‘Stay tuned’: Mike Johnson hints budget plan vote could be delayed – live

The White House press pool will now be determined the White House press team, Leavitt says.

For decades, a group of DC-based journalists – the White House Correspondents’ Association – has long dictated which journalists get to ask questions of the president of the United States in these most intimate spaces. Not anymore.

I am proud to announce that we are giving power back to the people who read your papers, who watch your television shows and who listen to your radio stations.

She says legacy outlets will still be allowed to join and participate in the press pool, but the “privilege” will also be extended to “new voices” from “well-deserving outlets”.

The state department has ordered officials worldwide to deny visas to transgender athletes attempting to come to the US for sports competitions and to issue permanent visa bans against those who are deemed to misrepresent their birth sex on visa applications.

The 24 February state department cable obtained by the Guardian instructs visa officers to apply Immigration and Nationality Act section 212(a)(6)(C)(i) – the “permanent fraud bar” – against trans applicants. Unlike regular visa denials, this section triggers lifetime exclusion from the United States with limited waiver possibilities.

“In cases where applicants are suspected of misrepresenting their purpose of travel or sex, you should consider whether this misrepresentation is material such that it supports an ineligibility finding,” reads the directive from the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio.

The instructions come after Donald Trump issued an executive order on 5 February barring trans athletes from competing in women’s sports. While signing the order, the president directed the homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, to deny visas to “men attempting to fraudulently enter the United States while identifying themselves as women athletes” during the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles – which will take place under Trump’s watch.

More than 20 civil service employees resigned on Tuesday from Elon Musk’s so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge), saying they were refusing to use their technical expertise to “dismantle critical public services”, the Associated Press reports.

“We swore to serve the American people and uphold our oath to the constitution across presidential administrations,” the 21 staffers wrote in a joint resignation letter, a copy of which was obtained by the Associated Press. “However, it has become clear that we can no longer honor those commitments.”

The Senate on Tuesday confirmed Daniel Driscoll, an Iraq war veteran and adviser to JD Vance, as secretary of the army, Reuters reports.

The Senate voted 66 to 28 to confirm Driscoll, who served in the army for 3-1/2 years, including a deployment in Iraq from October 2009 to July 2010. Several Democrats joined Republicans in backing president Donald Trump’s nominee.

• House speaker Mike Johnson has appeared to give himself wiggle room on whether the budget resolution vote will happen tonight. House GOP leaders had been determined to move forward with the “one big, beautiful bill” to advance Trump’s agenda, but with such a slim majority and at least four Republicans still a “no” this morning, there is a chance it could all get delayed until Johnson is sure he has the numbers (assuming both parties are in full attendance, just one Republican “no” would sink it). He told reporters: “Stay tuned.”

• Elsewhere, some 40% of the federal contracts that the Trump administration claims to have canceled as part of its signature cost-cutting program aren’t expected to save the government any money, the administration’s own data shows. Elon Musk’s so-called “department of government efficiency” last week published an initial list of 1,125 contracts that it terminated in recent weeks across the federal government. Data published on Doge’s “wall of receipts” shows that more than one-third of the contract cancellations, 417 in all, are expected to yield no savings.

• More on Doge, responses to the Musk-directed email to government employees about what work they had accomplished in the last week will reportedly be fed into an artificial intelligence system to determine whether their jobs are necessary, three sources with knowledge of the system have told NBC News. The information will go into an LLM (Large Language Model), an advanced AI system that looks at huge amounts of text data to understand, generate and process human language, the sources said. The AI system will determine whether someone’s work is mission-critical or not.

• Musk repeated the threat that federal employees could be fired if they failed to reply to the email on Monday evening, writing on X, which he owns: “Subject to the discretion of the President, they will be given another chance. Failure to respond a second time will result in termination.” No further details were given.

• Over in Europe, the Kremlin appeared to contradict Trump’s assertion that Russia was open to European peacekeepers being deployed in Ukraine, and referred reporters to an earlier statement that such a move would be unacceptable to Moscow. Russia has repeatedly said it opposes having Nato troops on the ground in Ukraine, with foreign minister Sergei Lavrov saying last week that Moscow would view that as a “direct threat” to Russia’s sovereignty, even if the troops operated there under a different flag, Reuters reported. Meanwhile the Kremlin said Russia had lots of rare earth metal deposits and that it was open to doing deals to develop them after Vladimir Putin held out the possibility of such collaboration with the US.

Asked how he responds to (Republican) critics like Thomas Massie (which he so far hasn’t acknowledged at all) who argue that this budget resolution will make the deficit worse not better, Johnson says the objective is deficit neutrality, adding “if we can reduce the deficit, even better”.

He says while they are trying to find savings for taxpayers, they are also trying to “bend the curb on the debt”.

He’s also asked if he still plans to hold the vote today or will it be delayed. Johnson says “we’re planning to take up our budget resolution as early as today” adding he’ll be “working with all the members throughout the day to get to that”. He then appeared to hint it could get delayed:

There may be a vote tonight, there may not be – stay tuned.

He blames Democratic “outrageous demands” that are “unprecedented and probably unconstitutional” for “making individual appropriations bills almost impossible” to pass. So, in other words, he didn’t address that there are concerns coming from within the GOP regarding his budget plan and why some may vote against it.

The press conference is over now.