The Republican-controlled U.S. House of Representatives voted on Tuesday to block the ability of Congress to quickly challenge tariffs imposed by President Donald Trump that have rattled financial markets.
The 216-214 vote, largely along party lines, delays lawmakers' ability for the rest of the year to force a vote that could revoke Trump's tariffs and immigration actions.
Trump has made a blitz of tariff announcements since taking office, upending relations with key trading partners, including Mexico and China. This week he has ramped up a trade war with Canada, sending markets reeling and prompting business leaders to warn of weakening consumer demand.
Trump has said the tariffs will correct unbalanced trade relations, bring jobs back to the country, and stop the flow of illegal narcotics from abroad.
Tuesday's vote effectively derails an effort to challenge Trump's Canada and Mexico tariffs, sponsored by Democratic Representative Suzan DelBene of Washington, which had been due to take place later this month.
"Every House Republican who voted for this measure is voting to give Trump expanded powers to raise taxes on American households through tariffs with full knowledge of how he is using those powers, and every Republican will own the economic consequences of that vote," DelBene and fellow Democrat, Representative Don Beyer from Virginia, said in a statement.
Rule changes governing the House voting processes in the majority's favor are a common affair on Capitol Hill.
"This is an appropriate balance of powers and we trust this White House to do the right thing, and I think that was the right vote and it was reflected in the vote count," House Speaker Mike Johnson said when asked by Reuters why he was comfortable giving more trade power to the executive branch.
The provision was tucked into a procedural vote related to the Republicans' six-month stopgap funding bill.
DelBene had sought to force a vote under the National Emergencies Act, which gives the president special powers in an emergency and was cited by Trump in his tariff actions. That law also allows for representatives to force a vote in the House within 15 days to revoke the president's emergency authority. The Senate would have to also pass the resolution for it to take effect.
But Tuesday's vote tweaks how the House will count calendar days for the remainder of 2025, effectively blocking a vote of this kind this year.
The voting change is the latest example of the legislative branch offloading its constitutional trade authority to the executive branch.
"The international emergency economic powers have not been used before to impose tariffs, and many members want to have a chance to weigh in," said Greta Peisch, former general counsel to the U.S. Trade Representative. "Without a fast-track voting process, they are unlikely to have an opportunity to do so."
President Donald Trump said on Tuesday he will label violence against Tesla dealerships domestic terrorism as he appeared with Tesla CEO Elon Musk to show support amid recent "Tesla Takedown" protests and the slump in the company's stock price.
Musk said Tesla would double its vehicle output in the United States in the next two years while speaking at the White House with Trump.
European buyers are unlikely to return to Russia's energy sector if sanctions are lifted, as the bloc has diversified its power mix with renewable energy and alternative gas suppliers, ministers and executives said at a conference in Houston.
Ukraine has agreed to accept a U.S. proposal for an immediate 30-day ceasefire and to take steps toward restoring durable peace after Russia's invasion, according to a joint U.S.-Ukraine statement on Tuesday.
The U.S. government is studying ways it could ease sanctions on Russia's energy sector as part of a broad plan to enable Washington to deliver swift relief if Moscow agrees to end the Ukraine war, Reuters reported last week.
"Do we really want to be dependent on energy from an aggressor like Russia? Obviously not," European Union (EU) Energy Commissioner Dan Jorgensen said during a panel discussion at the conference on Monday.
The bloc currently receives 13% of its natural gas from Russia, down from 45% in February 2022, owing to the fast deployment of renewable energy, Jorgensen added.
The European Commission put forward an Action Plan last month which will speed up permits for renewable energy projects, change how energy tariffs are set, and increase state aid for clean industries and more flexible power generation.
"We want to be independent of fossil fuels, especially from countries like Russia, for our security," Jorgensen said of the plan.
Solar generation provided 11% of the EU’s electricity mix in 2024, up from 9.3% in 2023, overtaking coal, according to energy think tank Ember. Coal-fired generation fell to less than 10% for the first time since Ember began collating those figures in 2011, according to data in January.
Gas-fired power production fell to a 15.7% share from 16.9% in 2023, according to Ember.
"My magic word in energy security is diversification," said Fatih Birol, executive director of the Paris-based International Energy Agency, on the CERAWeek panel alongside Jorgensen.
NEW MARKETS
While renewable sources are helping Europe shift away from fossil fuel power generation, new markets which emerged following Russia's invasion of Ukraine are likely here to stay.
