Coverage of elections, governance, and policy — with named sources and on-record exchanges only.
The Senate confirmed Kevin Warsh as Federal Reserve chair on Wednesday in a 54-to-45 vote, the narrowest margin for a chair in modern memory. By Friday, Jerome Powell had broken 75 years of practice and held onto his governor’s seat at the central bank, opening in the same week the question of how independent the post-Powell Fed will actually be.
Commissioners voted 5–2 to expand the pilot after data showed measurable peak-hour delays. The dissenters cited cost; supporters pointed to ridership.
This week the Agriculture Department’s internal watchdog reported that the agency cannot fully account for the artificial-intelligence systems running on its own networks, has no department-wide pre-deployment review process, and has not implemented the high-impact AI controls required by an Office of Management and Budget memorandum issued in February 2025. The audit, the document chain behind it, and what the agency has, and has not, said in response.
Chairman Tim Scott released the text of the Clarity Act on Tuesday, two days before a committee markup expected to send the most consequential crypto market-structure bill in a decade toward the Senate floor. The text decides which agency regulates which token, and which investors get the protections that come with that label.
In April, the Justice Department’s internal watchdog opened an audit of the agency’s compliance with the November 2025 Epstein Files Transparency Act. The document trail begins with a statute, runs through three DOJ disclosure events totaling 3.5 million pages, and turns on a CBS News page-by-page analysis showing that roughly 65,500 pages were quietly pulled from the public archive in the weeks after release.
Governor Bill Lee signed a new U.S. House map into law Thursday evening, eight days after the Supreme Court loosened the Voting Rights Act in Louisiana v. Callais. The map splits the state’s only majority-Black district into three. The NAACP filed in Davidson County Chancery Court within hours.
The first month of USDA data after the megabill took effect showed average monthly participation at 38.5 million in January, down from a fiscal-year 2024 average of 42.1 million. The unemployment rate barely moved over the same window.
Justice Samuel Alito on Monday paused the Fifth Circuit’s order reinstating in-person dispensing for mifepristone, leaving mail and telehealth access in place through next Monday while the Supreme Court weighs emergency applications from the two drug manufacturers. The stay is procedural. The fight over the 2023 REMS is not.
Court filings, internal spreadsheets, and sworn depositions describe a 72-hour grant-purge inside the National Endowment for the Humanities driven by a Department of Government Efficiency review that asked a chatbot the same question 1,162 times. A federal judge in the Southern District of New York is weighing whether the process violated the Constitution.
President Trump signed the Department of Homeland Security funding bill on Thursday evening, ending a 76-day shutdown without a dollar for Immigration and Customs Enforcement or Border Patrol. Senate Republicans now have until June 1 to deliver the same funding through reconciliation, where 50 votes is enough.
