CAPITOL HILL DEMOCRATS are pressing the White House to pull out all the stops to gird the executive branch against Trump’s promised efforts to tear down federal agencies and restructure them to his liking, The Hill’s Mike Lillis reports. The lawmakers want Biden to get aggressive — and creative — with unilateral actions in the final weeks of his administration. The idea is both to protect the Democrats’ policy victories and to fortify the Justice Department, the intelligence agencies and other offices in Trump’s crosshairs.
“There’s a lot that the Biden administration can do, and I know that they’ve done some scenario planning,” said Rep. Jared Huffman (D-Calif.). “It would be a huge political malpractice for them not to anticipate this scenario and have some plans in place.”
Pressed by reporters on Air Force One, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Biden still believed that Trump posed a threat to democracy, a warning he repeated often during the campaign.
Democrats are quick to point out that, with Republicans in control of the House, no major legislative changes are likely in the lame-duck session. But they see Biden as a kind of preemptive firewall against Trump’s vows to claw back their legislative wins and gut large parts of the federal bureaucracy in a “deep state” purge designed to streamline government and root out his executive branch critics.
“I’ve been here long enough to know you can do some really good things in a lame duck,” said Rep. Richard Neal (Mass.), senior Democrat on the powerful Ways and Means Committee.
The New York Times: Using Project 2025 as a blueprint, the group Democracy Forward says it has prepared a raft of potential legal challenges to respond to the Trump-Vance agenda as soon as Day 1.
Intelligence: Tulsi Gabbard’s expressed support for national security leakers and her elevation of Russian-backed narratives are coming under renewed scrutiny after Trump nominated her to the highest intelligence post in the country. If confirmed as director of national intelligence, Gabbard would be responsible for wrangling the information collected across all 18 intelligence agencies. Gabbard’s nomination surprised many in the national security world, who expressed alarm over her past controversial comments and lack of high-level national security experience.
“What is unusual here is you’ve got somebody who’s had such a long and vociferous track record of saying things that are factually incorrect, that seem to give aid and comfort to U.S. adversaries, and that undermine the very people they should be representing at the principals committee,” said Jamil Jaffer, a former Republican House Intelligence Committee staffer and national security prosecutor. “That’s what makes her an unlikely candidate to be nominated for this job, and to be an unlikely candidate to be confirmed to this job.”
The Hill: Scott Bessent and Howard Lutnick, two prominent supporters of Trump’s campaign, have emerged as the front-runners to lead the Treasury Department during his second administration.
The New York Times: Republicans float Lara Trump, the president-elect’s daughter-in-law, to fill Rubio’s Senate seat in Florida.
Foreign policy: Trump’s emerging Middle East team appears poised to push U.S. foreign policy into even tighter accord with Israel’s far-right government. But his picks have dismayed liberal Jews and Arab Americans alike, including Arab and Muslim voters who sided with Trump as a rebuke of Biden’s Gaza policy. Among Trump’s choices is former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee (R) for U.S. ambassador to the country. Huckabee, an evangelical Christian, said that Israel has every right to annex the occupied West Bank, though much of the world treats Israeli settlements there as illegal under international law (The New York Times).
“There is no such thing as the West Bank — it’s Judea and Samaria,” Huckabee has said, using the biblical names for the territory. “There is no such thing as settlements — they’re communities, they’re neighborhoods, they’re cities. There is no such thing as an occupation.”
Then there’s Elon Musk: The tech billionaire met with Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations on Monday in New York and discussed how to defuse tensions between Iran and the United States, The New York Times reports. And when Trump spoke with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on the phone following the election, Musk joined the call.
“Elon won’t go home. I can’t get rid of him. Until I don’t like him,” Trump quipped to House Republicans this week.
Musk has been a near-constant presence in Trump’s orbit since the election, offering his input on staffing choices and even getting named to a role to propose massive cuts to government spending and regulations. Trump has shown an affection for the billionaire head of Tesla and SpaceX, frequently invoking him in speeches. But some Republicans have questioned how long Trump and Musk can happily coexist, writes The Hill’s Brett Samuels, particularly given Trump’s past frustration with those who take too much of the spotlight.
“Trump is not going to have another alpha,” said one source close to the transition. “I think Trump is going to tire of him.”