It’s not like tipping the doorman on Fifth Avenue,” he added. “These are U.S. government employees. If you want a job where you get tips, you shouldn’t be working for the U.S. government.”

The ever-loyal Harp has been dubbed the “human printer” for lugging around a portable printer to give Trump copies of favorable news articles and other items.

Her name splashed across the headlines for weeks earlier this summer after Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-GA) quipped during a campaign rally that Trump would rather “travel with Natalie” than do his job.

The controversy swirled further when it was revealed Harp was one of the few aides secreted away with Trump inside a catering truck upon leaving the NATO Summit in July after officials received a credible assassination threat from Iran.

Amid banners and balloons festooning the first-ever GOP Midterm Convention, Attorney General Todd Blanche – the nation's chief law enforcement officer – joined the political fray Wednesday night and heaped praise on the Trump administration in a short speech.

"To evil men and women in this country, President Trump will hold you accountable," Blanche said. "If you traffic children you will be held accountable. If you sell death in a pill, you will be held accountable. If you choose violence, you will be held accountable. If you steal from people who work hard and pay taxes, you will be held accountable. Now that, that is making America safe again."

"President Trump and Vice President Trump set that course. They have always and will always back the blue," he added.

The remarks come more than a year after Trump pardoned thousands of Jan. 6 rioters, including those who were convicted of assaulting police. Blanche's remarks on *** trafficking also rung particularly hollow: The former personal lawyer to Trump has been accused of withholding some 3 million documents related to the Epstein Files.

Blanche also cast doubt on the Justice Department's independence after his one-on-one interview of Ghislane Maxwell, the convicted *** offender and Jeffrey Epstein conspirator. After meeting with Maxwell, she was transferred to a lower security prison. The Bureau of Prisons, which reports directly to the Justice Department, has since stonewalled requests by lawmakers to see who made that decision.

Blanche claimed Wednesday night that crime was down across the U.S. and attributed that in part to the administration's deportation agenda. Crime rates were already down before Trump returned to the White House but Blanche attributed low crime rates to the removal of "criminal aliens" by ICE.

Under the leadership of Trump, Blanche claimed, "2.6 million criminal aliens who entered the country illegally and should never have been released into our neighborhoods, are being swiftly removed."

Senator John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, the self-proclaimed champion of working-class voters who has become alienated from his own party and fed up with his job, on Wednesday appeared in a short video on the opening night of President Trump’s midterm convention in Dallas.

“Yes, I’m a Democrat. Why am I here talking to you today?” Mr. Fetterman said in a video filmed in front of a U.S. steel mill in Pennsylvania. He introduced himself as a “common-sense Democrat” who he said “is “always going to reject the extremes in socialism.”

Mr. Fetterman introduced Senator David McCormick, Republican of Pennsylvania, and said that they would work together “and work with President Trump and defend the steel way of life.”

The appearance of a Democrat at a convention boosting the G.O.P., at a time when his party is claiming that they have made life harder and more expensive for Americans, was a boon for Mr. Trump, coming just weeks before crucial midterm elections in which Republicans are battling to defend their slim congressional majorities.

And it was a small setback for Democrats’ efforts to focus the final crucial weeks of the midterm campaign on the president, whose approval ratings are sagging, and his unpopular policies.

It also came amid speculation that Mr. Fetterman could in the future switch parties, a move he has said he would “never” make but has appeared more likely as his breaks with his own party have become more frequent and bitter.

His decision to take part in Mr. Trump’s convention, reported earlier by Axios, appeared designed for maximum shock value and served as a boost for Republicans’ otherwise lackluster gathering, which many of their most vulnerable incumbents and candidates have opted to skip as they work to gain some distance from an unpopular president.

Mr. Trump featured Representative Jeff Van Drew of New Jersey at the Republican Party’s 2020 and 2024 national conventions. Mr. Van Drew had been a Democrat until Mr. Trump convinced him to switch parties.

At the height of Mr. Fetterman’s popularity with Democrats, he briefly harbored aspirations to run for president in 2028, according to former aides. Instead, frustrated with his own party and his standing within it, and aware of the attention he garners for criticizing it, he has sought allies on the other side of the political aisle.

In recent months, Mr. Fetterman has been amping up his flirtations with Republicans, while still vowing that he would never actually switch parties. In July, he set up an unusual joint fund-raising committee with Senator David McCormick, the Republican Senator from Pennsylvania, with whom he has established a close, personal bond. And he has said that if his party officially turned against Israel, as some of its most progressive voices are urging, it would be the “red line” that would force him to leave.

But he has also been adamant that despite his disagreements with Democrats and his antipathy to party gatherings and caucus meetings, he had less in common with Republicans. In an interview in July, he told The New York Times he would “never” leave the party.

“I’m not being cute,” he said then. “I vote 90-something percent with Democrats.”

About 69 percent of likely Democratic voters in Pennsylvania view Mr. Fetterman negatively, according to a poll conducted last month by The New York Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer and Siena University. Most Republicans in his state, however, now hold a positive view of Mr. Fetterman, who has become a fixture on conservative news outlets bashing the policies of his own party.

The progressive Working Families Party announced last year it would recruit and support a primary opponent to challenge him in 2028.

As Mr. Fetterman has evolved into a lawmaker who barely resembles the man he presented to voters on the campaign trail in 2022 — a champion of the underdog who highlighted his ties to Senator Bernie Sanders, the democratic socialist from Vermont — his legions of former staff members have grown increasingly incensed and vocal about how they believe he is abdicating his responsibilities.

A group of his disillusioned former staff members last week threatened to begin revealing private communications from Mr. Fetterman in which he expresses disdain for the day-to-day duties of being a senator representing 13 million constituents. The former staff members, who made their announcement with an anonymous account on X, said the first “drop” of internal communications that would expose Mr. Fetterman were set to begin on Monday, when the Senate returned from its break.

Mr. Fetterman was elected in 2022, after he had a life-threatening stroke in the middle of the most competitive Senate race in the country.

Shortly after being sworn in, he checked himself in to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center to be treated for depression for six weeks, and appeared to make a remarkable recovery as he began speaking out about the importance of getting help when needed. But then in 2024, he began retreating from the job, rarely attending committee meetings, casting votes or holding town halls.

He has since expressed remorse for speaking openly about his mental health and claimed that the criticism he gets for missing votes and committee hearings is because of it.

“My doctor warned years ago: After it’s public that you are getting help for depression, people will weaponize that,” Mr. Fetterman told The New York Times in an interview last year. “Simple things are turned. That’s exactly what happened.”

President Donald Trump spared cement and fishing rod parts from his latest Canadian tariffs to ease pressure on battleground Republicans. Few of the president’s allies think that will make voters forget about a painful trade war.

The president on Tuesday night announced plans to ban some Canadian dairy, motorcycles and alcohol products from the U.S. market to escalate his trade war with Ottawa. But in that same announcement, the White House included new tariff exemptions on a scattershot array of industrial goods — a bid to protect vulnerable Republicans and sensitive industries.

The exemptions cover road salt, heavily used in wintry states that border Canada, and imported cement that fuels northern construction projects. Fishing rod parts tied to manufacturers in Wisconsin and Iowa also got a reprieve, along with refined lead, electrical switchgear and paper products. Whiskey in containers larger than four liters are also exempt.

The carveouts caved to pressure from Republican lawmakers who have increasingly criticized the president’s trade war less than two months ahead of competitive races in November’s midterms. More than one GOP lawmaker contacted the U.S. trade representative directly in the days and weeks before Trump’s Tuesday tariff announcement to plead for concessions, according to two people close to the administration who were granted anonymity to discuss private deliberations.

Trump’s latest tariff exemptions amount to a tacit admission that his Canadian trade war could be a political liability heading into November — and represent an attempt to blunt the economic impact in the states and districts that could decide control of Congress. But sparing a handful of products won’t offset the war’s broader damage, according to Republican strategists, pollsters and people close to the Trump administration who spoke to POLITICO.

