Donald Trump live: President's budget bill to face tight vote in US House
The bill, however, faces opposition within Trump's Republican Party, where members have voiced concerns about the trillions it is likely to add to the national debt and cuts to social safety-net programmes like Medicaid.
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Al Jazeera
5 hours ago
- Al Jazeera
Trump says Powell should resign ‘immediately' in latest attack on Fed chair
United States President Donald Trump has repeated his call for Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell to step down, the latest in a series of attacks that have raised concern about the independence of the US central bank. Trump made the call for Powell to 'resign immediately' on Wednesday after his administration's top housing regulator urged the US Congress to launch an investigation into the central banker. Bill Pulte, the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, said in a post on X that Powell should be investigated for his 'political bias' and 'deceptive testimony' about renovations at the Federal Reserve headquarters in Washington, DC. In a Truth Social post responding to Pulte's comments, Trump said 'Too Late' – a nickname used to lambast Powell for not lowering rates faster – should resign. Trump's latest broadside comes days after he sent Powell a letter demanding that the central banker lower the benchmark interest rate, which is currently set at a range of 4.25 percent to 4.5 percent, by 'a lot'. The US president has repeatedly criticised Powell for not backing faster rate cuts, arguing that the central banker's cautious stance is holding back economic growth and that concerns about inflation are overblown. Lower interest rates reduce the cost of borrowing for businesses and consumers, helping boost economic growth. But rate cuts also have the effect of increasing inflation, which central banks typically wish to keep low, and Trump's sweeping tariffs are generally expected to put upward pressure on prices. On Tuesday, Powell told a panel discussion at the European Central Bank Forum in Portugal that the central bank had taken a wait-and-see approach to rate cuts in order to gauge the impact of Trump's tariffs, many of which are in limbo ahead of a July 9 deadline. 'In effect, we went on hold when we saw the size of the tariffs, and essentially all inflation forecasts for the United States went up materially as a consequence of the tariffs,' Powell said. 'We didn't overreact. In fact, we didn't react at all; we're simply taking some time.' Trump has repeatedly demanded that Powell, whose term does not expire until May 2026, step down or be removed since coming into office in January. Last week, Trump told reporters that he would 'love' for Powell to step down 'if he wanted to'. In April, Trump said that Powell's 'termination cannot come fast enough,' before backing off his threat after stocks and the US dollar dipped sharply. Under US federal law, the US president is only permitted to fire the Fed chair 'for cause', a provision widely interpreted to mean specific misconduct, not policy decisions. In May, the US Supreme Court reaffirmed precedent limiting the president's ability to remove the top central banker in a ruling that singled out the Federal Reserve as having a distinct status compared with other independent agencies. Trump earlier on Tuesday told reporters that he had 'two or three' choices in mind to succeed Powell without elaborating on who is under consideration.
Al Jazeera
5 hours ago
- Al Jazeera
Judge blocks Trump's ban on asylum at the southern US border
A federal court has ruled that President Donald Trump overstepped his authority by barring asylum claims at the southern border of the United States, as part of his broader immigration crackdown. On Wednesday, US District Judge Randolph Moss warned that Trump's actions threatened to create a 'presidentially decreed, alternative immigration system' separate from the laws established by Congress. The country had previously enshrined the right to asylum in its laws. But on January 20, upon taking office for a second term, President Trump issued a proclamation invoking the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA). 'This authority,' Trump wrote, 'necessarily includes the right to deny the physical entry of aliens into the United States and impose restrictions on access to portions of the immigration system.' But Judge Moss, an appointee of former President Barack Obama, pushed back on that assertion in his 128-page decision (PDF). 'Nothing in the INA or the Constitution grants the President or his delegees the sweeping authority asserted in the Proclamation,' Moss wrote. He emphasised that the president had no power to 'replace the comprehensive rules and procedures' in US immigration law with an 'extra-statutory, extraregulatory regime'. Asylum is the process by which individuals request protection on foreign soil when they fear persecution or harm. While asylum applications face a high bar for acceptance, successful applicants are allowed to remain in the country. But Trump has framed immigration across the US's southern border with Mexico as an 'invasion' led by foreign powers. He has used that rationale to justify the use of emergency powers to suspend rights like asylum. Judge Moss, however, ruled that suspending asylum could result in significant harms to those facing persecution. 'A substantial possibility exists that continued implementation of the Proclamation during the pendency of an appeal will effectively deprive tens of thousands of individuals of the lawful processes to which they are entitled,' Moss wrote. Nevertheless, he gave the Trump administration a 14-day window to appeal. The administration is expected to do so. 'A local district court judge has no authority to stop President Trump and the United States from securing our border from the flood of aliens trying to enter illegally,' White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said in response to Wednesday's ruling. 'We expect to be vindicated on appeal.' In court filings, the administration had also argued that it alone had the right to determine whether or not the US was facing invasion. 'The determination that the United States is facing an invasion is an unreviewable political question,' government lawyers wrote. Judge Moss expressed sympathy with another administration argument that the asylum processing system had simply become swamped with applications. 'The Court recognizes that the Executive Branch faces enormous challenges in preventing and deterring unlawful entry into the United States and in adjudicating the overwhelming backlog of asylum claims of those who have entered the country,' he wrote. But, he concluded, US laws did not award President Trump 'the unilateral authority to limit the rights of aliens present in the United States to apply for asylum'. The ruling comes as the result of a class-action complaint filed by immigrant rights groups, including the Florence Project, Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center and RAICES. The American Civil Liberties Union applauded Wednesday's decision as an important step in protecting Congress's powers to pass laws – and protecting immigrants' rights. 'The president cannot wipe away laws passed by Congress simply by claiming that asylum seekers are invaders,' ACLU lawyer Lee Gelernt said to US media.
