Good morning, Early Birds. And welcome to Washington to the Birds, who are in D.C. today to celebrate their Super Bowl win. Send tips to earlytips@washpost.com. Thanks for waking up with us.
In today’s edition … Congress is back in town … Corporate tax cuts on the chopping block … Canadians head to the polls … The Eagles are going to the White House … but first …
The big story
We’re soon coming up on the 100-day mark of President Donald Trump’s second term, and voters are not pleased. He has lower approval ratings than any other president 100 days in, according to a Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll.
Only 39 percent of American adults approve of Trump’s performance, while 55 percent disapprove. Specifically, 44 percent disapprove strongly. That is a dip from two months ago, when 45 percent approved of the president.
Much of the disapproval comes from his dramatic restructuring of the federal government and U.S. trade policy. None of Trump’s actions surveyed in the poll received majority support.
Elon Musk, the billionaire donor Trump tasked with slashing the federal government, has fared even worse in public opinion. The poll found that 57 percent of Americans disapprove of Musk’s work for Trump, with only 35 percent approving. It’s a decline in approval from February, when 49 percent disapproved and 34 percent approved.
Respondents were heavily opposed to reducing federal funding for medical research (77 percent) and freezing foreign nutrition aid for poor countries (62 percent) — both targets of cuts under the administration.
Dan Balz, Scott Clement and Emily Guskin break down the Trump poll, and Emily and Scott examine the Musk poll.
Welcome back, Congress
After two weeks in recess, Congress is coming back to Washington today on a turbocharged schedule. House Republicans want to pass Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” — the mammoth tax and spending cuts legislation — by their break starting the Friday before Memorial Day. That gives them only four weeks to get it done.
Expect a lot of public committee meetings this week to be occupied by the wonkier aspects of the legislation. But simmering in the background will be the much anticipated but yet to be publicly announced House Energy and Commerce Committee’s meeting, where lawmakers will hash out how to cut $880 billion from the federal deficit in programs under the committee’s jurisdiction.
The committee oversees health-care spending, and Democrats and independent assessors assert it will be impossible to cut that much money without slashing into a political third rail: Medicaid.
It’s leading to some tension among Republicans. Budget hard-liners are dead set on meeting the spending cut targets in the budget resolution Republicans passed this month. But many of the programs that could be cut to reach those targets have Republican support, including Medicaid. A dozen Republicans led by Reps. David G. Valadao (R-California) and Don Bacon (R-Nebraska) urged their leadership not to make cuts to the program. Republicans in districts with significant Medicaid participation have been warning the White House and congressional Republican leaders for months that any cuts could be politically ruinous.
House Republican leaders say they have no plans to hollow out the program that provides health care for low-income Americans, though they say there are still opportunities to make it more efficient by cutting participants who aren’t eligible.
Regardless of what Congress ends up doing, many Medicaid users have spoken out about the uncertainty, in states from Virginia to California to Ohio to Louisiana.
Republicans don’t need Democratic buy-in on the legislation because they plan to pass the package through reconciliation — the arcane procedure that lets them bypass the Senate filibuster. But Republicans have tiny majorities in both chambers, meaning they will need to have intra-caucus discipline to get it across.
Democrats, meanwhile, are hammering Republicans on the issue. Several have gone to Republican districts to paint GOP members as Medicaid cutters. (House Republicans’ main campaign organization called the attacks defamatory and threatened lawsuits, prompting Democrats to take down billboards in some districts.) House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-New York) held a sit-in on the Capitol steps Sunday to protest the Republican legislative plan with several other Democratic lawmakers, including Sen. Cory Booker (D-New Jersey).
“Budgets are more than just numbers in a spreadsheet — they are moral documents,” Booker said. “Republicans in Congress are proposing cuts that will take food from children, health care from the sick and dignity from those already struggling. It’s wrong.”
The ‘big, beautiful bill’
Hello, it’s Jacob Bogage from the economic policy desk with news on what’s in — or, I suppose, what’s missing from — Trump and Republicans’ massive tax, immigration and defense bill.
One of Trump’s earliest campaign promises on taxes appears to have died during negotiations. His proposal to lower the corporate tax rate is off the table for now, according to three people with knowledge of recent GOP bill-drafting sessions.
That’s surprising for a number of reasons:
- First, it’s not exactly, “Promises made, promises kept,” as Trump’s team likes to crow. And for a while, tax writers were considering raising the corporate rate to offset the cost of other Trump promises like no taxes on tips. For now, K Street fixtures seem to have pushed House tax writers off that mark. “There is a risk that some Republicans would go along with a bill that would raise the corporate rate. That’s something we would fight tooth and nail against,” Stephen Moore, an informal Trump economic adviser and economist at the Heritage Foundation, told me.
- Second, cutting the corporate rate isn’t all that expensive, especially if the GOP limits it to domestic manufacturers, as Trump has floated. The nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget scores it at $100 billion over 10 years on the low end of the cost spectrum. Here’s how that stacks up with Trump’s other wish-list items in a handy chart:
- Third, Republicans are leaning hard into the notion that this tax bill will pay for itself by stimulating economic growth. That is not how tax cuts work. At best, analyses have found, an extension could recoup maybe 20 percent of the multitrillion-dollar cost. The provisions that do get the biggest growth hit, though, are business tax cuts and breaks that incentivize new investment. So if the GOP wants this bill to be “pro-growth,” some lawmakers say Republicans need to look harder at business tax breaks, rather than for individuals.