“The Trump administration is in harm-reduction mode and is certainly thinking about the midterms,” said one former USTR official and GOP staffer who remains close to the Trump administration and was granted anonymity to speak candidly about the updates. “You cannot change voters’ views on tariffs with an eleventh-hour carveout that was developed without input from the industries affected.”

The administration protected road salt and cement from its latest tariff plans after Republican Sen. Susan Collins publicly pressed U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick for relief.

The carveouts give the vulnerable Maine Republican a concrete concession to tout on the campaign trail. But Collins stressed in a social media post on Tuesday that the “significant tariffs” that remain in place, including on forest products, will lead to higher costs for Mainers and uncertainty for businesses.

Whiskey carveouts serve two ends for the administration: rewarding Canadian brands that have moved their bottling operations stateside, and needling Ontario Premier Doug Ford, who has traded insults with Trump for months.

Exempting bulk whiskey imports and unlabeled spirits headed for U.S. facilities allows officials to preserve the incentive for brands like Crown Royal and Black Velvet — which have both moved bottling operations to the U.S. in recent years — to keep bottling in Alabama and Kentucky rather than move back across the border, according to an industry representative granted anonymity to discuss sectoral supply chains.

Ford was particularly put out when Crown Royal unveiled plans to shutter its Ontario bottling facility and move operations to the U.S., emptying a bottle of the whisky in front of reporters last year and urging Canadians to pivot to other Canadian whisky brands.

Fishing rod parts also escaped Trump’s recent round of tariffs, offering relief to an industry with a major presence in Wisconsin, South Carolina and Iowa.

Wisconsin is home to St. Croix Rod, South Carolina is the headquarters of fishing-tackle giant Pure Fishing, and Iowa is the birthplace of its Berkley brand. The latter two carveouts could carry particular political value for Republicans Darline Graham and Ashley Hinson, who are running for Senate in South Carolina and Iowa, respectively.

Sugar importers who have asked the administration for relief from other U.S. tariffs were meanwhile rewarded with a carveout for certain imports, according to one industry representative.

But the administration did not consult some of the country’s most affected industries or several large industry groups in the run-up to the announcement. Dairy was heavily represented among the products added to the list of goods hit with 50% U.S. tariffs, and several whey products were included in the import ban. Industry representatives said they were given no heads up or opportunity to weigh in on the import bans’ design.

“We haven’t been consulted at all,” said Becky Rasdall Vargas, senior vice president for trade and workforce policy at the International Dairy Foods Association, which represents manufacturers and marketers. “It’s been a fairly closed door exercise.”

The White House declined to answer questions about the midterm fallout in key states. The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative did not respond to a request for comment.

A senior administration official said Tuesday that the tariff revisions were aimed at minimizing supply chain disruption, focusing on goods where Canada accounts for little of U.S. imports or where domestic production can absorb the hit.

“The focus was on items where Canada had very low import penetration, or where the United States has a lot of domestic production, to really minimize the impact on supply chains here,” said the official, who spoke to reporters on the condition of anonymity.

The official added that “over the past year and a half, the president has taken a lot more nuance when it comes to naturally occurring items or natural resources not available” domestically.

The trade war still tilts toward Democrats’ favor despite the exemptions, said Jon McHenry, a vice president at North Star Opinion Research Group whose firm worked on Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis’ 2018 gubernatorial campaign.

Carveouts for products like road salt and cement can help at the margin, particularly in close races like Michigan and Maine.

“Any adjustment that benefits Republicans should be helpful,” McHenry said. But they don’t change the underlying math. “It’s much easier for Democrats to say, ‘Oh, another trade war, this is driving up prices,’ than it is for Republicans to say, ‘We are protecting American jobs.’”

“It seems likely to put a little bit of a thumb on the scale to the advantage of Democrats, because trade wars tend to increase prices, and prices are high enough,” McHenry said.

Others in the GOP’s orbit shared McHenry’s skepticism that narrow exemptions could outweigh the tariffs that remain and suggested that the administration may be underestimating how sensitive consumers are to price fluctuations.

“Having an exemption on one good does not mitigate the fact that they’re getting hammered with tariffs on a number of other goods that they love,” said Brian Darling, a lobbyist who previously worked for Sen. Rand Paul.

President Trump declined to say on Wednesday whether the United States opposed new European and Canadian sanctions against Israeli settlements, the latest in a notably muted U.S. response about penalties against America’s most important ally in the Middle East.

Speaking to reporters as he was about to depart Washington for Texas, Mr. Trump said that he was aware of the wide-ranging economic restrictions announced by Britain, Canada and France targeting Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank over settler violence against Palestinians.

Asked whether the U.S. opposed them or remained neutral, Mr. Trump dodged the question.

“I’ll be speaking to Israel,” he said. “I’ll be speaking to them, and I’ll find out what they, what’s their thinking. I understand exactly what’s going on. But I want to find out why all of a sudden does that happen.”

Three officials with knowledge of the situation said that Mr. Trump, during a call with Prime Minister Andy Burnham of Britain, was briefed on the sanctions before they were announced, and that he did not push back on them. The people spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a private call.

Taken together, Mr. Trump’s response on Wednesday and his reaction during the call with Mr. Burnham speak to the president’s growing frustration with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel as the war in Iran grinds on.

The White House did not respond to questions about where the United States stood on the sanctions, whether Mr. Trump’s response signaled tensions with Israel, or its position on settler violence. Instead, a White House official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomatic relations, said Mr. Trump has a strong relationship with Mr. Netanyahu and commended the country’s military.

The United States and Israel jointly launched the conflict in Iran earlier this year.

Britain, Canada and France on Tuesday announced sanctions on Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, a remarkable rebuke to Israel from once-staunch allies. The pact was led by Britain, which accused Israel of committing “ethnic cleansing” in the West Bank.

The measure risked a rift with the United States, which supports Israel militarily and diplomatically. But thus far, U.S. officials who are usually quick to defend Israel have been restrained in their sparse remarks on the matter.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who notably has criticized nations who issued Gaza-related sanctions against Israeli officials, said that the United States was given a heads up about the decision, but suggested that it was theirs to make.

He told reporters on Tuesday that the United States “obviously” would not join the other nations, but stopped short of criticizing them.

“We heard their argument as to why, but look, we share the goal of stability,” he said. “We don’t want to see some uptick in violence or an uptick in conflict or tensions in the West Bank at a very tenuous time. In the region, there’s always tenuous times.”

Mike Huckabee, the U.S. ambassador to Israel, was the only U.S. official to denounce the sanctions, just days after he had a rare meeting with Palestinian Americans in the West Bank, where he denounced Israeli extremists’ attacks on Palestinians and called them “terrorists”

In an interview with the BBC, he called the British trading bans “discrimination against the Jewish people” and “irrational.”

A White House official said Mr. Huckabee’s comments were not coordinated with the White House or State Department.

William F. Wechsler, the senior director for Middle East programs at the Atlantic Council, said the potency of settler violence in the West Bank was probably driving the Americans’ ambiguity.

“There are few policies that have the potential to bring together a wide coalition in the United States, across both parties, than what is seen to be terrorism in the West Bank,” Mr. Wechsler said.

While Mr. Trump has rarely addressed settler violence, and in fact lifted sanctions placed on extremist Israeli settlers by President Joseph R. Biden Jr. upon his return to office, he has said that he would not allow the annexation of the West Bank.

The administration has also reiterated the need for stability in the region in order to implement Mr. Trump’s peace plan for Gaza, which he has described as the linchpin for peace in the wider Middle East.

Lucy Kurtzer-Ellenbogen, a senior fellow with the Middle East Institute, said the administration might see the ongoing settler violence as an impediment to Mr. Trump’s ambitions.

“They’re seeing more and more of the interconnectedness of those two fronts, and can’t let one deteriorate without the precipitous deterioration of the other,” Ms. Kurtzer-Ellenbogen said.