"We have managed to change from Russian gas to other gas suppliers," Holger Lösch, deputy director general of the Federation of German Industries said in an interview.
"I think the truth is that Europe probably will try to diversify its gas supply further on," Lösch added.
In January, Venture Global Inc's Plaquemines LNG export plant in Louisiana exported more than half a million tonnes of LNG, all to Europe, LSEG, ship tracking data showed.
Europe has other options as well as U.S. LNG, including gas from the Middle East, North Africa and Azerbaijan Lösch said.
"I don't anticipate Europe going back to a place where they're buying significant amounts of energy from Russia. I think that was a lesson learned," Toby Rice, CEO of EQT said in an interview at the conference.
Market participants may be less keen to commit to staying weaned off Russian supplies if it would lead to cheaper energy, other executives warned.
"Why would we shoot ourselves in the foot by having the highest energy costs?" said Torbjorn Tornqvist in an interview, CEO of one of the world's largest oil traders, Gunvor.
A senior USAID official on Tuesdayordered the agency's remaining staff to report to their now-former headquarters in Washington DC for an "all day" group effort to destroy documents, many of which contain sensitive information,Politicoreports.
The materials marked for destruction include "classified safes and personnel documents" at the Ronald Reagan Building, according to an email sent by USAID's acting executive director, Erica Carr.
"Shred as many documents first, and reserve the burn bags for when the shredder becomes unavailable or needs a break," read the email instructing staff to label the burn bags with "SECRET" and "USAID/B/IO" (which stands for "bureau or independent office") in dark sharpie.
🚨🚨 THIS IS A 5-ALARM FIRE 🚨🚨 Right now, as we speak, today, USAID is shredding and burning the contents of the agency's classified safes -- the key information needed to reconstruct the history of USAID's weaponization both at home and abroad. THIS MUST BE STOPPED pic.twitter.com/G4uEuUY0yd
According to the report, the email did not provide any reasoning for the document destruction, however the building is currently being emptied out after mass layoffs, which may have disrupted the routine destruction of materials.
The effort also underscores the tumultuous way in which the Trump administration is dismantling an agency that once managed a $40 billion annual budget and had more than 10,000 staff around the world.
Efforts by Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency last month to access secure computer systems at USAID — including information about employees’ security clearances — triggered an uproar at the agency that prompted the administration to place two of the agency’s security staff on administrative leave. A DOGE spokesperson subsequently said that there was no improper access to classified material. -Politico
According to a former USAID staffer, "I’ve never seen something like this — en masse. Everyone with a safe is supposed to keep it up to date and destroy documents when they no longer need to be stored. Sometimes security will check your safe and tell you if you have to clean out old material."
Trump has a golden opportunity to stick it to the international freeloaders who've been riding America's coattails on medical innovation for far too long.
Last week, while unveiling his cabinet to a room full of governors, he threw down the gauntlet. With HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Dr. Oz, his pick for CMS, by his side, Trump zeroed in on a glaring injustice: "Why in the United States do we pay $1,300 for a drug... and in London they pay, literally, $200?" With his usual brashness, he didn't mince words: "Americans are being screwed, and it's no good."
The usual suspects—Senate Democrats like Sanders, Warren, and Wyden—wasted no time trying to "help." The day after Trump's inauguration, they sent him a letter begging him to keep the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), the Biden bill that imposed prescription drug price controls and used the Medicare savings to give away to wind, solar, and electric vehicles cronies.
They correctly spotlighted the problem of Americans paying far more than other countries, but their too-easy answer to this problem is to link U.S. drug prices to whatever socialist backwaters like Canada or France feel like paying. It's a full-on import of price-control lunacy.
This assumes drugmakers are just greedy villains gouging patients here while the rest of the world plays smart. Wrong. Americans are getting taken for a ride because we let other nations piggyback on our R&D bill. It costs a jaw-dropping $2.5 billion to bring a single drug to market. If there is no path to earn that back and a reasonable return on capital then new cures will not be developed. Instead of the rest of the world hitching a free ride, there would be no moving vehicle for anyone to latch onto.
Trump, unlike Biden, understands that you can't get the same number of new drugs developed if every government is imposing price controls. His instincts have always been spot-on: make the freeloaders pay up. For decades, other countries have muscled American drugmakers into dirt-cheap deals, leaving U.S. patients to foot the innovation bill. Time to flip the script. Trump's already got the playbook from his first term–he actually convinced Canada and Mexico to pay more for biotech drugs via a longer data exclusivity period in the original version of USMCA, before Nancy Pelosi forced him to take that provision out.
