Today’s notice: Reckoning with a flood. Working the working-class politics. What it sounds like inside the White House when a college is about to be targeted.
The Latest
How Does This Happen? That’s what state officials in Texas, federal ones in Washington and just people worldwide are asking in the aftermath of Friday’s floods on the Guadalupe River that have led to dozens of deaths.
Some state emergency officials have blamed the short-staffed National Weather Service over its forecast for the storm. Meteorologists, former NWS leaders and emergency management experts have another view, NOTUS’ Anna Kramer and Claire Heddles reported this weekend.
“Bottom line, all need to work toward an improved alerting system,” one former NWS official with insight into the Texas region told them.
Even after months of aggressive staffing cuts from the Trump administration (more on that below), the NWS did have extra staff available to respond to the storm, Anna and Claire report. NWS sent out emergency alerts — it’s just not clear everyone who needed to hear them was able to.
“Did people receive these notices? It was nighttime, so many people likely did not have immediate access to their phones. Texas Hill Country is also complex terrain, which means there are likely pockets of spotty cellular coverage,” Mark Shepherd, an atmospheric sciences expert at the University of Georgia, wrote in an analysis he shared with Anna and Claire.
These sudden, severe storms are increasing in frequency. The most pressing question now might be how the federal government and individual states can better prepare for the inevitable.
Open Tabs: How Health Care Remade the U.S. Economy (NYT); ICE increasingly targets undocumented migrants with no criminal record (WaPo); Elon Musk Says He’s Forming ‘America Party’ (WSJ)
From the White House
President Donald Trump is only just beginning to figure out a sales pitch for his brand new signature law. See Thursday night in Iowa: “No death tax. No estate tax,” he said at a victory rally after the bill passed. “No going to the banks and borrowing from, in some cases, a fine banker, and in some cases, Shylocks and bad people.” (The president later told reporters he’d “never heard” the term Shylock as being antisemiticantisemetic, contra the ADL.)
Throughout the political scramble to get the reconciliation bill over the line, there was a chorus of voices warning that all the new working-class voters MAGA won over might be turned off by many of the bill’s provisions. In the end, the ideology that won out was a very traditional, conservative Republican one, NOTUS’ Alex Roarty reports. It feels more Paul Ryan than MAGA populist.
Trump, for now, will have to balance domestic concerns with international ones. The president is scheduled to meet with Benjamin Netanyahu today. A senior White House official told Jasmine that the Israeli prime minister was the one who requested the meeting, and the White House doesn’t have an agenda or “goals” for the chat. But expect Trump to bring up the Gaza ceasefire proposal that he keeps amping up, the official said.
From the Hill
Next up for the Senate: trying to get a rescissions package passed — fast.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune said weeks ago that he was waiting on Appropriations Chair Sen. Susan Collins to take the next steps. But under rules for rescission bills, Republicans only have until July 18 to pass the rescission legislation, NOTUS’ Helen Huiskes reports.
Time is running out, and it may not have the votes — or Collins’ support.
The Big One
“POTUS wants to see more action against universities”: That’s from a March 18 email that senior policy strategist May Mailman blasted out to the White House communications team, alongside two draft social media posts: one announcing funding cuts to the University of Pennsylvania and another to San Jose State University.
NOTUS’ Mark Alfred reviewed previously unreported internal White House emails that surfaced in court documents in a DOGE funding freeze case. The emails show how administration officials scrambled to find ways to punish universities over trans athletes — and reveal a previously unreported target of the White House: San Jose State University.
Creating media moments plays a big role here, with internal communications showing how important getting placement in major media outlets is to the administration.
“If the premise is we want to show we are on top of it — I think the big 175 million number to a known university will make that splash,” Alex Pfeiffer, White House principal deputy communications director, wrote in one email.
There was some concern for optics when it came to grants touching national security ($977,000 SJSU got for “the terrorist and serious criminal database support”) and public health (a $99,700 healthy drinking water study).
“Up to you guys if you want to trumpet that,” Josh Gruenbaum, commissioner of the Federal Acquisition Service, wrote about the water study.
San Jose State’s punishment was never announced. “The likelihood of press only for SJSU is low,” Gruenbaum wrote.
New on NOTUS
Weather labs on the line: Ten weather and oceanographic laboratories are listed for termination in the administration’s NOAA budget request, part of a proposed cut in infrastructure that would see 12,000 positions terminated. Rep. Tom Cole is trying to change the forecast for one Oklahoma lab slated for closure: “I’ve allowed things in my district to be closed before, but this is a national asset, and I want to be very careful about what we do with it.”
A very particular set of skills: Fired USAID and other government workers used to working in authoritarian countries are quietly building a resistance to Trump with their backgrounds very much in mind. “You just released a bunch of well-trained individuals into your population,” one currently employed federal official involved in these efforts told NOTUS. “If you kept our offices going and had us play solitaire in the office, it might have been safer to keep your regime.”
Guess whose contracts still haven’t been DOGE’d? A recent update to the official DOGE-tracking website appeared to contain a first: a chop to a contract for one of Elon Musk’s companies. But a deeper look reveals the track record for DOGE firms remains intact: The rescinded $19K-ish for SpaceX had already been disbursed, and even the DOGE site said the savings from the cut are $0.
More: Inside the Effort to Kill the GOP’s Gender-Affirming Care Restriction; Alina Habba Has Been Under an Ethics Investigation for Over a Year.
NOT US
- The Advertisers Spending Big in West Palm Beach Just to Reach Trump, by Maggie Severns and Anthony DeBarros for The Wall Street Journal
- How Hunter Biden Helped Derail His Father’s Re-Election, by Josh Dawsey, Tyler Pager and Isaac Arnsdorf for The Wall Street Journal
- Why some fear government data on the U.S. economy is losing integrity, by Andrew Ackerman for The Washington Post
Week Ahead
No House votes this week. But the Senate is in.
Monday: The Netanyahu meeting is scheduled for the White House.
Tuesday: The South Carolina Democratic Party hosts Gov. Gavin Newsom for a two-day tour.
Wednesday: A House Ways aAnd Means subcommittee has a “Making America the Crypto Capital of the World” hearing scheduled.
The heads of Georgetown, UC Berkeley and CUNY are scheduled to appear before a House Education and Workforce Development hearing on campus antisemitism.
Leaders of Gabon, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Mauritania and Senegal will reportedly gather in Washington for a summit, with Trump due to attend.
At some point: Gov. Ron DeSantis said last week a second Florida ICE detention facility, Camp Blanding, will be built this week.
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The newsletter is produced by Tara Golshan, Matt Berman and Andrew Burton.