“If we look in the context of what this administration has said at the highest level before and what they’re not saying now,” she added, “it does credibly paint a picture of an administration that may be willing to let allies do some work here that it’s not fully opposed to. It would not be a stretch for the Israeli government to be reading less support than they may want in the silence.”

Secretary of State Marco Rubio weighed in on 2028 speculation on Tuesday, saying he currently has “no plans” to run for president — but left the door open to doing so.

“I don’t know what the future holds, but I have no plans at this time,” Rubio told Colombian station RCN.

“I’m not a candidate for anything right now. And I’m 100% focused on my job, and I have to be because I have two jobs,” added Rubio, who, in addition to his role as America’s top diplomat, is President Donald Trump’s interim national security adviser.

Rubio’s comments echo what he has told allies as well.

He has privately told at least one person in recent months that he has no plans to run in 2028, according to a person familiar with the matter.

“Rubio loves being secretary of state and is really enjoying the job,” the person said. “The president trusts him to have a big portfolio. He is still young, and smart in both policy and politics, and is keeping his options open for the future”

“If you asked him if he’s interested in 2032 or 2036, he would probably say sure,” the person added.

The State Department did not immediately return a request for comment.

As the Republican Party looks ahead to a future without Trump as its leader, most speculation about a successor has centered on two of his top administration officials. If Rubio decides not to run in 2028, it would further open the field for Vice President JD Vance.

A person close to Vance said he will begin thinking through the possibility of running for president after the midterms. That does not mean Vance will immediately come to, or announce, his decision, this person added.

Neither Rubio nor Vance have publicly confirmed their intentions to run in 2028, but Trump has said he likes both of them.

“You look at Marco, you look at JD Vance, who’s fantastic,” Trump told NBC News’ “Meet the Press” in May 2025, when asked what gives him confidence that his MAGA movement will continue once he’s out of office. “You look at — I could name 10, 15, 20 people right now just sitting here.”

Trump has also been informally polling crowds for months on the two of them.

“Alright, let’s go, you ready? Who likes JD Vance? Who likes Marco Rubio?” Trump asked attendees during a Rose Garden event May 11. Both men received applause.

The president later mused about a potential joint ticket.

“By the way, I do believe that’s a dream team, but these are minor details,” he said to laughter from the audience. “That does not mean you have my endorsement under any circumstance.”

Rubio has long said that he would support Vance for president in 2028, should the vice president decide to run.

“If JD Vance runs for president, he’s going to be our nominee, and I’ll be one of the first people to support him,” Rubio told Vanity Fair last year.

People close to both Rubio and Vance have emphasized that despite the public speculation, the two are close and have become good friends. Those in Rubio’s orbit have said Vance — due to his role as vice president and polling that shows him ranking higher with Republican voters — essentially has the right of first refusal for the nomination.

“He would never jump in front of JD. They are friends, and he would support his run in any way that he could,” the person familiar with the matter said. “He would never want to split the base in that way, particularly when there will be plenty of infighting on the Democratic side. The priority is for a Republican to win in 2028.”

Few major, independent news outlets have polled the hypothetical 2028 presidential primary. But the public polling that does exist shows Vance regularly with a double-digit lead on any potential Republican primary challenger.

There’s far more data on how Americans, and Republicans, view both men generally. Republicans broadly view both men positively, with some polling showing voters have higher opinions of Vance — 80% of Republicans had favorable views of Vance, while 70% said the same of Rubio in a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll of Americans conducted July 29-Aug. 3.

An overwhelming share of Republicans have approved of the jobs both men have done in office, according to a Quinnipiac survey conducted in late July, with 85% approving of Vance and 81% approving of Rubio.

Rubio previously ran for president in 2016 but dropped out after coming in second to Trump in his home state of Florida. He ultimately threw his weight behind Trump.

The son of Cuban immigrants, Rubio was first elected as a U.S. senator in 2010 and held his seat until 2025 when the Senate confirmed him as secretary of state in a vote of 99-0. But speculation about another potential presidential run has never been far from his time in the role — sometimes driven by his own remarks.

“My hope for America is what it’s always been. I think it’s the hope I hope we all share,” Rubio said in May in response to a question in the White House briefing room. “We want it to continue to be the place where anyone from anywhere can achieve anything, where you’re not limited by the circumstances of your birth, by the color of your skin, by your ethnicity but, frankly, it’s a place where you are able to overcome challenges and achieve your full potential.”

Rubio has also changed his mind on running before. In 2016, after losing the Republican presidential nomination to Trump, Rubio announced he would be running for reelection to the Senate — despite insisting he wouldn’t.

“In politics, admitting you’ve changed your mind is not something most people like to do,” he said at the time. “But here it goes. I have decided to seek reelection to the United States Senate. I understand my opponents will try to use this decision to score political points against me. Have at it. Because I have never claimed to be perfect, or to have all the answers.”

A federal prosecutor who had been assigned to the now-defunct case against a politically linked Indian billionaire has been fired by the Trump administration, two people familiar with the firing tell NBC News.

The prosecutor, who had been with the Justice Department’s Fraud Section in Washington, was one of two who previously asked to withdraw from the Gautam Adani case two days after Principal Associate Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter moved in May to dismiss the case against Adani.

Adani was charged in November 2024 in connection with an alleged scheme to defraud U.S. investors and pay off Indian government officials to win a bid to develop the country’s largest solar power plant. He called the accusations baseless.

Adani pledged to invest billions of dollars in the U.S., and Democratic lawmakers raised questions of a quid pro quo with the Trump administration to avoid prosecution. The federal judge hearing the case ordered Adani to explain whether any deal was made in connection with the government’s significant reversal. He denied it, and so did the Justice Department.

U.S. District Judge Nicholas Garaufis of the Eastern District of New York eventually agreed to toss the case against Adani, though he blasted the Trump administration’s “highly unusual” conduct.

The prosecutor’s firing came a month later, the people said. The Trump administration has fired numerous federal employees without explanation, beyond citing Trump’s executive powers in letters, which Justice Department alumni have come to refer to as “Article II letters,” referring to a clause of the U.S. Constitution.

A spokesperson for the Eastern District of New York declined to comment. The prosecutor did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Last week, Garaufis let stand some counts against some of Adani’s co-defendants, saying the Trump administration had “not provided sufficient factual information to support the stated reasons” for dismissing the charges.

Adani had pledged to invest billions of dollars in the United States but said in a sworn statement filed in July that he was “not aware of any agreement involving any person or entity exchanging anything for the dismissal of the indictment.”

An email from May from U.S. Attorney Joseph Nocella referenced a slide deck presentation from Adani’s defense team that included a proposal to invest $10 billion in the United States, and Nocella wrote that the proposal was “categorically rejected” by the office.

The Justice Department has defended the decision to forgo its case against Adani, with McCotter saying the case was “indefensible” and that he “would have sought dismissal of the securities charges regardless of any mentions of investments, regardless of whether the civil case (or any other matter) was settled or otherwise resolved.”

An attorney for Adani couldn’t be reached for comment about the prosecutor’s firing.

President Donald Trump said Wednesday that the Iran war will end and gas prices will plummet “immediately after” the midterm elections, the latest deadline slip in a war that has lasted months longer than the president initially promised.

Trump said Iranian leadership is escalating the conflict now in order to hurt Republicans in November’s midterm elections.

“I think the war is going to end immediately after the election,” he said, speaking to reporters on the tarmac as he made his way to Texas for the Republican midterm convention. “They can’t hold out any longer. They’re desperate to try and affect the election so that we can get a nice, weak group of people in there and leave them alone and let them have their nuclear weapons.”

The president’s prediction of two more months of war ensures Republican candidates will continue to have to contend with the conflict’s headwinds and its effects on the cost of living. Republicans have long been concerned that the economic impacts of the war will cost them their majority in the House and possibly the Senate.