Or consider NATO, where he strong-armed allies into coughing up billions more for defense after years of mooching off America's military muscle. Critics clutched their pearls, but he got results. Those same freeloaders banked the savings from America's security umbrella to fund their cushy healthcare systems, systems that then turn around and lowball drug prices.
Trump is now using tariff threats to get Colombia, Mexico, and Canada to cooperate on border enforcement. Europe is slashing car tariffs to dodge a trade war. Why not add foreign drug price controls to the mix?
If Trump presses trading partners to shoulder more of the R&D burden, simple math kicks in: higher prices abroad, lower prices here. Pair that with deregulation of the FDA approval process that makes it so expensive to bring new drugs to market, and you've got an agenda that will deliver more new cures at lower prices for Americans. It's classic Trump: negotiate hard, win big, and make America not just great, but healthy again.
Phil Kerpen is the president of American Commitment and the Committee to Unleash Prosperity.
Jay Bhattacharya’s confirmation hearing in the Senate last week was as close as we may ever get to a formal surrender in the long war over Covid-19 pandemic policies. While some public-health officials, academics, and journalists continue todefendthe Covid restrictions and oppose Bhattacharya’s nomination to direct the National Institutes of Health, Democrats at the hearing unanimously abandoned the fight against his supposedly “fringe” ideas.
Bhattacharya, a Stanford professor of medicine and economics, had been a leading opponent of Covid measures supported by Democrats on the committee, including the Biden administration’s vaccine mandates for federal employees and for workers at private companies. One of the senators, Edward Markey of Massachusetts, had been so worried about the “dangerous” policies in Florida and other states that he advocated a national mask mandate in 2020 and introduced legislation to prod recalcitrant states. Last week, however, Markey and his Democratic colleagues studiously avoided discussing the mandates or any issue related to Covid. Pandemic? What pandemic?
Instead, they used their time to rail at Donald Trump and Elon Musk, leaving it to the committee’s Republicans to address the most consequential public-health edicts ever imposed on Americans. The Republican senators catalogued the costs of the lockdowns, the learning loss from school closures, and the ineffectiveness of the restrictions. They praised Bhattacharya for coauthoring the Great Barrington Declaration opposing lockdowns and school closures, and they thanked him for his court testimony opposing mask mandates for students. They criticized social media platforms’ censorship of his views and the smear campaign egged on by Anthony Fauci and the former NIH director, Francis Collins, who dismissed Bhattacharya and his coauthors as “fringe epidemiologists.”
“You showed incredible courage in speaking the truth about Covid-19 when much of the rest of the world stayed silent about it,” Indiana senator Jim Banks told Bhattacharya. “It’s remarkable to see that you’re nominated to be the head of the very institution whose leaders persecuted you.” Banks then asked him to define the role of the NIH director during a pandemic.
“The proper role of scientists in a pandemic is to answer basic questions that policymakers have about what the right policy should be,” Bhattacharya replied. “Our role isn’t to make decisions—to say you shouldn’t be saying goodbye to your grandfather as he’s dying in a hospital.” Instead of decreeing that schools close and people be vaccinated, he said, scientists should accurately describe the risks and benefits of these actions, so that citizens and their leaders can weigh the trade-offs. “Science should be an engine for freedom, for knowledge and freedom, not something that stands on top of society and says you must do this, this, and this, or else.”
That’s a stark contrast from “The Science” extolled by Fauci, Collins, and their acolytes in academia and the media. They proclaimed the necessity of unprecedented authoritarian measures and ostracized scientists who pointed to abundant evidence—from pre-2020 studies as well as data during the pandemic—that these measures were ineffective. They vastly exaggerated the risk of Covid to younger people while ignoring the enormous social, economic, and medical costs of the lockdowns. They justified vaccine mandates for workers, even ones with existing Covid immunity because of prior infection, by falsely claiming that the vaccinated would not spread the virus. Fauci summed up their attitude toward dissenters: “Attacks on me quite frankly are attacks on science.”
It would have been refreshing at the hearing if Democrats on the committee had apologized for the attacks on Bhattacharya—or at least acknowledged that they should have heeded him instead of Fauci. They ignored not only their mistakes but also the lessons of the pandemic. The Democrats repeatedly denounced the Trump administration’s initial budget cuts at NIH and demanded that Bhattacharya (who hadn’t been involved with the cuts) vow to restore every one of them. But if we learned anything from the pandemic, it was that the NIH and other federal public-health agencies have squandered vast sums of money.
