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house republicans
'Hidden From the American People,' GOP Moves to Give Trump Unchecked Trade War Powers
"They slipped in a little clause letting them escape ever having to debate or vote on Trump's tariffs," said one Democratic critic. "Isn't that clever?"
Mar 11, 2025
Republican leaders in the U.S. House of Representatives on Tuesday snuck language into a rule on the GOP's stopgap funding bill that a pair of Democratic lawmakers warned would "effectively surrender congressional power over raising taxes and tariffs on the American people" to President Donald Trump as he escalates his trade war against the world.
The Republican move would prevent any Democratic vote to challenge the "national emergency" being invoked by Trump to levy sweeping tariffs on countries including Canada, China, and Mexico—and, according to remarks by the president during his joint address to Congress earlier this month, any nation that does not lower barriers to trade with the United States by April 2.
Trump has used the International Emergency Economic Powers Act to slap tariffs on Canadian, Chinese, and Mexican exports—although some products have been granted exemptions. The 1977 law empowers the president to control international transactions by declaring a national emergency. However, the measure has never been invoked in order to impose tariffs.
While House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) and some of his GOP colleagues said Tuesday that they believe they can push through the six-month funding measure that would avert a government shutdown, Democratic lawmakers condemned the Republicans' process, in which they say they were not included.
"Guess what [Republicans] tucked into this rule, hoping that nobody would notice?" Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.), the ranking member of the House Rules Committee, said on the lower chamber's floor on Tuesday. "They slipped in a little clause letting them escape ever having to debate or vote on Trump's tariffs. Isn't that clever?"
McGovern: Guess what they tucked into this rule, hoping that nobody would notice? They did this after everyone went home. They slipped in a little clause
letting them escape from ever having to debate or vote on trump's tariffs. pic.twitter.com/qza0T1UdyT
— Acyn (@Acyn) March 11, 2025
Reps. Don Beyer (D-Va.) and Suzan DelBene (D-Wash.), both members of the House Ways and Means Subcommittee on Trade, said in a joint statement Tuesday that "every House Republican who votes 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."
"It speaks volumes that Republicans are sneaking this provision into a procedural measure hidden from the American people," added Beyer and DelBene, who together previously introduced the Prevent Tariff Abuse Act and the Congressional Trade Authority Act in a bid "to rein in Trump's abuses of tariff powers."
The lawmakers continued:
Today, Trump is further endangering the U.S. economy and hiking prices on the American people by increasing his destructive and pointless tariffs on Canada. There can be no doubt about how he will use the power Republicans are about to give him, and about the disastrous economic effects we have already seen from Trump's tariffs. While he babbles about making Canada the 51st state, your groceries and housing are getting more expensive and your retirement accounts are getting crushed—and House Republicans are supporting him every step of the way.
"The Constitution delegates authority setting tariffs, which are taxes, to Congress, and Congress retains the power to stop Trump from wrecking our economy," Beyer and DelBene added. "Yet House Republicans are choosing to surrender the power of their own votes to a reckless president, putting politics over the country and their constituents. We will continue urging our colleagues to come to their senses and save our economy from Trump's tariff chaos."
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House GOP Prepares to Make It Easier for Tech Giants—Like Musk's X—to Scam Consumers
"Allowing companies like Apple, PayPal, and X Money to avoid federal laws creates a blind spot for rampant financial abuse and fraud," said one watchdog group.
Mar 11, 2025
House Republicans on Tuesday are expected to join their Senate colleagues in advancing a resolution that would roll back a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau rule designed to protect the American public from scammers on digital payment platforms, a move that watchdog groups say would personally benefit President Donald Trump and billionaire Elon Musk.
The House resolution, led by Rep. Mike Flood (R-Neb.), targets a CFPB rule that was finalized shortly after the November election, in the waning days of the Biden administration. The CFPB said at the time that the rule would help ensure that companies offering digital payment services "follow federal law just like large banks, credit unions, and other financial institutions."
But the CFPB is now led by Project 2025 architect Russell Vought, who has halted virtually all of the agency's work while Musk's Department of Government Efficiency overtakes the bureau, looking to gut it from the inside.
With their effort to rescind the CFPB's digital payments rule, congressional Republicans are aiding Musk's assault on the CFPB and delivering a major win for his push into financial services with X Money. The Senate voted mostly along party lines to rescind the rule last week.
"This is a gift to Big Tech and likely the personal finances of Trump and Musk themselves," Tony Carrk, executive director of Accountable.US, said in a statement as the GOP-led House Financial Services Committee took up the resolution. "These companies process over 13 billion transactions a year, and millions of Americans are relying on them for safe and secure payments."
"Allowing companies like Apple, PayPal, and X Money to avoid federal laws creates a blind spot for rampant financial abuse and fraud," Carrk added.
Accountable.US noted in a recent report that both Trump and Musk stand to benefit financially from efforts to gut the CFPB and eliminate rules enacted under the Biden administration.