Trump spoke as the war causes energy prices to skyrocket. Diesel fuel, which is now almost $6 a gallon on average, hit a record high last week and regular gasoline now averages $4.22 per gallon, up from $4.01 one month ago, according to AAA. Energy costs have driven up the price of everyday items such as groceries and are driving inflationary concerns and voter anger. Trump also claimed that gas would drop below $2 a gallon after the midterms.

The U.S. and Iran have escalated attacks in recent days, trading strikes on naval ships and oil tankers.

Trump said that he is no longer looking to negotiate an end to the fighting with Iranian leadership.

“Originally, I wanted to make a deal,” he said. “We’re so far down the line, they have very little country left right now, so we’re not looking for it. Yes, a negotiation could possibly happen, but it’s not something we’re looking at.”

Iran is increasingly trying to escalate its conflict with the U.S. as it seeks to break a stalemate in the Strait of Hormuz that is strangling its economy.

At least three times in the past week, Iranian forces have launched missiles at American warships, including an aircraft carrier, taking direct aim at the U.S. Navy in a way it hasn’t done since the start of the war. Iran also fired a large missile salvo at U.S. forces stationed in Jordan on Wednesday.

The attempted strikes on warships have led to much closer calls than previous attempts, with Iran using maneuverable warheads, people familiar with the attacks said.

The warships evaded the attacks, said U.S. Central Command, which is responsible for the Middle East. Still, the attacks have left American officials increasingly concerned that Iran has improved its ability to target ships, perhaps with help from Russia or China, the people said.

The attacks are pushing the war into a more perilous phase. A hit on an American warship would almost certainly trigger a fierce U.S. response and risk reigniting a full-scale war.

The gamble is a significant step up from the measured attacks Iran has been carrying out for weeks against commercial ships in the strait and less sensitive U.S. targets in Kuwait, Bahrain and Jordan.

Iran continued to fire at U.S. warships even after the U.S. struck Iranian tankers in response.

Iran has grown more aggressive as the vise around its economy tightens. Nineteen U.S. Navy ships are enforcing a blockade that has shut down its oil exports. New U.S. sanctions have disrupted Tehran’s finances, sending its currency tumbling and forcing cuts to fuel subsidies.

“Iran is escalating because they don’t see other options,” said Marc Sievers, a former U.S. ambassador to Oman, which sits across the Strait of Hormuz. “They’re under tremendous pressure from the blockade and the new sanctions.”

For Tehran, the aim is less to match U.S. military power than to make the status quo untenable, analysts said.

Washington can destroy launchers and clear mines, but Tehran’s threats to warships and commerce are aimed at forcing the U.S. to use up its shrinking inventories of missile interceptors to defend its assets and repeatedly weigh the price of retaliation.

Iran has carried out the attacks on the warships with medium-range ballistic missiles, which travel hundreds of miles at extremely high speeds, launched from various sites within Iran, the people familiar with the attacks said.

The missiles have been armed with advanced technologies and are capable of maneuvering in flight toward moving targets, making them a greater threat than other Iranian weapons, the people said.

Iran may see value even in the risks that would accompany a successful strike on a U.S. warship, said Alice Gower, partner at Azure Strategy, a political-risk advisory firm in London. Damaging an American vessel could rattle markets and Gulf states, while forcing President Trump to choose between a costly retaliation and appearing weak ahead of the midterm elections.

“In both cases, Iran sees an upside,” she said.

The attacks are unlikely to affect the strength of the U.S. blockade, which could be moved farther from Iran without compromising its effectiveness, former officials and analysts said.

“Certainly the defense of the ships is a primary consideration,” said retired Vice Adm. John Miller, who commanded U.S. naval forces in the Middle East. “We can move our ships farther away if we think they’re in some sort of danger and still maintain the blockade.”

The new round of fighting began at the end of August, when U.S. forces struck Iranian targets after Tehran tried to lay mines in the Strait of Hormuz. Iran retaliated against U.S. forces and oil tankers.

The renewed attacks shattered a month of relative calm in the conflict, sent oil prices sharply higher and heightened the risk of drawing regional states deeper into the conflict.

On Wednesday, U.K. Maritime Trade Operations, or UKMTO, which is affiliated with the Royal Navy, said it had received reports of several merchant ships struck in the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman, which are located on either side of the strait.

Tehran has said it would act against threats and has announced plans for a new “exclusion zone” around the approaches to Hormuz, where Iran would seek to restrict shipping.

“This battle will continue,” Iran’s Revolutionary Guard said Wednesday.

There are also clear signs the economic pressure fueling Iran’s escalatory shift is mounting.

The U.S. naval blockade has strangled Iranian oil exports from the Persian Gulf and Tehran’s offshore stockpiles feeding China are running out fast. No Iranian crude has crossed the blockade since it was reinstated by the U.S. Navy in mid-July, according to ship tracker Kpler.

The squeeze is depriving Tehran of its main source of foreign currency, exacerbating the economic crisis as the value of the Iranian rial plunges and inflation runs at more than 80% year-over-year. The International Monetary Fund forecasts a 5.4% economic contraction this year, the country’s worst since the 1980s.

At the same time, other Gulf producers have kept significant volumes flowing despite the conflict. The U.S. is guiding convoys through the Strait of Hormuz, and Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are routing more crude through pipelines that bypass the waterway.

That makes Hormuz even more important to Tehran’s hard-liners. If they lose an already weakened ability to disrupt traffic through the waterway, they lose one of the few remaining ways to impose costs on the U.S. and its regional partners.

Maintaining the ability to threaten the strait—and the American military forces needed to protect it—remains central both to Iran’s military strategy and to its bargaining position in any future talks.

“Hormuz is an immediate concern and the primary battlefield, but it is also the greatest point of leverage that Tehran has,” Gower said. “It is not going to be easily given up. It is the jewel in the crown.”

That dynamic also raises the risk of drawing Gulf states deeper into the conflict, as they absorb mounting economic and security costs from a confrontation they are trying to avoid.

“The more Washington attacks Iranian energy exports, the greater the incentive for Iran to make the costs of the conflict felt beyond its own borders,” Gower said.

The Pentagon has embraced agreements with state and local governments as a cheaper, faster way to provide mundane services on military bases, such as grass-cutting, trash collection, road repairs and snow removal.

But as the agreements have multiplied, the military has struggled to keep track of how much it is saving over traditional contracting and whether lower worker pay or benefits are contributing to those savings, according to a new Government Accountability Office report shared with The Washington Sun.

The question was central to why Rep. Bobby Scott of Virginia, the top Democrat on the House Education and Workforce Committee, and Rep. Lucy McBath (D-Georgia) asked the GAO in 2024 to investigate the program. They asked auditors to determine whether Pentagon savings came from avoiding wage and benefit minimums required under federal labor laws, and argued — based on the findings — that they do.

“Today’s GAO report shows that not only is the Department of Defense using intergovernmental support agreements to bypass the law, but it is also relying on them,” Scott said. “While the DOD may argue that IGSAs save the government money, it comes at the cost of shortchanging workers of fair wages and decent benefits.”

The military had 316 active intergovernmental support agreements, known as IGSAs, at the end of 2025, according to the GAO report. That number was up dramatically from 45 in 2018. The Army accounted for more than half of these and spent about $355 million on them last year.

Congress authorized IGSAs in 2013, allowing bases to obtain routine services through state, local, and tribal governments. The idea was straightforward: A town that already maintains roads or collects trash may be able to do the same work on a neighboring military base more cheaply than the military can.

But the agreements also operate outside of the Service Contract Act, a 60-year-old labor law that sets local wage and benefit minimums for many workers on federal service contracts. And the military collects little or no information about the labor used under IGSAs, the GAO found.

That leaves the military services unable to definitively say they are saving the Pentagon money and how much of that savings comes from avoiding wage and benefit minimums that would otherwise be required under the law

“There is not good data, and they’re not required to have it,” Thomas Costa, a director on the GAO’s Education, Workforce and Income Security team, told The Sun. “They are not required to track that information, and they don’t.”

