Funding for public-facing taxpayer services would remain untouched, but IRS enforcement would see the deepest cuts under the plan from House Republicans.
Michele Sandiford
- House Republicans are proposing a billion-dollar cut to IRS funding next year. A fiscal 2027 spending bill introduced by members of the House Appropriations Committee would give the IRS a $10.2 billion budget next year. The Trump administration proposed more severe IRS cuts in its budget proposal, closer to a $1.5 billion cut. Funding for public-facing taxpayer services would remain untouched, but IRS enforcement would see the deepest cuts under the plan from House Republicans.
- The Trump administration is facing a lawsuit over its efforts to quash diversity, equity and inclusion work. New legal action comes after President Trump doubled down on his orders for federal contractors to end all DEI-related work. A coalition of contractors, non-profits and universities now alleges that the president’s executive order from March was unconstitutional. Their lawsuit argues that the anti-DEI orders illegally force contractors to pick between First Amendment rights or keeping a contract.
- House Appropriations Committee lawmakers did something rarely seen these days, they passed a spending bill without any objections. The committee approved the fiscal 2027 Military Construction, Veterans Affairs and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 58-0 yesterday. Lawmakers authorized $480 billion dollars in funding for the Department of Veterans Affairs. Included in that is $3.4 billion for the electronic health records modernization system and $660 million dollars for construction projects. The committee also allocated $19.2 billion to miliary construction accounts to improve the infrastructure to support servicemembers where they work and live.
- The Department of Homeland Security is quickly running out of emergency funding. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin says DHS will run out of emergency funds being used to pay staff during the shutdown by early May. Mullin told Fox & Friends on Tuesday that DHS’s payroll costs $1.6 billion every two weeks. The Trump administration has been using funding from last year’s reconciliation bill to pay DHS staff in recent weeks. Mullin also called furloughed staff back to the office earlier this month. But lawmakers have yet to make much progress on a funding agreement to end a shutdown that stretches back to February 14.
- U.S. Southern Command is launching a new autonomous warfare command. Once fully established, the new command will employ autonomous, semi-autonomous and unmanned platforms and systems to counter threats and challenges across domains. SOUTHCOM says it will work with the military services and DoD’s Defense Autonomous Warfare Group (DAWG) to identify available expertise and capabilities required for the new command to begin operations and fully integrate into SOUTHCOM’s mission. The command will also collaborate with Allies and partners in the region to disrupt and degrade narcoterrorist and cartel networks and respond to life-threatening crises caused by large-scale natural disasters.
- The Department of Health and Human Services is looking to temporarily reassign mid-career and senior staff to chip away at a monthslong backlog of reasonable accommodation requests. HHS faces a departmentwide backlog of more than 9,000 reasonable accommodation requests. Typically, staff at its component agencies would review these requests, but HHS centralized this work as part of a new policy it implemented last year. Under this new policy, all reasonable accommodation requests require the approval of an HHS official at the assistant secretary level or above. HHS is now requesting nominations for GS-12 and GS-13 employees to serve on 90-day or 120-day detail assignments to process the backlog of reasonable accommodation requests.
- The Department of Homeland Security is moving forward with a massive cloud computing deal. In an April 21st notice, DHS said it would make awards to four major cloud providers: Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. DHS expects to award the contracts in August. The procurement is being overseen by DHS’s Office of the Chief Information Officer. It’s the first time the department is buying cloud services at an enterprise level as individual DHS components had previously handled their own cloud contracts.
- Democrats are urging the Trump administration to halt plans to collect detailed medical data from eight million federal insurance enrollees. That comes after a proposal from the Office of Personnel Management in December, seeking claims-level data from all 65 federal insurance carriers. In letters sent to OPM and the White House, House and Senate lawmakers warn of potential legal violations, exposure of personal health information and data security risks.
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