Yes, the investment in Covid vaccine research was a notable success, but in other areas the agencies failed miserably. While researchers in other countries reported promising results treating Covid with inexpensive existing drugs (like dexamethasone), U.S. officials mostly ignored or actively discouraged these approaches while spending more than $160 million to develop remdesivir, a $3,000-per-dose antiviral drug with disappointing results. (A 2022 literature review concluded that it had “little or no effect” on mortality.)
European public-health agencies made plenty of mistakes during the pandemic, too, but at least they encouraged schools to reopen, while many in America remained closed. They also avoided some of the worst U.S. policies, like forcing toddlers to wear masks, mandating vaccines for adults with natural immunity, and recommending vaccines for healthy children facing essentially no risk from the virus. The panicked groupthink that ruled Washington was largely absent in Scandinavian countries, especially Sweden, which recorded one of Europe’s lowest rates of excess mortality during the pandemic while avoiding lockdowns and advising citizens not to wear masks.
Bhattacharya assured the Democratic senators that he would review the budget cuts and make sure that NIH provided researchers with necessary resources. But he also made clear that the agency needed to be reformed. “Over the last few years, top NIH officials oversaw a culture of cover-up, obfuscation, and a lack of tolerance for ideas that differ from theirs,” he said. “Dissent is the very essence of science. I’ll foster a culture where NIH leadership will actively encourage different perspectives and create an environment where scientists, including early career scientists and scientists that disagree with me, can express disagreement respectfully.”
The challenge facing Bhattacharya in Washington became especially clear two days after the hearing, when thousands of researchers and other protesters gathered near the Lincoln Memorial for a rally called “Stand Up for Science.” The disagreement was anything but respectful, as speakers took turns vilifying the new administration. One of them was Collins, who had just retired after directing NIH for 12 years. Like the Democratic senators at the confirmation hearing, he had nothing to say about the Covid mistakes: his and Fauci’s support for engineering dangerous viruses in laboratories, NIH funding for the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the suppression of the lab-leak theory, the harms caused by the lockdowns and school closures, the attacks Collins promoted against Bhattacharya and other dissidents. Oblivious to the dramatic decline of public trust in science, Collins hailed the NIH as “an institution with a stunningly positive track record.”
Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images
Worst of all, Collins pulled out a guitar and played an old folk melody featuring lyrics he’d written to celebrate the scientific researchers and bureaucrats funded by the federal government. The crowd sang along with him in the chorus: “This is a song for all the good people. We’re joined together by this noble dream.” It was painful to hear, but it did vividly capture what remains the attitude of the Washington public-health establishment: “good people” defending “The Science” against evil critics.
Bhattacharya’s confirmation can’t come soon enough.
Hopes for the release of detained Hong Kong media tycoon Jimmy Lai are higher following U.S. President Donald Trump's return to office, Lai's son said on Tuesday in Washington, where he and advocates plan to meet Trump administration officials.
Lai, the founder of the Apple Daily newspaper that was forced to close after a police raid and asset freeze in June 2021, has pleaded not guilty to two charges of conspiracy to collude with foreign forces, and a charge of conspiracy to publish seditious material.
China-imposed national security legislation in Hong Kong has been used to jail pro-democracy activists after violent street protests there in 2019. The United States and other foreign governments have criticized the law as a tool for authorities to clamp down on dissent.
Lai's case is a source of friction between Washington and Beijing, with Trump having said last year during his campaign for the presidency that he would "100%" get Lai out of China.
Sebastien Lai told reporters that even as his father's health declines in harsh, solitary confinement in Hong Kong, the pro-democracy advocate is still fighting for his beliefs at 77.
"President Trump was the first president of the United States that mentioned my father by name," Lai told reporters in Washington, adding that his father's cause had always received bipartisan support in the U.S.
"The short of it is, yes, we're a lot more hopeful," he said, when asked if his confidence had grown with Trump in the White House.
He said Lai's advocates had already met this week with State Department officials, and would meet with officials at the White House National Security Council.
The White House and State Department did not respond immediately to Reuters questions about the meetings.
China has described the claims about Lai's health as slanderous. China's embassy in Washington did not respond immediately to a request for comment.