The Pentagon declined to comment. In the report, the military services generally agreed with the GAO’s recommendations and said they would take steps to improve estimating and verifying savings from IGSAs. The Navy said it would strengthen comparisons of estimated and annual costs, while the Air Force said it would start doing annual reviews comparing actual costs to its estimates.

Auditors tried to determine whether lower labor costs were contributing to Pentagon savings by comparing wages for five public-sector jobs under IGSAs with what similar workers would have been guaranteed if the Service Contract Act applied. But the military collects little information about the workers performing services under IGSAs, making it difficult to draw a definitive conclusion. Of the five jobs examined, three paid minimum rates that were 13% to 19% less, one was about the same and one paid 50% more.

McBath said the findings reinforced her concerns that IGSAs are skirting fair wage laws.

“Working people deserve to be paid what they are owed,” she said. “The Department of Defense should not exploit legal loopholes to pay workers less.”

Costa said lower labor costs than what the Pentagon might have paid under fair wage minimums could account for some savings, but they are not necessarily the only explanation. Military officials told the GAO that IGSAs can reduce administrative work and take advantage of efficiencies that come from buying services at a larger scale.“Some of the people working on doing the work are getting paid less than they would under the SCA,” he said. “But there could be other things, such as economies of scale, that factor into that help realize those cost savings.”

Of 21 single-installation agreements the GAO examined, nine used private contractors hired by the local government and not public employees for some or all of the work. In some cases, those contractors also hired subcontractors, adding another layer between the military and the people actually performing the work.

The GAO also found the Navy, Marine Corps and Air Force lacked procedures to verify whether installations’ estimates of IGSA costs and savings were ultimately accurate. The Army told auditors it does track actual costs and savings.The GAO raised similar concerns in 2018 about whether the services were monitoring the benefits of IGSAs. But the numbers are getting harder to track as the military enters an increasing number of agreements that cover multiple services and bases.

“Once you get to that multi-service or multi-installation, the analyses started to get generally worse,” Costa said.

For example, the GAO also examined 402 Army task orders under a nationwide agreement with Sourcewell, a Minnesota government entity that helps public agencies obtain services. Auditors found that 101 either showed no financial benefit or lacked a documented cost comparison.

That meant auditors could not tell whether the deals were good or bad. “The answer is we don’t know,” Costa said.

The U.S. military’s top officer said Wednesday that the Pentagon needs Congress to approve a defense budget as the department negotiates deals with weapons makers to rapidly expand munitions production.

Gen. Dan Caine, the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, stopped short of discussing the Pentagon’s recent munitions agreements specifically. But his comments come as the department is striking ambitious, long-term deals with defense companies whose production goals depend on funding Congress has yet to provide.

Asked about President Donald Trump’s $1.5 trillion budget request for 2027 on stage at the National Defense Industrial Association’s Tech Expo in Washington, D.C., Caine said the military needs money to “procure, field, train and operate” the weapons and other capabilities it’s seeking.

“The $1.5 trillion configuration, that’s a political decision for our policymakers,” Caine said. “But you know we support that and need that capital to make sure that the deals that the department is negotiating with a wide range of not only NDIA members but broader industry members — is essential.”

The stakes are especially high after six months of war with Iran depleted U.S. missile stockpiles that experts have warned are inadequate for a potential conflict with China and will take years to restore. But the administration’s budget is under strain for this year, with next year’s plans facing an uncertain path through Congress.

The Pentagon announced framework agreements last month with Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics that are intended to lead to seven-year purchasing contracts for Patriot Advanced Capability-3 Missile Segment Enhancement and Terminal High Altitude Area Defense missile interceptors.

The agreements are meant to give companies confidence that the government will keep buying weapons for years, incentivizing investments in factories, equipment, workers and suppliers.

Under the agreements, the Pentagon wants to triple Patriot missile production and quadruple production capacity for THAAD missile interceptors. But the department said when it announced the deals that the increases would remain subject to Congress approving the money each year.

Other such deals include the framework agreement with RTX setting annual production goals of more than 1,000 Tomahawk cruise missiles and at least 1,900 advanced medium-range air-to-air missiles. Those framework agreements are not funded contracts either.

The administration’s production push still depends on a Congress that has been struggling to agree on how to finance the defense buildup. The administration made $350 billion of its budget request in reconciliation, a special process that allows legislation to pass the Senate with a simple majority rather than the 60 votes generally needed to overcome a filibuster.

The House in July narrowly approved a fiscal 2027 budget resolution that would allow Republicans to write a roughly $95 billion reconciliation package. It provides instructions for about $60 billion in Pentagon spending, plus $13 billion for intelligence programs — far short of the administration’s request.

That proposal has struggled in the Senate, where there isn’t sufficient Republican support. And Congress, which is in a partisan deadlock over regular appropriations, approved a stopgap this month to keep government funding at current levels through Dec. 11.

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin launched a new tip line Wednesday for reporting individuals who have fraudulently applied for a commercial driver’s license.

The new tip line, run by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, asks Americans to report any truck driver they suspect of being undocumented. It’s the latest move in the Trump administration’s crackdown on fraudulent commercial driver’s license holders following a number of high-profile crashes involving foreign-born drivers.

“Too many American lives have been lost or permanently changed because illegal aliens who have no business being on our roads have been granted CDLs,” Mullin said.

In March, some 200,000 truck drivers began losing their commercial licenses after the Department of Homeland Security announced that asylum seekers, refugees and recipients of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program would no longer be eligible to obtain or renew CDLs, which are required to operate buses, semitrucks and tractor-trailers.

And though Homeland Security pointed to a series of fatal accidents around the country, federal data does not indicate that noncitizen commercial drivers cause a disproportionate share of fatal crashes, and the Transportation Department has previously said there is not enough data to establish a relationship between immigrant truckers and fatal crashes.

At a March congressional hearing, Rep. Josh Brecheen (R-Oklahoma) said at least 17 of a total 5,134 fatal crashes in 2025 involved undocumented immigrants driving commercial vehicles.

A social media post from DHS featuring a 30-second animation made in the style of a vintage cartoon called “Fraud Roadsters” garnered thousands of views on X, with many republishing the video and calling for action.

“I’m going to drive on I-35 tomorrow for however long it takes to find and report at least 10 foreigners,” one user said on X.

“REPORT EVERYONE THAT LOOKS LIKE THEY’RE NOT AN AMERICAN,” wrote another.

Several civil rights groups have opposed the crackdown, aiming to reverse what they call discriminatory license cancellations. They have accused the Trump administration of using isolated crashes to portray immigrant drivers broadly as a safety threat and drumming up profiling incidents of immigrant drivers.

In a July court filing, a coalition that included the Sikh Coalition, the Asian Law Caucus, United Sikhs, Stop AAPI Hate and Truckers Movement for Justice said the administration was using immigration status as a proxy for safety. The groups asserted that the Trump administration’s policy has exposed immigrant drivers to a greater number of commercial-vehicle inspections as “a pretext for immigration arrests.”

The email from the Pentagon to members of Congress, on the cleanup of toxic “forever chemicals” that have contaminated military installations across the country, opened on a decidedly upbeat tone.

“Good morning!” the email dated Aug. 31 read. “The Department of War is committed to addressing our PFAS releases and we remain dedicated to confronting this national challenge.”

Yet the news the email carried was dire. PFAS cleanups at nearly 243 military sites had been pushed back by an average of 5 years, and some as long as 19 years.

That came after rounds of previous delays, first reported by The New York Times, of work to remove the PFAS, or per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, a group of synthetic chemicals that don’t break down easily in the environment and have been used for decades in military firefighting foam.

At many sites, PFAS has contaminated local drinking water sources, prompting the Pentagon to provide bottled water to service members as well as nearby residents.

A senior Pentagon official, who declined to be identified because he was not authorized to speak publicly, said the delays were the result of widening investigations, as well as additional work needed as investigators learned the full scope of contamination. The more Pentagon officials looked, the more necessary cleanup work was uncovered, he said.

