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

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.

Johnson declines to give a view on whether Elon Musk should allow Trump’s cabinet members to make their own decisions on personnel.

But he says he’s “excited” about Doge’s efforts as it is achieving its goal of scaling down the size and scope of government.

He says “we ought to be standing up and applauding” Musk’s prediction he can identify and eliminate $3tn in “waste” of taxypayer dollars.

Asked by a reporter to confirm unequivocally that there won’t be any cuts to Medicaid further down the line, speaker Mike Johnson claims the program is “hugely problematic” because of “a lot of fraud, waste and abuse” and needs “shoring up”.

He claims it wastes $50bn a year in taxpayer dollars in “fraud alone” and eliminating “fraudulent payments” will save “a lot”. He also claims there are “a lot” of savings to be achieved by ensuring illegal aliens are not enrolled (undocumented migrants are not eligible for Medicaid).

He repeats that the bill doesn’t mention Medicaid, but doesn’t explain where funding for the plan will otherwise come from.

Among the thousands of government workers culled by Musk’s agency were an educator, archaeologist and scientist, who have spoken to Alaina Demopoulos.

The scientist, who works on food sustainability issues in the north east, was 10 weeks away from the end of her three-year probationary period when the Trump administration launched its mass firings of federal workers. A new mom, she decided to take a deferred resignation so she could get severance pay. She said:

Government workers are real people with families who dedicated their lives and expertise to service. It feels like we’re being treated as grifters or terrorists, when we’re not. A lot of us have given up options for much higher incomes in order to do the work that we thought was going to help the world. This is a huge, huge loss for science, because now government researchers are going to shift into the private sector. There’s a lot of good work that the world won’t even know to miss, because we won’t get to do it.

An archaeologist who worked for the National Resources Conservation Services in North Dakota received a generic form letter that still said “template” in the document title, informing him he was being fired for performance-based reasons. He is exploring legal options.

An educator at a national forest in Oregon said:

I feel like we’re being attacked. There have always been people who are anti-government, but now I feel like people see all government employees as villains. I really cared about the work I did, and I didn’t go into this because I wanted to make six figures. The forest or park services have always been very bipartisan, and it’s not something you can easily throw away.

You can read the full piece here:

Responses to the Elon 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’s threats that federal employees could be fired if they failed to reply to the email caused mass confusion on Monday, as workers struggled with how – or whether – to respond. Several government agencies, including the FBI Pentagon, and state department, told their employees not to respond.

Musk repeated the threat 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.”

As of this morning, three House Republicans, have signaled their opposition to the budget resolution. The Republican majority is so narrow that should they vote against, and should all Democrats be present and also vote against, Mike Johnson’s budget plan is doomed.

Victoria Spartz, Tim Burchett and Thomas Massie have said they are opposed as they want deeper spending cuts, but still plan to speak to GOP leadership ahead of the vote. Massie wrote on X on Monday:

If the Republican budget passes, the deficit gets worse, not better.

Others like Warren Davidson have said they want answers about a government funding deal before they can vote for the budget resolution. Davidson posted on X on Monday:

Let’s be clear. There is no path to pass the @HouseGOP budget plan until it includes the plan for ALL spending. The current plan skips 3/14 altogether. Until that is addressed, there is no viable path to pass the budget resolution.

Jeff Van Drew, a Trump loyalist, told Time Magazine he’s prepared to vote against the budget resolution as the proposed cuts to Medicaid are too extreme. He said he called the president to express his opposition to the plan.

I told him I very well may not vote for this, and I’m certainly waiting until the last minute to see if some changes can be made, because I’m very unhappy.

Van Drew added that they’re “aligned” on not wanting to cut people’s access to health care, but the New Jersey Republican also said Trump didn’t ask him to support the budget resolution.

Other centrist Republicans remain undecided.