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Key events
The US has lifted sanctions on Venezuela’s acting president, Delcy Rodríguez, in the latest step towards normalising relations between the two countries after US forces abducted her predecessor, Nicolás Maduro, and his wife.
The couple have since been taken to New York to face drug trafficking charges where both have pleaded not guilty.
The move to lift sanctions on Rodríguez, which was announced by the US Treasury Department on Wednesday, allows her to work more freely with US companies and investors. Without explicitly mentioning the sanctions targeting her, Rodríguez, in a statement, expressed hope for US-Venezuelan relations.
“We value President Donald Trump’s decision as a step toward normalising and strengthening relations between our countries,” she said on her Telegram channel after the Treasury’s announcement. “We trust that this progress will allow for the lifting of current sanctions against our country, enabling us to build and guarantee an effective bilateral cooperation agenda for the benefit of our people.”
Rodríguez and her brother, Jorge Rodríguez, were hit with sanctions during Trump’s first term over their role in allegedly undermining Venezuelan democracy.
Trump polled advisers about replacing Tulsi Gabbard as intelligence chief
Hugo Lowell
Donald Trump has privately asked cabinet officials in recent weeks whether he should replace his director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, venting frustration that she shielded a former deputy who undercut his rationale for war with Iran, according to two people briefed on the discussions.
It is not clear that Trump will actually fire Gabbard over the episode. Currently, there is no standout candidate to take the job, and advisers have cautioned that creating a high-profile vacancy before a successor is ready could cause unhelpful political distractions.
But Trump’s discussions marks an ominous development for Gabbard, given the president tends to poll his advisers when he starts to seriously consider whether a personnel change is necessary. The two people spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations.
Trump’s doubts about Gabbard followed her testimony at the world wide threats hearing on Capitol Hill last month where she declined to condemn Joe Kent, who had resigned days earlier after arguing that Iran did not pose an imminent threat to the United States, the people said.
The nature of Kent’s departure and his criticism of the war had already angered Trump, but he expressed particular frustration about Gabbard seemingly defending Kent and appearing reluctant to defend the administration’s position to attack Iran, the people said.
Asked on Sunday whether he still had confidence in Gabbard’s leadership, Trump offered a mixed endorsement. “Yeah, sure,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One. “I mean, she’s a little bit different in her thought process than me, but that doesn’t make somebody not available to serve.”
Republican plan to fund DHS could get first test vote later today
The Senate is expected to try quickly passing a measure later today that would fund most of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), though it’s unclear how soon the House will follow to largely end the longest partial government shutdown in history.
House speaker Mike Johnson and Senate majority leader John Thune announced a plan yesterday to fully fund the DHS as part of a two-step process, AP reported.
The agreement puts the leaders on the same page for ending the impasse after they pursued separate plans that resulted in Congress leaving Washington last week without a fix.
Johnson and Thune announced a return to the bipartisan Senate plan worked out with Democrats that funds most of the department, with the exception of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and US Border Patrol.
Republicans would then try later to fund those agencies on their own through party-line spending legislation that could take months to finish.
Neither outcome is guaranteed, and the strategy could potentially still face opposition from the GOP’s own ranks even though president Donald Trump has given his support.
Phillip Inman
Before Donald Trump declared “liberation day” on 2 April 2025 and shocked the world by raising import tariffs on nearly every country the US did business with, he had spent almost three months causing chaos in Washington.
The wholesale slashing of government jobs under Doge (the “department of government efficiency”) and the defunding of US aid agencies had shown White House watchers that the US president was in a hurry to upset institutions he considered profligate or useless.
Investors quickly understood that chaos was an essential tool in Trump’s armoury. Almost as soon as he was inaugurated, there was a steady decline in the value of the dollar against other currencies. Investors sold assets denominated in dollars and bought assets elsewhere: Europe, Asia, South America.
“If you think that discouraging investors from buying assets in the US is a victory, then you don’t believe in a growing economy,” said Dario Perkins, the head of global research at the consultancy TS Lombard. “If it was possible for Trump to have spent the last 14 months on the golf course, we would be in a better place.”
Russ Mould, the investment director of the British stockbroker AJ Bell, said:
America is still home to the world’s largest economy and its reserve currency, as well as the globe’s largest equity and bond markets, but investors continue to reassess their exposure one year on from liberation day.
The economy has either gone sideways or declined, depending on the preferred measure. Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that US companies, which were supposed to be the victors in Trump’s new tariff war, stopped hiring almost as soon as liberation day was announced.
Significant revisions in February to data covering 2025 pushed payroll employment down by 403,000 jobs, resulting in the addition of 181,000 jobs last year. This small boost is set against the 163 million people who are employed in the US.
Commission to vote on Trump’s White House $400m ballroom project after injunction granted
Hello and welcome to the US politics live blog.
The National Capital Planning Commission will meet this afternoon to decide on Donald Trump’s White House $400m ballroom project, after a federal judge halted construction earlier this week.
Although the order did not take place with immediate effect, judge Richard Leon’s injunction prompted the president to claim, in a Truth Social post, that his administration did not in fact require “express authorization from Congress” to proceed. The government is appealing against the decision.
Trump’s fellow Republicans have up until now not felt the need to weigh in on the project, Politico reported. One exception was Lexi Hamel, a spokesperson for representative Mike Simpson, who said in a statement on Wednesday the Idaho Republican “believes the ruling is stupid” and that “nobody raised hell when Roosevelt or Truman renovated the White House (at taxpayer expense).”
The federal panel postponed an expected vote on the project last month, after receiving thousands of negative public comments. Before meeting, the commission released more than 9,000 pages of public comments it received about the project.
The commission has said that more than 35,000 people had submitted written comments, with the majority opposing Trump’s plans to build a 90,000 sq ft ballroom where the East Wing of the White House once stood, and condemning the demolition of the East Wing, which began in October.
The Commission of Fine Arts, which is also tasked with reviewing the ballroom plans and where Trump has also installed loyalists, voted to approve the ballroom project last month.
Historic preservationist groups have sued and attempted to halt the project. In December, the National Trust for Historic Preservation filed a federal lawsuit, seeking to block the construction of the new ballroom, arguing that the administration violated laws by tearing parts of the White House “without any review whatsoever”.
In other developments:
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House Republicans announced that they will pass a bill, advanced by the Senate last week, to end the record-breaking partial Department of Homeland Security (DHS) shutdown after previously rejecting the measure.
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Democrats quickly celebrated the win with Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer saying “House Republicans caved” after previously “[derailing] a bipartisan agreement, making American families pay the price for their dysfunction”.
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Nasa’s lunar rocket successfully launched and the astronauts on the first crewed lunar rocket in more than 50 years received praise from across the US.
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Attorney general Pam Bondi’s job with the Trump administration is reportedly at risk. The president is said to be unhappy with Bondi’s performance as the head of the justice department and the controversy surrounding the Epstein files, according to a New York Times report.
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Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida signed legislation on Wednesday to require documented proof of citizenship to register to vote and to begin a process that will eventually unenroll voters who have not provided citizenship documentation.
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Supreme court justices appeared skeptical of the Trump administration’s argument to restrict birthright citizenship for hundreds of thousands of children born to undocumented immigrants of temporary foreign nationals. Trump himself attended the hearing, widely considered to be the first time a sitting president has attended arguments at the supreme court.