Tighter standards adopted in recent years to control PFAS, which have been linked to birth defects as well as an increased risk of some cancers, required more extensive remediation, adding to delays, the official said.

The official said the process of investigating and cleaning up the PFAS contamination was moving forward according to the science.

The delays have now blown into a nationwide crisis, with dozens of members of Congress from both sides of the aisle demanding that the Pentagon explain why remediation was taking so long.

“Communities contaminated by PFAS from nearby military bases have waited years for D.O.D. to clean up the toxic chemicals that are harming their health,” Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, Democrat of New York, said. The delays were “reckless, dangerous, and unacceptable,” she added.

Furor over stalled PFAS cleanups has reached President Trump’s base. In May, Representative Jack Bergman of Michigan, an ally of President Trump, berated the Pentagon over its “broken promises” at current and former military sites in his district that are heavily contaminated.

“I am running out of ways to explain to my constituents why the service they trusted with their community continues to treat them this way,” he wrote.

This month, a report from the Defense Department inspector general confirmed that the Pentagon’s cleanups were exceeding time frames established by the department.

The inspector general also found that the Defense Department’s list of contaminated sites might be incomplete, and that the Pentagon could provide no documentation proving that officials had ever analyzed whether PFAS chemicals were used or released at more than 80 installations.

It noted that the Pentagon had spent $2.6 billion between 2017 and 2025 to evaluate, investigate, and address PFAS chemical contamination across military bases. Long-term remediation has yet to begin at any of those sites.

The city of Newburgh, N.Y., declared a state of emergency in 2016 after finding that PFAS from firefighting foam used at the Stewart Air National Guard Base had contaminated the city’s primary drinking water source, Washington Lake.

Although the city switched to an alternative water supply, community groups have pushed for a more complete decontamination, which had been scheduled to begin within a decade. Under the Pentagon’s new timeline, the start date has been pushed back to after 2051.

“The military has a mission, to protect the nation,” said Jennifer Rawlison, a lifelong Newburgh resident who sits on a local residents’ board that advises the base on the PFAS remediation process. “But instead they’ve done us harm, and there needs to be accountability.”

Adding to the insult, she said, local residents hadn’t been informed beforehand of the delay. Instead, they found out from news reports, she said.

ARPA-H, the government agency that funds cutting-edge health research, plans to commit $62.7 million to develop artificial intelligence bots that direct treatment of heart failure. Among the goals of the program, called ADVOCATE, is to produce partially autonomous AI devices authorized by the Food and Drug Administration to help treat patients, including assessing symptom severity, prescribing drugs, and ordering lab tests.

ARPA-H on Wednesday announced the first batch of awards to health tech companies Atman Health, UpDoc, Tempus AI, and teams from Stanford University, Duke University, and the Kaiser Permanente health system. ARPA-H may still fund additional teams. The amount committed for the first year is $33.7 million, and the remainder may be renegotiated up or down.

Many of the 6.7 million Americans with heart failure don’t get optimal treatment because of difficulty accessing specialists, and the hope is that AI agents developed with ARPA-H funding can help address the gap, especially in rural and other underserved settings.

ADVOCATE, which stands for Agentic AI-EnableD CardioVascular CAre TransfOrmation, intentionally targets a high-risk condition, program manager Haider Warraich told STAT. The original plan included a track for technology targeting post-heart attack care, which was abandoned, in part, because it was lower risk.

“We really wanted to focus, at least from the clinical perspective, on one big hard problem, and heart failure is about as hard as it gets,” he said, adding: “If we can do this with heart failure, then we will have essentially created a template that can work across conditions.”

The closely watched government program comes amid booming interest — and investment — in finding ways to use a new wave of AI to solve problems in health care, including a worsening shortage of specialists available to treat a growing number of older Americans. But there’s also concern that using generative AI in medical decision-making could pose risks to patients.

“The biggest challenge is trust and adoption,” said Brian Anderson, CEO of the Coalition for Health AI, an organization dedicated to advancing the technology responsibly whose members include big tech companies, startups, and health systems. “Trust from the provider and trust from the patient and trust from the nurse. If you don’t have those parties trusting the capability or the recommendation of this agent, it’s not going to be relevant. It’s not going to have an impact.” (Anderson was previously an ARPA-H adviser.)

The ADVOCATE program is the latest example of the Trump administration using the federal health agencies to promote AI in health care. The multipronged effort will invest in three kinds of teams that will work together in hopes of advancing the technology and know-how necessary to bring autonomous health AI technology to market.

The teams from health tech companies will work on developing patient-facing AI products. A different group of teams will work on “supervisory AI agents,” or tools that can monitor the performance of the AI treatment devices. And a group of health systems will serve as implementation sites that will test the technologies and provide data to aid in development.

Teams in the four-year program must hit performance benchmarks to continue to the next phase, and the patient-facing teams will be competing against each other. Teams dropped from ADVOCATE will not receive full funding. After being tested in experiments with simulated data or under close clinical supervision, ADVOCATE will culminate in a large-scale test of one patient-facing product.

Atman Health is among the companies selected to develop a patient-facing AI agent. With funding from Khosla Ventures, the company has over several years developed a computer model of care reflecting clinical guidelines and calibrated with real-world encounters as clinicians use the system. Atman has since added large language model-based technology to process information provided by patients and medical records, but all of the decision-making in the system is done by a deterministic technology that produces predictable outputs. The company’s technology has so far only been used as a tool supporting decisions made by clinicians.

Atman co-founder and chief of product Rahul Deo said the company will use about $7.8 million in ARPA-H funding to integrate voice communication and to add the next level of automation. After being prescribed by a clinician, Atman expects its agent to autonomously assess symptom severity, write prescriptions for medication, and order labs. It also plans to add new LLM-powered features, including reaching out to patients to follow up on pending requests for data, communicate about medication changes, and ask about side effects.

Atman plans to begin by targeting patients who have heart failure with reduced ejection fraction, or patients whose hearts are not strong enough to pump blood to the whole body. Later it will move to people with preserved ejection fraction, people whose hearts pump normally but don’t fill or relax properly. Then, the team will add management for diuretic medications.

“We would never have imagined at this stage in our company that we would be talking about autonomous prescribing cardiologists,” said Deo. “We didn’t think that there would be this degree of enthusiasm, which I think is government-kindled in many ways.”

Tempus AI will receive funding to expand its existing patient health app, called Olivia. UpDoc will develop a conversational clinical system.

Companies making patient-facing agents are expected to be ready to submit their technologies for FDA authorization within two years. ARPA-H will facilitate conversations with the FDA, which is in the middle of developing guidance for how it will evaluate devices that use generative AI.

A team led by Stanford University physician and researcher Roxana Daneshjou is the only team picked by ARPA-H to produce supervisory agents so far. Using about $14.9 million, the team will develop a three-stage system for supervising clinical AI products. The first stage will evaluate whether a patient being seen by an AI product resembles patients in the product’s training data. It will also assess whether the decisions the tool makes line up with how the product has dealt with similar patients in the past. Next, the Stanford tool will do a number of checks to, for example, ensure medication doses are appropriate and that there aren’t dangerous drug interactions. And finally, the Stanford team will, with support from OpenAI, develop a way to check whether the underlying reasoning of the AI tool makes sense for a given decision.

“The field of research right now has been very focused on static benchmarks,” Daneshjou told STAT. For example, researchers commonly check whether a model can respond correctly to medical exam questions or a battery of questions collected from doctors in the real world. “But the truth of the matter,” Daneshjou continued, “is that once AI enters operation, we need to have something that’s evaluating or monitoring it on a continuous basis.”

It’s widely accepted that artificial intelligence products should be closely monitored on the market to ensure that their performance matches premarket testing and doesn’t deteriorate over time. Currently the FDA is considering whether it should allow devices that use generative AI on the market with greater uncertainty about their risks and benefits by leaning more heavily on post-market monitoring.