Al Jazeera
7 hours ago
- Al Jazeera
US says its strikes degraded Iran's nuclear programme by one to two years
Washington, DC – The Pentagon has announced that United States military strikes against Iran set back the country's nuclear programme by one to two years, an assessment that follows President Donald Trump's claims that the programme was 'obliterated'. Defense Department spokesperson Sean Parnell said on Wednesday that the three Iranian nuclear facilities targeted by Washington were destroyed, echoing the president's remarks. He praised the strikes as a 'bold operation'. 'We have degraded their programme by one to two years at least,' Parnell told reporters. 'Intel assessments inside the department assess that.' Since the US sent a group of B-2 stealth bombers to Iran on June 21, Trump has consistently lashed out at any suggestions that the attacks did not wreck the country's nuclear facilities. He has maintained that Iran's nuclear programme has been 'obliterated like nobody's ever seen before'. An initial US intelligence assessment, leaked to several media outlets last month, said the strikes failed to destroy key components of Iran's nuclear programme and only delayed its work by months. For its part, Tehran has been coy about providing details about the state of its nuclear sites. Some Iranian officials have said that the facilities sustained significant damage from US and Israeli attacks. But Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei said last week that Trump had 'exaggerated' the impact of the strikes. There has been no independent assessment of the aftermath of the US attacks, which came as part of a 12-day war between Israel and Iran. Visual analyses via satellite images cannot fully capture the scope of the damage at the underground sites, especially the country's largest enrichment facility, Fordow. Another persistent mystery is the location and state of the stockpiles containing Iran's highly enriched uranium. Iran's nuclear agency and regulators in neighbouring states have said they did not detect a spike in radioactivity after the bombings, as might be expected from such strikes. But Rafael Grossi, the head of the United Nations nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), did not rule out that the containers holding the uranium may have been damaged in the attacks. 'We don't know where this material could be or if part of it could have been under the attack during those 12 days,' Grossi told CBS News last week. 'So some could have been destroyed as part of the attack, but some could have been moved.' Satellite images showed trucks moving out of Fordow before the US strikes. Grossi also said that Iran could be enriching uranium again in a 'matter of months'. Enrichment is the process of enhancing the purity of radioactive uranium atoms to produce nuclear fuel. The facilities targeted in the US strikes had been under constant IAEA surveillance. But now, Iran's nuclear programme is in the dark, away from the scrutiny of international inspectors. After the war, the Iranian parliament passed a law suspending cooperation with the IAEA, citing the agency's failure to condemn the US and Israeli attacks on the country's nuclear facilities. The Geneva Conventions prohibit attacks on 'installations containing dangerous forces, namely dams, dykes and nuclear electrical generating stations'. Before the war started on June 13, Tehran claimed to have obtained Israeli documents that show that the IAEA was passing off information to Israel about Iran's nuclear programme – allegations that the agency denied. Earlier on Wednesday, the US State Department called on Iran to allow the IAEA access to its nuclear programme. 'It is … unacceptable that Iran chose to suspend cooperation with the IAEA at a time when it has a window of opportunity to reverse course and choose a path of peace and prosperity,' State Department spokeswoman Tammy Bruce said in a statement. Israel launched a massive attack against Iran on June 13 without direct provocation, claiming that it was preemptively targeting Iran's push towards a nuclear weapon. Tehran denies seeking a nuclear bomb. Israel, meanwhile, is widely believed to have an undeclared nuclear arsenal. Israeli air strikes during the conflict killed hundreds of Iranian civilians, including nuclear scientists and their family members, as well as top military officials. Iran responded with barrages of missiles that left widespread destruction and killed 29 people in Israel. Ten days into the war, the US joined the Israeli campaign and bombed Iran's nuclear facilities. Tehran, in turn, launched a missile strike against a US air base in Qatar, an attack that resulted in no casualties. Hours later, Trump announced a ceasefire between Israel and Iran. Officials in both countries have described the outcome of the war as a 'historic victory'. Israel has similarly claimed that Iran's nuclear programme was destroyed. But Iran has insisted it foiled Israel's goals by maintaining the stability of its government as well as its nuclear and missile programmes.
