GOP lawmakers start to sweat redistricting

Politico

2 days ago

Welcome to POLITICO's West Wing Playbook: Remaking Government, your guide to Donald Trump's unprecedented overhaul of the federal government — the key decisions, the critical characters and the power dynamics that are upending Washington and beyond.
Send tips | Subscribe | Email Sophia | Email Irie | Email Ben
President DONALD TRUMP's gambit to grow House Republicans' razor-thin majority through redistricting is starting to meet rare resistance from his own party.
Two vulnerable GOP lawmakers — Reps. KEVIN KILEY of California and MIKE LAWLER of New York — are floating separate efforts to ban mid-decade redistricting as the Trump team's push for Texas Republicans to draw a more favorable map sets off a nationwide redistricting arms race.
'What's happening here is not popular among members in either conference,' Kiley told West Wing Playbook. 'I've talked to Republican members who are in states that could potentially benefit in the general political sense, but they don't like the idea of having their districts completely changed in the middle of the decade.'
Lawler did not respond to a request for comment.
Kiley filed a bill Tuesday aimed chiefly at stopping Democratic governors from retaliatory gerrymandering if Texas Republicans succeed in pushing through a new map that could net the GOP five seats in the midterms. Kiley and Lawler, both swing-district lawmakers, could feel the effects of Democratic redistricting. Lawler's seat, which has long been on Democrats' target list, would be among the districts where the party would try to stretch its advantage in the state.
Kiley is also trying to prod Speaker MIKE JOHNSON and House Minority Leader HAKEEM JEFFRIES to reach an agreement to stop the redistricting tit-for-tat in its tracks, though that appears unlikely.
'The onus is on the speaker to show some leadership here,' Kiley said.
GREG STEELE, spokesperson for Johnson's political arm, said 'while these efforts remain at the state level, Speaker Johnson is focused on leading the fight to defend and grow the House Republican majority in any district come 2026.'
But the legislative pushback also constitutes rare GOP opposition to the president, who stoked the flames of the redistricting fight Tuesday by saying that Republicans are 'entitled' to five more seats in Texas — even as a White House official told our JAKE TRAYLOR that Trump's team is taking 'a pretty hands-off approach' to the partisan battle they set in motion.
Kiley suggested that Trump 'doesn't want to see the California congressional delegation upended, or the New York delegation or some of these other states,' though he said he hasn't spoken with the president on the matter.
'It seems to me he was not given full information about how exactly these things might play out,' Kiley added.
A person close to the president granted anonymity to describe internal thinking said Trump's team isn't sweating Democrats' threats of retaliation.
Democrats face steep obstacles to redistricting even in their best-case-scenario state of California, where Gov. GAVIN NEWSOM plans to call a special election and potentially spend massive sums to convince voters to return mapmaking power from an independent commission to lawmakers. And Republicans are starting to push for redistricting in states beyond Texas, including Missouri.
'Republicans have more opportunity than Democrats' to redraw maps, and 'Democrats' hurdles in the opportunities they claim to have are much higher, because Democrats have extreme gerrymandered maps in their favor everywhere they can,' the person said.
The White House's power-protection play carries increasing political risk. As more Democratic governors vow to retaliate, BRENDAN STEINHAUSER, a Texas-based Republican strategist, warned the GOP's redistricting effort 'could backfire if there are enough Democratic seats out there and enough Democratic governors to redraw the maps in a way that ends up hurting Republicans nationwide.'
Game out the chess match further and Republicans' machinations could complicate Trump's agenda in Washington. Trump has gotten nearly everything he's wanted from this GOP House. Even if Republicans hold the House next year, they could do so at the expense of some of those Trump-loyal members.
'It could become a real headache for Johnson, building a majority by sacrificing parts of the current majority,' said California-based GOP strategist ROB STUTZMAN.
He added: 'What a shock Trump didn't think it through.'
MESSAGE US — West Wing Playbook is obsessively covering the Trump administration's reshaping of the federal government. Are you a federal worker? A DOGE staffer? Have you picked up on any upcoming DOGE moves? We want to hear from you on how this is playing out. Email us at [e-mail].
Did someone forward this email to you? Subscribe!
POTUS PUZZLER
Which president signed the nation's first federal income tax into law?
(Answer at bottom.)
WHO'S IN, WHO'S OUT
NOT A TAR HEEL: The director of Voice of America, MICHAEL ABRAMOWITZ, has been terminated after refusing to accept a demotion in North Carolina, according to court documents released Monday.
JOHN ZADROZNY, a senior adviser to the U.S. Agency for Global Media, VOA's parent company, said in a letter that Abramowitz's 'failure to accept a directed geographic reassignment warrants removal from your position for such cause as to promote the efficiency of the Federal service.'
In July, acting USAGM CEO VICTOR MORALES notified Abramowitz that he was being reassigned to the VOA station in Greenville, North Carolina, and being given a new position. In his sworn declaration, Abramowitz said that the rationale for sending him to North Carolina 'does not make sense.'
