Trump administration faces group chat fallout: From the Politics Desk

Welcome to the online version of From the Politics Desk, an evening newsletter that brings you the NBC News Politics team’s latest reporting and analysis from the White House, Capitol Hill and the campaign trail.

Happy Monday! We hope your brackets are intact after this weekend. (If you picked the favorites, you’re probably in good shape.)

In today’s edition, we dive into the fallout over a journalist appearing to have been accidentally added to a group chat among Trump administration officials about U.S. plans to strike Houthis in Yemen. Plus, with the shutdown fight behind them, Sahil Kapur lays out the key hurdles Republicans in Congress must now clear to pass a massive bill to enact the president’s policy agenda. 

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— Adam Wollner

The Trump administration is reviewing how its national security team sent war plans to a magazine editor

The White House said it was reviewing how the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic magazine could have accidentally been added to a group text where people who appeared to be members of President Donald Trump’s administration discussed plans to launch airstrikes against Houthi militants in Yemen, Kelly O’Donnell and Daniel Arkin report. 

“At this time, the message thread that was reported appears to be authentic, and we are reviewing how an inadvertent number was added to the chain,” the National Security Council said in a statement to NBC News.

The statement came in response to an article published Monday by The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, a veteran national security and foreign affairs journalist. Goldberg reported he had been added to a group chat called “Houthi PC small group” on March 13 via Signal, an encrypted messaging service widely believed to be more secure than other commercial texting applications.

Goldberg reported that he went on to receive a series of messages on Signal that appeared to come from Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, National Security Advisor Michael Waltz and other prominent officials in the Trump administration.

Goldberg reported that he exited the Signal group after he personally concluded it was “almost certainly real.”

How Trump responded: Trump claimed he had no knowledge of the matter, telling a reporter in the Oval Office: “You’re telling me about it for the first time.”

How Democrats are responding: Democrats were quick to sharply criticize the Trump administration. 

Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., a member of the Foreign Relations Committee, said: “Every single one of the government officials on this text chain have now committed a crime — even if accidentally — that would normally involve a jail sentence.” 

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., called for “a full investigation into how this happened, the damage it created, and how we can avoid it in the future.” Sen. Ruben Gallego, D-Ariz., blasted the episode as “amateur hour.”

And Hillary Clinton, who drew intense criticism from Republicans for her use of a private email server, tweeted a screenshot of The Atlantic article with a simple message: “👀 You have got to be kidding me.” 

How Republicans are responding: Republicans have so far been more muted in their response. At least one GOP member of Congress chided Trump’s national security team.  

“Classified information should not be transmitted on unsecured channels — and certainly not to those without security clearances, including reporters. Period,” said Rep. Mike Lawler, R-N.Y. “Safeguards must be put in place to ensure this never happens again.”

House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., said the administration is “addressing” the situation and has acknowledged “it was a mistake,” adding that he expects the White House to “tighten up and make sure it doesn’t happen again.” 

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What else to know from the Trump presidency today

• Trump gathered his Cabinet secretaries for a third known meeting with Elon Musk in attendance, praising his department leaders for their cost-cutting measures even as he acknowledged these may not be “popular.”
• A new round of talks between the U.S. and Russia on a partial Ukraine ceasefire began today, following another night of Russian drone strikes against Ukraine. 
• The judge presiding over the Alien Enemies Act case denied the government’s request to lift his hold on deportations under the rarely used wartime law despite Trump’s repeated attacks on him and his order.
• Trump said he plans to implement “secondary tariffs” on Venezuela that would require any country purchasing oil or gas from them to face a 25% tariff on goods imported to the U.S.
• Trump said in remarks from the White House Roosevelt Room that the South Korean car manufacturer Hyundai is opening a steel plant in Louisiana.
• Second lady Usha Vance will travel to Greenland this week, along with Energy Secretary Chris Wright and national security adviser Mike Waltz, as Trump has called for the U.S. to take over the Danish territory.
• Trump announced that Alina Habba, who is serving as counselor to the president, will be the interim U.S. Attorney for the District of New Jersey.
• Trump has authorized the homeland security secretary and the attorney general to sanction law firms that file “frivolous” lawsuits. 
• In a post on Truth Social, Trump blasted a portrait of himself that hangs in the Colorado State Capitol and demanded the state’s governor remove it.

4 hurdles facing Republicans as they shift focus to a bill to pass Trump’s agenda

By Sahil Kapur

Congress is back after weeklong recess with Republicans planning to shift focus to a party-line bill to pass President Donald Trump’s multitrillion-dollar agenda after having dispensed with a separate government funding deadline.

Speaker Mike Johnson has set a target of passing the legislation through the House in April before the Easter recess, which leaves Republicans in the House with three weeks — and a lot of work. And then the bill would go to the Senate, which has a different idea of how to proceed.

Here are four hurdles they face.

Medicaid cuts: A recent analysis from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office found that it’s mathematically impossible for House Republicans to meet their own budget targets without cutting Medicare or Medicaid. 

Pursuing hundreds of billions of dollars in Medicaid cuts would put swing-district Republicans in a politically precarious position. But abandoning those cuts would anger hard-line conservatives who voted for the budget blueprint to begin the process because they were promised steep spending reductions.

A $4.6 trillion asterisk? Extending Trump’s expiring 2017 tax cuts would cost $4.6 trillion over a decade, according to the CBO. And that’s before tackling Trump’s other pursuits, like ending taxes on tips and overtime pay.

To get around the problem, Republicans are considering a far-reaching accounting change to hide the deficit impact, known as “current policy baseline,” instead of “current law baseline,” which would treat the cost of making Trump’s tax cuts permanent as $0. Democrats are preparing to fight that with the parliamentarian, the in-house referee overseeing the reconciliation process.

House-Senate divide: The two chambers adopted conflicting budget resolutions before Trump sided with the House version. On Monday, House GOP leaders called on the Senate to adopt the House measure. But Republican senators are waiting to see whether the House can deliver on the actual bill. Despite the paper-thin House majority, senators are in no mood to let the House dictate the outcome.

Debt limit: The exact date by which Congress will need to act to raise the debt ceiling this year is still unknown. House lawmakers’ budget plan called for a $4 trillion increase in the debt ceiling, but they need to pass the reconciliation bill to make it official. That means they’ll have to send the legislation to Trump’s desk before the deadline or risk economic calamity. 

Read more from Sahil →

That’s all From the Politics Desk for now. Today’s newsletter was compiled by Adam Wollner and Bridget Bowman.

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