Expiration Date

Today’s notice: The great ACA subsidy-extension debate of 2025 devolves into shouting. MAGA rallies around Susie Wiles. A wealthy GOP congressman gives up stock trading. And: Populism’s struggles in the MAGAified Congress.

THE LATEST

What is it about health care policy? It always seems to bring out the most possible drama in Congress. As lawmakers eye the exits with no fix for expiring Affordable Care Act subsidies in sight, the outrage literally echoed through the halls to reporters waiting outside a House GOP meeting yesterday.

“Take those words out of your mouth” was Mike Johnson’s retort to Rep. Mike Lawler, who was part of a seemingly doomed attempt to secure a vote on an amendment that included a one-year extension of the enhanced ACA subsidies — with a pay-for to offset spending and hopefully clear the House Rules Committee.

Getting heated: Following the meeting, Lawler told reporters he was “pissed off” and that the situation was “bullshit.”

Things fell apart Friday after a meeting of the “Five Families” — the heads of the various Republican caucuses — could not agree on what an ACA subsidy amendment should look like, the NOTUS Hill team reports.

Moderates kept pushing, but were rebuffed repeatedly by Johnson. “He is willing to talk and to listen, so I’ll give him credit for that, but he has far too seldom been willing to act,” one of those moderates, Rep. Kevin Kiley, said, in one of the kinder missives lobbed Johnson’s way.

The upshot: The House is unlikely to pass a solution to the subsidies this week, and the Senate is probably not going to pass one either. So the subsidies are on track to expire and health care costs for millions of Americans will rise — exactly the political outcome the moderates worried about.

Open tabs: Elon Musk diving into 2026 midterms for the GOP (Axios); Pentagon plan calls for major power shifts within U.S. military (WaPo); Trump preps EO targeting defense contractors (Punchbowl); The underrated factors limiting the power of a blue wave next year (Politico)

From the White House

“All hands on deck!” is how one source close to the White House described to Jasmine the administration-wide effort to circle the wagons around beloved (or feared) chief of staff Susie Wiles after a two-part Vanity Fair profile of Donald Trump’s inner circle hit Washington like a sack of bricks.

“A disingenuously framed hit piece on me” is how Wiles described it in her first X post since before the inauguration. (She stopped short saying she was misquoted, though.)

While some MAGA allies openly (and via Signal) questioned how this could happen (Wiles spoke to writer Chris Whipple 11 times), it’s probably easier to track who in Trump’s orbit hasn’t posted in support of Wiles.

“I’ve said that many times about myself,” Trump told the New York Post about Wiles describing him as having an “alcoholic’s personality.”

The most under-covered quote in the VF piece: “I hear stories from my predecessors about these seminal moments where you have to go in and tell the president what he wants to do is unconstitutional or will cost lives. I don’t have that,” Wiles said.

Every now and then we get new insights into how this style of presidency — where the team is not one of rivals but one with players and an all-powerful coach — actually functions. Near the bottom of Part 2, Wiles explains that she often has tough talks with the president, as any chief of staff might. But, she says, “they’re over little things, not big.”

One big thing Trump did last night: He said he would declare the Venezuelan government a “foreign terrorist organization” and ordered a blockade on all sanctioned oil tankers coming and going from the country.

From the Hill

No video, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told lawmakers yesterday. “We’re not going to release a top secret, full, unedited video of that to the general public,” Hegseth said of the infamous September “double-tap” strike in the Caribbean.

Some Republicans are looking for more clarity on the decision-making process. “We’re still looking at it,” Sen. Thom Tillis said. “That’s why I think the video would be helpful.”

Allow us to jump ahead to January, with NOTUS’ Avani Kalra and Ursula Perano closely tracking how Democrats are going to approach spending negotiations.

The appetite for a shutdown is… negligible. “I don’t want to see another government shutdown,” Sen. Dick Durbin said. “I’ve seen those. I’ve had enough of them.”

THE BIG ONE

MAGA populism has its limits: We know Trump’s coalition has frayed over the Epstein files and foreign policy, but perhaps MAGA’s quietest ideological split is one of the most politically dangerous.

The Republican Party can’t figure out how to capitalize on its working-class support without alienating its traditional backers in the business class, NOTUS’ Jade Lozada reports. The bipartisan House bill rebuking Trump’s ban on collective bargaining for federal workers is unlikely to be anywhere in the Senate.

Neither is Sen. Josh Hawley’s proposal to speed up union contracts (one that the Chamber of Commerce hates).

Republicans aren’t worried yet. “There’s always some traditional Republican views that tend to be opposed to union issues in general,” Rep. Mark Messmer, a majority member of the House Education and Workforce Committee, told Jade. “There’s enough of the Republican members that do support labor issues that I don’t fear anything passing that would be an anti-labor position out of Congress.”

But maybe they should be? “It’s only going to be so much longer that the conservative movement is going to be able to paper over these fissures,” Jarrett Dieterle of the conservative Manhattan Institute said.

NEW ON NOTUS

Giving up on stock trading: Rep. Jefferson Shreve’s office has confirmed that the Indiana Republican, one of the wealthiest members of the House, is voluntarily getting out of the individual stock trading game.

ICYMI, earlier this year NOTUS’ Dave Levinthal revealed Shreve was busy stock trading around the time of Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs announcement. Shreve’s office didn’t say whether he supports the push for a law to bar members from trading stock. As of now, he has not signed on to Rep. Anna Paulina Luna’s discharge petition to force a vote on just that.

New details about Trump’s East Wing demolition: A memo, filed by the White House in response to the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s lawsuit seeking to pause Trump’s ballroom construction, included a number of revealing documents — including a streamlined environmental assessment conducted by the National Park Service determining there would be “no significant impact” to the environment caused by the project.

The filing also provided the first public projection of the project’s timeline, which is estimated to be completed sometime in the summer of 2028 — just months before Trump is set to leave office.

More: Trump Expands Travel Ban, Mostly Targeting African Countries, by Jackie Llanos

DHS Denies That ICE Agents Pulled Over Ilhan Omar’s Son, by Amelia Benavides-Colón

NOT US

• Scams, Schemes, Ruthless Cons: The Untold Story of How Jeffrey Epstein Got Rich, by David Enrich, Steve Eder, Jessica Silver-Greenberg and Matthew Goldstein for The New York Times
  
• Judges Are Getting Fired as Trump Pursues Immigration ‘Purge,’ by Alicia A. Caldwell and Jimmy Jenkins for Bloomberg
  
• A medical examiner’s testimony put a father behind bars for life. Now he says he ‘made a mistake.’ By Dan Slepian and Erik Ortiz for NBC News

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