- Fourth and finally, that economy Republicans want to grow — it has changed (read: shrunk) a lot in the past month because of Trump’s tariffs. “A lot of members have now realized with the backdrop of tariffs that this thing has to be as pro-growth as possible,” one person close to the tax bill told me. “The reality is, the ground has completely shifted in the past month in the economy, and to be raising taxes on businesses now, you’re out of your mind.”
Let’s see what this week cooks up in the tax world. Help me cover the “big, beautiful bill,” the IRS, DOGE and more. Follow me on Bluesky: @jacobbogage.bsky.social. And send secure news tips on Signal: jacobbogage.87.
On the world stage
The United States and Iran have been engaged in somewhat under-the-radar negotiations about Tehran’s nuclear program — a third round of talks was held over the weekend in Oman.
Susannah George and Nilo Tabrizy, writing from Dubai, made note of an interesting shift in the negotiations: “Iranian media coverage of nuclear talks between Washington and Tehran has been largely positive, reflecting a growing willingness among the Iranian elite to engage with the United States, with even conservative outlets spinning the negotiations as evidence of their country’s influence on the world stage.”
In an interview with Time magazine published last week, Trump said he was confident his administration would get a deal.
“I think that we’re going to make a deal with Iran. I think we’re going to make a deal with Iran. Nobody else could do that,” he said, adding that he would be open to meeting Iran’s president or supreme leader. But Trump also said he would “very willingly” go to war with Iran if no agreement is reached.
“If we don’t make a deal, I’ll be leading the pack,” he said.
There is a level of irony to these negotiations: Trump roundly lambasted the Obama administration’s deal with Iran during the 2016 campaign, calling it “one of the worst and most one-sided transactions the United States has ever entered into” when he withdrew from it in 2018. Democrats have certainly not missed this dynamic.
Get ready with The Post
- Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) has undergone a remarkable transition from a foreign policy hawk to an ally of the president’s more hands-off approach to U.S. intervention. He tells our colleague Liz Goodwin that Trump “has made me reevaluate some of the things I took for granted. … That American interventionism has limits. Afghanistan — years and trillions.” The shift comes as he runs for reelection next year with a more isolationist Republican base.
- Three children who are U.S. citizens, including a 4-year-old with Stage 4 cancer, were deported from Louisiana over the weekend, Emmanuel Felton and Maegan Vazquez report. The youngest was 2.
- Martine Powers sent a dispatch from Pope Francis’s funeral in Rome, where Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky had a private chat.
- Trump’s first 100 days as president have been a flurry of dramatic cuts to the federal government. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s first 100 days were a flurry of dramatic moves to expand the federal government. Naftali Bendavid digs into the parallels between the high-metabolism early days of each presidency.
- The Supreme Court will hear arguments this week for a case that could shake the foundations of secular public education. It started with a push to create the country’s first state-funded Catholic charter school in Oklahoma and has ballooned into a fight over the future of public schools. Justin Jouvenal and Laura Meckler explain how the case came to be.
Postcard from Canada
Today is Election Day in Canada.
Prime Minister Mark Carney of the Liberal Party faces his biggest challenge from Pierre Poilievre, a Conservative whose party, up until the departure of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, was dominating in the polls. The Liberals have since managed to turn their luck around, driven largely by the shake-up in party leadership and Trump’s verbal attacks on Canadian sovereignty and the trade partnership with the United States.
Jagmeet Singh of the New Democratic Party and Yves-François Blanchet of the Bloc Québécois are also contenders.
Trump has loomed heavily over the election. His remarks — which Republicans say are jokes but Canadians are not treating as such — about making Canada the 51st state and his punishing tariffs on one of the United States’ biggest trading partners sparked a firestorm up north, where voters have pushed their leaders on how they plan to respond to Trump.
Our Toronto-based colleague Amanda Coletta has a profile of Carney and his remarkable rise in Canadian politics.
Happening today
The Philadelphia Eagles are going to the White House, where Trump will host a celebration today for their Super Bowl win over the Kansas City Chiefs.
“They deserve to be down here, and we hope to see them,” Trump said in February.
That’s a big change in tune from the last time the Eagles won the Super Bowl. Trump invited the team in 2018, then withdrew the invitation after he insisted that all members stand for the national anthem and “only a small number of players decided to come,” Trump posted at the time on what was then Twitter. “Staying in the Locker Room for the playing of our National Anthem is as disrespectful to our country as kneeling,” he wrote. “Sorry!”
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt put to rest any questions about their attendance this year, saying last month that, despite “fake news” to the contrary, the Eagles were invited this year and accepted.
That doesn’t mean everyone on the team will show up. Jalen Hurts, the star quarterback, was asked last week whether he would go.
“Um,” he said and left it at that.
In your local paper
The Bangor Daily News has a dispatch from Northern Maine on how businesses along the Canadian border are responding to Trump’s tariffs.
The Los Angeles Times took a rare look inside the 13-mile San Jacinto tunnel bringing Colorado River water to often-parched Southern California.
The Chicago Tribune explains an interesting unofficial Illinois political tradition of having one senator from the Chicago area and another from elsewhere in the state. As Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Illinois) retires, there are questions about whether that tradition will continue.
Send a reply
In other football news, D.C. and the Commanders plan to announce a deal today for a new stadium at the site of the defunct RFK Stadium, Sam Fortier, Meagan Flynn and Nicki Jhabvala report. The move is a spiritual homecoming for the team, which called the historic stadium home until after the 1996 season, when it moved to Landover, Maryland.
Do you have memories of when the football team called RFK Stadium home? How do you feel about the homecoming? Let us know at earlytips@washpost.com.
Thanks for reading. You can follow Dan and Matthew on X: @merica and @matthewichoi.