Today’s notice: What happened after ACA subsidies expired. Jasmine’s first story from China. Grumblings about the cost of the president’s ballroom get louder. Trump sides with the Senate on housing. New Democrats’ new plan. And: The people who didn’t know they were still giving money to Tulsi Gabbard and Kari Lake.

THE LATEST

Exclusive: Massive drop in Affordable Care Act enrollments. Fears that the end of federal subsidies would dramatically impact the number of Americans insured through the HealthCare.gov marketplace appear to have been well founded. NOTUS’ Paige Winfield Cunningham obtained internal documents from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services which found that roughly 21% of customers in the 30 states using the federal marketplace dropped coverage this year.

That’s much higher than the 12% drop-off over the same period last year.

The politics: Health care costs are a prime motivator for voters who tell pollsters affordability is their top midterm concern, and the coverage declines on Donald Trump’s watch give Democrats who shut down the government to draw attention to the expiring subsidies last year a chance to say I told you so.

What the Trump administration is going to say, according to three sources Paige talked to, is a very different story. Leadership at CMS, whose top official is Mehmet Oz, is seeking to attribute the majority of enrollment decline to rooting out fraud rather than people not paying their premiums, she writes.

It’s a tough sell. Marketplace fraud has been a real concern in recent years after COVID-era changes to ACA enrollment put in place by the Biden administration. But CMS insiders say it’s unlikely fraud is behind most of the cancellations, Paige reports.

Jasmine is in China. Her first dispatch ahead of Trump’s mega-sized visit to the country explores how Iran could overshadow what MAGA hopes will be a chance for the president to flex against his No. 1 geopolitical foe. The China trip was planned for March, but got moved after the war with Iran began.

“The reality is the relationship with China is immensely important. I mean, more important long term than what’s going on with Iran,” a senior Trump administration official said. “We need to address the China thing. We can’t keep putting them off.”

Open tabs: Kennedy Is Driving a Vast Inquiry Into Vaccines, Despite His Public Silence (NYT); Trump nominates Kari Lake and Doug Mastriano to diplomatic posts (Politico); Supreme Court Clears the Way for a Republican-Friendly Alabama Map (NOTUS); Rep. Kiggans defends response after radio host’s racial remark aimed at Jeffries (MS NOW)

From the Hill

Trouble for Trump’s ballroom funding scheme: “I don’t know what ends up happening there because a lot of members are unhappy with this,” a vulnerable Republican told NOTUS recently of the effort to allocate $1 billion in taxpayer money to cover security costs associated with the president’s White House ballroom project. Our Reese Gorman, Al Weaver and Igor Bobic report on the private Republican grumbling over the idea of being forced to vote on this, and a growing feeling that the ballroom money could struggle to earn enough Republican support to clear the House’s reconciliation process.

“When we’re dealing with an affordability crisis, we’re really going to make members vote on a ballroom?” a senior House Republican aide said.

First on NOTUS: Moderate Democrats’ anti-corruption promise. Should Democrats return to power next year, the moderate New Democrat Coalition is vowing to address the growing concern among Americans that lawmakers are profiting off their jobs. NOTUS’ Kadia Goba obtained a new memo outlining the group’s agenda, which also took aim at the White House. “The stench of corruption permeates every action of this administration,” the group’s chair, Rep. Brad Schneider, told her.

From the White House

The moment Senate housing bill authors were waiting for: NOTUS has cataloged the fierce split between House and Senate lawmakers over a housing bill, which theoretically everyone wants but the devil, as always, is in the details. Authors of the Senate version said the House has to pass what it sent over or risk a bill that can’t pass the Senate at all. House lawmakers, including many Republicans, were upset by this.

Trump told the House to get over it last night and publicly pressured the chamber to pass the Senate version, NOTUS’ Raymond Fernández reports.

Golden Fleet update: A newly released 30-year shipbuilding plan from the U.S. Navy shows that the military plans to build 15 of the so-called “Trump-class” battleships the president wants, though many experts say they’ll be obsolete before they even leave the shipyard. NOTUS’ Joe Gould reports that the Navy plan puts taxpayers on the hook for many more of these ships than was originally disclosed — five times the original number, to be exact.

From FEMA

Meet the new boss, same as one of the old bosses: Former Navy SEAL Cameron Hamilton was acting director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency for a few months last year before being fired — shortly after publicly breaking from the president’s plan to dismantle the agency. Yesterday, Trump nominated Hamilton to come back as Senate-confirmed FEMA director and manage the new White House plan to keep the agency in place (with significant changes).

NEW ON NOTUS

Give until it hurts — or you forget about it: Unceasing recurring donations to the zombie campaigns of Trump administration officials Tulsi Gabbard (the director of national intelligence) and Kari Lake (the former head of the U.S. Agency for Global Media) may have roped hundreds of people into giving money they didn’t intend to give, NOTUS’ Adora Brown reports.

“You know, you click on something and buy a T-shirt and do a donation, and you’re not realizing that you’re signing up for the next year,” Anthony Pascuma, who had been donating $50 a month to Gabbard’s leadership PAC without realizing he was still doing it, told Adora. The PAC has not contributed to any candidates since 2024.

A recurring Lake donor canceled after being made aware that $50 was coming out of their account every month well after Lake’s last (failed) bid for public office ended.

Follow-up: Buying more Palantir. Democratic Rep. Gil Cisneros, whom we revealed in February had invested heavily in the defense and immigration-enforcement contractor, added an additional $15,001 to $50,000 worth of Palantir stock to his portfolio last month, NOTUS’ Dave Levinthal flags.

More: Pennsylvania Supreme Court Justice Quits the Democratic Party, by Torrie Herrington

Democrats Say Mass Deportations Are ‘Get-Out-of-Jail-Free’ Cards, by Jackie Llanos

NOT US

• Inside the White House’s most inscrutable marriage. (No not that one), by Jemima Kelly for the Financial Times
• Inside the Unlikely Reunion Between Trump and DeSantis, by Alex Leary for The Wall Street Journal
• How Americans Caught Gold Fever Again, by Jennifer Wilson for The New Yorker

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