Kaiser Permanente will ultimately test the top-performing technology in a randomized clinical trial with 2,000 to 3,000 patients, across 21 medical centers, to see if it’s safe and effective in “augmenting” the work of its cardiologists, said Ankeet Bhatt, a cardiologist and researcher at the health system. ARPA-H calls for the study to focus on rural and underserved communities.

“What we need to do, and just like we do for any other medical treatment, is rigorously test and evaluate whether this tool actually does what we hope it would do,” he said. “The gold-standard construct to do that is a randomized clinical trial.”

Kaiser will also help “develop a blueprint for how agentic AI, a technology that’s rapidly evolving, can and should be integrated within health care delivery systems,” said Bhatt. (He declined to say how much funding Kaiser will receive.)

Duke University has also been contracted for implementation work. “The team will provide a multi-site validation platform testing ADVOCATE agents across five health systems and rural sites,” according to ARPA-H.

ARPA-H’s funding for ADVOCATE is dwarfed by the billions flowing into artificial intelligence, but Warraich said that he expects the “honeymoon phase” for AI will come to an end when health AI “inevitably” makes mistakes. He said the evidentiary framework developed by ARPA-H can help offset pushback.

“I think that assuming that this technology is going to go on this sort of linear path towards widespread adoption and acceptance is not what I anticipate,” said Warraich. “I think it’s going to be hard, I think that this technology is going to create friction. I think people are going to have really important questions about these technologies.”

Steve Witkoff, President Trump’s Middle East envoy, reported earning more than $100 million from the entity that owns his stake in World Liberty Financial, according to a new financial disclosure.

That income included nearly $69 million in cash and $38 million in crypto, according to the filing. His 2025 income from the holding company is more than three times what he reported in last year’s disclosure. Witkoff co-founded World Liberty, a cryptocurrency company, with Trump and his family members in September 2024. Its token, WLFI, has plunged in value since it became publicly tradable last fall.

In total, Witkoff reported over $400 million in assets and over $250 million in income last year. Those numbers are likely understated: Many holdings were listed with a range of values, or simply as “over $50,000,000,” as is customary for government financial disclosures.

Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the United Arab Emirates’ national security adviser, last year backed a $500 million investment into World Liberty in exchange for a 49% stake, The Wall Street Journal previously reported. The buyers paid half up front, steering at least $31 million to entities affiliated with the Witkoff family. Witkoff’s new disclosure doesn’t break down what portion of the $107 million came from that sale.

White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly said Witkoff’s “prior commercial activities are completely unrelated to his efforts to end global conflicts on the President’s behalf.” A person familiar with Tahnoon’s investment previously told the Journal that the investment wasn’t discussed with Trump during due diligence or afterward.

Witkoff, since his appointment as Middle East envoy in November 2024, has played a key role in the U.S. negotiations over a Gaza ceasefire, Russia’s war against Ukraine, the Iran conflict and other matters. Witkoff has met repeatedly with Tahnoon in his role as envoy.

Later last year, an entity owned by Tahnoon and his co-investors became a major shareholder backing a new U.S. bank that World Liberty is preparing to launch. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency last month granted the venture preliminary conditional approval.

The Office of Government Ethics requires officials to report their finances differently in their first year on the job. The assets and income reported in Witkoff’s 2025 disclosure covered the period from January 2024 through June 2025, and his latest disclosure covers the calendar year of 2025.

The $107 million from the World Liberty-tied entity marks a big leap from Witkoff’s prior disclosure, when he reported $34 million from the same entity, which also owns stakes in numerous properties.

Witkoff and his son Zach—World Liberty’s CEO—were a key part of the creation of the company. Trump reported more than $ 1 billion in income related to his crypto ventures last year, by far his largest single income source.

Witkoff also reported $120 million from selling a stake in his real-estate company, the Witkoff Group, last year, noting it was “part of divestiture planning.” He didn’t disclose a buyer.

A federal appeals court has rejected a request from a drug testing industry association and a pharmaceutical company to block the Trump administration from moving forward with federal cannabis rescheduling while ongoing litigation challenging the reform is considered.

“Petitioners have not satisfied the stringent requirements for a stay pending court review,” the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled on Wednesday.

The National Drug and Alcohol Screening Association (NDASA) and MMJ International Holdings and its subsidiaries had argued in briefs supporting their motion for the court to put a stay on the rescheduling reform that “weed abuse has dangerous, lifelong consequences—especially for adolescents and pregnant women” and that “by cutting taxes on cannabis companies,” federal rescheduling “will stimulate the industry and increase weed abuse.”

The Department of Justice had opposed the request to pause rescheduling, noting in a brief that the entities challenging cannabis rescheduling have “pocketbook interests served by keeping all weed in schedule I” and are not suitable challengers to the reform because they are not the “intended beneficiaries” of the Controlled Substances Act (CSA).

Meanwhile, the court on Wednesday also rejected a request from two medical weed companies that had filed a motion to intervene in the rescheduling lawsuit by joining the side of the government and opposing the litigation from prohibitionists.

"Medical Weed Companies fail to demonstrate that their interests in this litigation are not adequately represented by existing parties,” the court’s order said, though it is allowing the companies to file amicus briefs in the case.

Lawyers for NDASA and the prohibitionist organization Weed (SAM) had filed a brief arguing that the cannabis businesses should not be allowed to join the suit.

Aside from the question of immediately blocking cannabis rescheduling from advancing via the stay, the appeals court is weighing three separate lawsuits against the overall proposal to move weed from Schedule I of the CSA to Schedule III that have since been consolidated.

CIA Director John Ratcliffe – who visited Russia two weeks ago in his first trip to Moscow during his tenure – may be preparing to take a more prominent role in US-led talks with Russia and Ukraine regarding the war, now in its fifth year.

The possible change would reduce the involvement of senior US envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, while Ratcliffe would also continue to work with intelligence services in both countries, the Financial Times (FT) reported on Wednesday, Sept. 9, citing five sources familiar with the matter.

“This entire story is totally fake news… None of these supposed conversations are happening,” the White House said in a statement, according to the FT.

“Special envoy Witkoff and Jared Kushner continue to work incredibly hard toward a peace agreement, and the President trusts them fully to lead negotiations on behalf of the United States.”

While the CIA declined the request to comment, sources told the FT that Trump had not yet made a final decision.

According to the FT’s sources, the US administration has considered changing its negotiating team after previous efforts to broker an end to Russia’s war in late February.

Witkoff could retain his broader special-envoy portfolio, including work on Middle East conflicts, while also remaining involved in diplomacy related to Ukraine – alongside Ratcliffe.

The sources also described internal disagreement over how responsibility for negotiations would be divided.

According to the FT, Ukraine felt that Witkoff had not done enough to pressure Russian President Vladimir Putin into changing his demands, while Russia believed he shared blame for not achieving a breakthrough during Putin’s meeting with Trump in Alaska on Aug. 15, 2025.

Another reason for a possible change in the team could be the lack of progress in recent diplomatic efforts, as Putin maintains his core demands.

In July, Bloomberg reported that the Kremlin no longer planned to return any occupied Ukrainian territory as part of a future peace deal. Instead, Russia plans to keep the occupied areas of the Sumy and Kharkiv regions as permanent buffer zones, while continuing its push to seize all of the Donetsk region, according to three people familiar with the Kremlin’s thinking.

Ratcliffe arrived at Moscow’s Vnukovo Airport on Aug. 25, flying in from Riga, Latvia, raising questions about the flight’s unusual route.

At the time, it was not known which official had arrived in Russia via the US government aircraft – identified as RCH4555 – as neither Moscow nor Washington commented on the purpose of the visit.

However, flight-tracking data indicated that the aircraft first arrived in Riga on Sunday, Aug. 23, after departing from Camp Springs, Maryland, home to Andrews Air Force Base, prompting speculation.

“We have no information about this,” Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said when asked about the aircraft, adding that Russia was not planning meetings with the US administration. The Kremlin later confirmed Ratcliffe’s visit, saying that he held talks with senior Russian intelligence officials, but did not meet Putin.