'I understand that Defendants have indicated that they only plan to broadcast in four languages at VOA (Mandarin, Farsi, Pashto and Dari),' he wrote. 'But the Greenville station, which has historically provided shortwave radio broadcasts mainly to West Africa and Latin America, does not serve countries that speak any of those languages.'
Abramowitz is the main plaintiff in a lawsuit against the Trump administration after the president issued an executive order dismantling USAGM. 'My efforts are not about holding onto a government job, but instead about upholding the rule of law and preserving the Voice of America, which is so important to the national security of the United States,' Abramowitz wrote in a message to VOA staff Monday.
KARI LAKE, who serves as USAGM senior adviser, told West Wing Playbook that 'We're in good faith union negotiations. This is part of the process.'
WE'RE HIRING: The National Weather Service has received permission to hire 450 meteorologists, hydrologists and radar technicians months after the agency faced sweeping DOGE-led cuts, CNN's ANDREW FREEDMAN reports. The new hiring number includes 126 new positions that will apply to 'front-line mission critical' personnel, a NOAA official told CNN.
Musk Radar
FIVE THINGS UNDONE: The White House today officially ended a program which required federal employees to summarize five weekly achievements in emails, our NICOLE MARKUS and Sophia report. The mandate was originally introduced in February by ELON MUSK as part of an effort to trim the federal workforce.
Office of Personnel Management Director SCOTT KUPOR said in a statement that OPM informed agency leads that it would no longer 'manage' the process 'nor utilize it internally.'
'At OPM, we believe that managers are accountable to staying informed about what their team members are working on and have many other existing tools to do so,' Kupor said.
Agenda Setting
ZELDIN'S ON A HEATER: The EPA is preparing to terminate $7 billion in federal grants aimed at assisting low- and moderate-income families to install solar panels on their homes, NYT's MAXINE JOSELOW reports. The agency is drafting termination letters to 60 nonprofit groups and state agencies that received the grants under the 'Solar for All' program, with the goal of sending the letters by the end of this week.
It's the latest move by the Trump administration to claw back billions of dollars in grants awarded under former President JOE BIDEN's Inflation Reduction Act. Representatives for the EPA did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
REVERSING COURSE: Months after the Trump administration said it axed a multibillion-dollar grant program for disaster protection, administration officials said in a court document that it did not actually cancel the program, POLITICO's E&E News' THOMAS FRANK reports. In April, the administration canceled the grant program called Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities, and removed all $4.1 billion from the BRIC account.
But in a declaration last month for a court case challenging the move, FEMA acting administrator DAVID RICHARDSON said, 'FEMA has not ended the BRIC program, contrary to publicity otherwise.' He acknowledged his agency's role in that publicity, saying, 'Despite FEMA's public announcements … FEMA/DHS has not ended BRIC.'
When presented with the declaration, even BRIC supporters struggled to understand it.
'The information that has been out so far seems to contradict [the declaration], and we want to make sure we're understanding FEMA's intention. This is happy news if this is the case,' said MARY JO FLYNN-NEVINS, head of governmental affairs for the International Association of Emergency Managers, which strongly supports the BRIC program.
WHERE'S THE MONEY, LEBOWSKI? The investigative arm of Congress found that the National Institutes of Health illegally withheld funds lawmakers required it to spend, our ERIN SCHUMAKER reports. The Government Accountability Office today said that the Trump administration failed to follow the requirements of the Impoundment Control Act, which determines when a president can cancel funding appropriated by Congress.
In implementing a communications pause earlier this year at HHS, and in complying with Trump's various executive orders, the 'NIH withheld funds from obligation and expenditure,' according to the GAO's report. The watchdog also found that HHS failed to inform Congress or the GAO of whether the money is being spent in another way.
OUR LIPS ARE SEALED: Defense Secretary PETE HEGSETH has banned officials at a missile defense conference in Alabama this week from discussing the president's favorite weapon system: the multibillion-dollar Golden Dome missile shield, our JOE GOULD and JACK DETSCH report. It follows new rules from the Pentagon that ban personnel from participating in think tank and research organization events.
Hegseth's public affairs office told organizers of the Space and Missile Defense Symposium to keep the Golden Dome off the agenda. The Pentagon, when asked for comment, pointed to a July announcement about the creation of an office to oversee the missile shield's development.
What We're Reading
A Terrible Five Days for the Truth (The Atlantic's David A. Graham)
'Unlike Anything We've Seen': The Energy Industry is Counting on the AI Boom (POLITICO's Debra Kahn)
A Look Inside Jeffrey Epstein's Manhattan Lair (NYT's David Enrich, Matthew Goldstein, Jessica Silver-Greenberg and Steve Eder)
POTUS PUZZLER ANSWER
President ABRAHAM LINCOLN signed the first federal income tax into law on this date in 1861 in a rush to finance the Civil War. Lincoln's tax imposed a 3 percent tax on annual incomes over $800.