"Last year, Trump Media & Technology Group filed a trademark to create a broad financial services platform Truth.Fi," the group observed. "The products and services they said they would perform included the creation of a 'downloadable computer software' that serves as a 'digital wallet' to store and trade cryptocurrencies as well as a digital payments processing platform for purchases made with cryptocurrencies."
That initiative and Musk's X Money would fall under the purview of the rule that congressional Republicans are poised to roll back.
In a CNNappearance on Monday, former CFPB Director Rohit Chopra said that Musk and other powerful corporate executives are "fixated" on the consumer bureau because it is "responsible for monitoring all of those tech companies for how they're moving our money to protect against privacy errors and fraud."
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How the GOP Spending Bill Would 'Hand a Blank Check to Elon Musk'
One top Democrat called the seven-month continuing resolution a "power grab" that "further allows unchecked billionaire Elon Musk and President Trump to steal from the American people."
Mar 10, 2025
House Republicans this week are aiming to pass a seven-month government funding bill that Democrats said would effectively preempt any congressional effort to rein in billionaire Elon Musk as he works in concert with President Donald Trump to eviscerate federal agencies and fire government employees en masse.
The continuing resolution (CR), which would avert a looming shutdown and keep the government funded through September, calls for increasing military spending while cutting or declining to fund key programs involving rental assistance, public health, and other critical areas.
Politicoreported that the bill would boost military spending by roughly $6 billion and slash non-military funding by $13 billion.
"The bill, for instance, does not renew $40 million in fiscal 2024 funding for more than 70 programs that help children and families," the outlet noted. "Most had been requested by Democratic senators, but not all: Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith previously secured $250,000 for a group that works to prevent child abuse in her home state of Mississippi and GOP Sen. Lisa Murkowski requested more than $5 million to help fund homeless shelters and prevent child abuse in Alaska."
Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.), the top Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, said in a statement that the legislation "is a power grab for the White House and further allows unchecked billionaire Elon Musk and President Trump to steal from the American people."
DeLauro continued:
By essentially closing the book on negotiations for full-year funding bills that help the middle class and protect our national security, my colleagues on the other side of the aisle have handed their power to an unelected billionaire. Elon Musk and President Trump are stealing from the middle class, seniors, veterans, working people, small businesses, and farms to pay for tax breaks for billionaires and big corporations. They have made it harder for Americans to get their Social Security benefits; shut down the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which has saved American families $21 billion; fired 6,000 veterans and reportedly plan to make it harder for veterans to access benefits by firing an additional 80,000 VA employees; laid off hundreds of workers who build and maintain critical nuclear weapons; and shut down medical research labs. House Republicans' response: hand a blank check to Elon Musk.
Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), vice chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, echoed DeLauro's criticism of the Republican bill, calling it a "slush fund continuing resolution that would give Donald Trump and Elon Musk more power over federal spending—and more power to pick winners and losers, which threatens families in blue and red states alike."
"Instead of turning the keys over to the Trump administration with this bill," said Murray, "Congress should immediately pass a short-term CR to prevent a shutdown and finish work on bipartisan funding bills that invest in families, keep America safe, and ensure our constituents have a say in how federal funding is spent."
In a fact sheet released over the weekend, Murray's office noted that full-year government funding bills typically provide "scores of specific funding directives for key programs and priorities" that constrain the executive branch.
But under the GOP continuing resolution, the fact sheet observes, "hundreds of those congressional directives fall away," giving the Trump administration broad discretion to "reshape spending priorities, eliminate longstanding programs, pick winners and losers, and more."
"Under this CR, the Trump administration could—for example—decide not to spend funding previously allocated for combatting fentanyl, the SUPPORT Act, and other substance abuse and mental health programs, or specific NIH priorities like Alzheimer's disease and vaccine research—and instead steer funding to other priorities of its choosing," the document states. "It could also pick and choose which Military Construction, Army Corps, or transit improvement and expansion projects to fund without direction from Congress."
A similar fact sheet released by DeLauro warns that the CR "provides a blank check to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) in the amount of $4 billion, enabling Elon Musk to direct contracts to Starlink and SpaceX (companies owned by Musk) at a time when unvetted and unchecked SpaceX employees have burrowed in the FAA (the same Federal agency that regulates SpaceX), with no requirement for public transparency, fair competition, or congressional approval."
"This continuing resolution is a blank check for Elon Musk and creates more flexibility for him to steal from the middle class, seniors, veterans, working people, small businesses, and farmers to pay for tax breaks for billionaires," said DeLauro.
The Republican bill is expected to get a House vote as soon as Tuesday evening. In a post to his social media platform on Saturday, Trump praised the CR as "very good" and demanded lockstep unity from his party, which has willfully ceded the power of the purse in the opening weeks of the president's second White House term.
Trump's call for "no dissent" from Republicans stems from the party's narrow majorities in the House and Senate. In the latter chamber, the bill will need at least seven Democratic votes to pass.
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