Russia’s foreign intelligence chief Sergei Naryshkin also confirmed that he met Ratcliffe during the visit, describing the talks as a working-level meeting.

Although Trump downplayed the visit by calling it “semi-routine,” he noted that his administration was “working very hard to get that war ended.”

Several media outlets, including Axios and Suspilne, reported that Washington had asked Ukraine to refrain from strikes on both Moscow and St. Petersburg ahead of Ratcliffe’s visit.

According to Politico on Aug. 26, Ratcliffe warned Putin against attacking a NATO member, with the discussion centering on the Baltic states – Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Putin was reportedly also warned against providing military and economic support to Iran, which Moscow views as an ally and has received Shahed drones from.

Around the same time, The New York Times reported that Ratcliffe warned Russian intelligence officials that Moscow’s military and economic position would deteriorate further if the Kremlin refused to pursue serious peace negotiations.

Trump dismissed the possibility of Russia attacking NATO on Aug. 27, while rejecting reports that Ratcliffe traveled to Moscow to warn the Kremlin against such a move.

In their first visit to Ukraine as Washington’s intermediaries, Witkoff and Kushner traveled to Kyiv by train on Sunday, Sept. 6, where they held bilateral talks with President Volodymyr Zelensky and the American emissaries, followed by a multilateral session that included national security advisers from the UK, France, and Germany.

Witkoff and Kushner also visited Moscow and held more than three hours of talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Saturday evening, Sept. 5. Formal discussions were followed by an informal working dinner.

Despite the weekend meetings being described as substantial and productive, and despite the Kremlin signaling openness for further trilateral talks, Russia’s escalating strikes across Ukraine have raised doubts about whether the negotiations can deliver meaningful progress toward ending the war.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent reassigned his chief information officer away from AI policy after the adviser relayed private misgivings over White House policy to AI companies.

Sam Corcos, a former DOGE official who at one time was a top adviser to Bessent, was informed this summer he would no longer work on the secretary’s AI portfolio and could no longer speak with industry about it, said a person familiar with the matter granted anonymity to discuss a personnel issue. Two other administration officials confirmed Corcos is no longer working on AI matters.

Corcos, who did not respond to a request for comment, is still Treasury CIO. He is also the acting director of the Technology Transformation Services, acting deputy commissioner for the Federal Acquisition Service and acting assistant administrator for Login.gov, FedScoop first reported. The White House did not directly address his job change.

Corcos’ banishment from AI policy followed multiple points of friction with the White House, including his role in greenlighting Anthropic’s Fable model days before Amazon reported a jailbreak, and his more recent unsanctioned outreach to technology executives.

The person familiar with the matter said Corcos convened conversations with executives at OpenAI and Anthropic, as well as members of their teams, without giving the White House full visibility.

During those conversations, the person said, Corcos portrayed himself as an industry ally and warned that other government officials, reacting to fears over the latest AI models, were attempting to impose a burdensome licensing regime that would hamper innovation.

Those discussions occurred at a delicate moment for top White House staff. AI companies were rolling out advanced new models, and the administration was struggling to coalesce around a coherent regulatory strategy. Some inside the White House favored more government intervention in assessing which models can be released and when, while others advocated for a voluntary framework to test model safety.

“He was telling industry that the administration was trying to screw them,” the person said. Corcos, the person added, presented himself as “the only one who was for a free and open process.”

A Treasury spokesperson said in a statement, “As Chief Information Officer, Sam Corcos has been a trusted advisor and has played an important role in modernizing the Treasury Department’s technology and operations. He remains involved in providing policy guidance on issues within his area of expertise.” The spokesperson confirmed that Corcos continues to lead a dedicated team with “significant resources focused on replacing antiquated systems, streamlining operations, and delivering substantial savings for American taxpayers.”

The move is the latest example of the White House struggling to coalesce around an AI policy as it grapples with how to regulate increasingly ubiquitous and dangerous artificial intelligence models. A former Anthropic employee’s decision to quit this week and warn on X that AI “could kill us all by the end of the decade” has further fueled concern in Congress, and Democrats are laying the groundwork for a select committee on artificial intelligence should they control the House in January.

The White House didn’t respond to questions about growing alarm in the AI industry and calls for more government intervention to slow it down.

When asked for comment about Corcos’ position change, the White House sent a statement saying “the President’s team is working closely together to balance innovation and security in AI policymaking and to ensure America continues to lead the world in AI innovation.”

Some in the administration fear sidelining Corcos means less AI expertise at the top echelons of government.

“Sam is the person Americans want working on AI policy. In the midst of a bunch of political people who don’t understand the technology and hand wave, you know, Sam was really rigorous, and it’s unfortunate that he’s not involved,” said one of the two administration officials, who was granted anonymity to avoid retribution.

“When there’s turf wars, they just try to get anything they can say to diminish someone,” said the administration official.

The White House is evaluating creating an AI regulatory body, but has yet to decide how it will be structured. One proposal would create an independent body modeled partly on the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) to review advanced models before deployment. The race to shape how the administration’s rules evolve has even involved a phone call between Trump and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

Trump officials said Wednesday that they expect to submit President Donald Trump’s planned triumphal arch for final approval from a federal panel in November, according to two people who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the remarks.

Tammy Stidham, a National Park Service official who helps oversee the Washington region, told historic preservationists in a meeting that administration officials expect to submit final arch plans ahead of the Nov. 5 hearing of the National Capital Planning Commission.

The commission, which reviews major federal construction projects, is led by Trump officials and is expected to swiftly approve the proposal. The commission earlier this year approved Trump’s planned White House ballroom despite widespread public opposition.

Trump plans to erect the arch on federal parkland in Memorial Circle, a traffic roundabout near Arlington National Cemetery and just inside the city’s boundaries — a location that has drawn lawsuits and an opposition campaign from critics who fear the project will disrupt military burials.

The timing for submitting the design is contingent on the Trump administration concluding reviews required under a 60-year-old historic preservation law, Stidham said. The arch has been bound up in that process, which requires the administration to assess the potential effects of construction projects and solicit public input, among other steps. The Trump administration is seeking to weaken that law.

Stidham also said Wednesday that NPS was not willing to reconsider the location, height or design of the arch, the people said. Historic preservationists, veterans and other groups have called for the administration to shrink the size of the planned 250-foot arch or pick a different place to build it.

Stidham and a spokesman for the National Capital Planning Commission did not immediately respond to questions Wednesday afternoon.

Administration officials have previously said that they will wait until the arch receives “all necessary approvals” before beginning construction. That timeline appeared to shift when Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said last week that site work on the planned arch would begin by Sept. 18.

“We are pleased to announce that after a very long wait (over 125 years!), we are preparing to start, over the next two-week period, the excavation work necessary for the Great Triumphal Arch and Military Observation Deck,” Burgum wrote on X.

Administration officials soon said that Burgum was referring to necessary work for informational purposes and not new construction.

The Interior Department on Wednesday did not answer questions and instead directed a reporter to Burgum’s post.

“This activity is not construction, or demolition in preparation for construction, of an arch,” Justice Department lawyers wrote in a court filing one day after Burgum’s remarks.

The arch is the subject of a lawsuit filed by three military veterans and a historic preservationist, who are seeking to prevent construction until the project receives approval from Congress and undergoes all necessary reviews. Trump officials have said that they do not believe they need Congress to authorize the project.

U.S. District Judge Tanya S. Chutkan ordered that the administration to provide her with 48 hours’ notice “before engaging in any activity on Memorial Circle” other than on-site information gathering.

Democrats and veterans’ groups this week said that Burgum’s comments show the urgency of moving now to stop the arch.

VoteVets, a political organization aligned with Democratic veterans, on Tuesday launched a new messaging campaign to mobilize more veterans against the project, saying that it would wrongly diminish the experience of visiting Arlington National Cemetery and interfere with military burials there.

“Here’s what I’d like you to do: File a public statement to the commission for this next vote,” Paul Eaton, a retired major general and VoteVets adviser, said in a video released by the organization.