Politics Desk

WASHINGTON  — The Supreme Court on Thursday rejected an antiabortion challenge to federal regulations that permit sending pills through the mail once a patient has consulted a doctor online.

The justices granted an emergency appeal from the makers of mifepristone and set aside an order from a U.S. appeals court in Louisiana that would have made it illegal to send or receive the medication by mail.

Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr. dissented.

“The court’s unreasoned order granting stays in this case is remarkable,” Alito wrote. “What is at stake is the perpetration of a scheme to undermine our decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which restored the right of each State to decide how to regulate abortions within its borders.”

The decision is a setback for abortion opponents, including Louisiana Atty. Gen. Liz Murrill, who sued and argued that her state’s ban on abortion has been thwarted by abortion pills sent by mail.

Thursday’s order preserves access to the medication under the current rules, but it is not a final decision.

The case will now return to the 5th Circuit Court in New Orleans for further review.

“Today’s ruling buys time, but no peace of mind,” said Nancy Northup, president of the Center for Reproductive Rights. “Mifepristone access remains highly at risk as this case moves forward and the Trump administration conducts a politically motivated review of this pill with the hardly disguised aim of making it harder to get.”

National Right to Life expressed deep disappointment.

“Women facing unexpected pregnancies deserve real medical care and support, not a one-size-fits-all mail-order abortion system that minimizes risks and leaves women isolated during medical emergencies,” said Carol Tobias, the group’s president.

The legal dispute has put the Trump administration in a politically awkward spot.

Critics of abortion, including Republican attorneys general from 23 states, argued that the regulations adopted during the Biden administration have thwarted their state laws and allowed patients to obtain medication from doctors in California and New York.

But the Trump administration has shown no urgency to change the regulations that allow for dispensing the pills by mail.

Alito, who spoke at the 5th Circuit a week ago, said he agreed with the state’s argument.

“Louisiana’s efforts have been thwarted by certain medical providers, private organizations, and States that abhor laws like Louisiana’s and seek to undermine their enforcement,” he wrote. “These medical providers and private organizations have developed an operation enabling women in Louisiana and other States that restrict abortions to place an online order for a pill called mifepristone that induces abortion.”

Thomas said abortion is a crime in Louisiana.

The makers of the abortion pills have no grounds to sue “based on lost profits from their criminal enterprise. They cannot, in any legally relevant sense, be irreparably harmed by a court order that makes it more difficult for them to commit crimes.”

But most of the court’s conservatives refused to go along, even though they had voted to overturn the constitutional right to abortion.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts and Justices Neil M. Gorsuch, Brett M. Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett refused to block the current regulations on a fast-track appeal.

Two years ago, the court handed down a similar decision involving abortion pills and the 5th Circuit Court.

The justices overturned a 5th Circuit ruling on the grounds that the antiabortion doctors who sued had no standing because they did not prescribe or use the medication.

In 2000, the FDA approved the use of mifepristone as safe and effective for ending an early pregnancy or treating a miscarriage. It is used in combination with a second drug misoprostol, which induces cramping.

Since 2016, the FDA has relaxed regulations on its use. They include a requirement that women obtain the pills directly from a doctor or a medical clinic. However, it was understood the medication would be taken later at home.

The agency temporarily suspended this rule in 2021 in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, then lifted it entirely in 2023.

Medication abortions now account for almost two-thirds of abortions in the United States, and telehealth is used in 27% of abortions nationwide. Last year, in response to abortion opponents, the Trump administration agreed to review the safety record of mifepristone.

“Mifepristone is one of the safest and most well-studied drugs on the market,” said Dr. Camille A. Clare, president of the American College of Obstetricians & Gynecologists. “The FDA removed the in-person dispensing requirement after careful evaluation of the data because mifepristone is safe and effective even when distributed by mail.”

But the Louisiana attorney general decided to sue in federal court without waiting for the FDA.

She argued that the mailing of abortion medication, which was approved under the Biden administration, was undermining her state’s strict ban on abortions.

A federal judge in Louisiana said the state appeared to have a strong claim, but he decided not to rule on it until the FDA completed its review.

The 5th Circuit Court of Appeals responded a few days later by ruling the FDA erred by relaxing its regulations to allow for dispensing the pills by mail. The three-judge panel then put its ruling into effect immediately on May 1.

Abortion law experts called out the decision as extreme and unusual.

“To our knowledge, no court has ever ordered the FDA to reimpose on a drug a safety rule the agency has thoroughly studied and deemed unnecessary,” said Melissa Goodman, executive director of UCLA’s Center for Reproductive Health, Law and Policy.

COLUMBUS, Ohio — The bitter divorce between an Ohio congressman and his former wife, the daughter of one of the state’s U.S. senators, has escalated into new legal action.

Republican U.S. Rep. Max Miller filed a defamation lawsuit against Emily Moreno, his one-time spouse, on Wednesday in Cleveland, citing “the considerable reputational and financial harm” caused to him by her accusations that he was “a violent and abusive husband and father.”

Miller, a two-term congressman up for reelection this fall, alleges that Moreno, her attorney Andrew Zashin and his law firm have engaged in a defamatory campaign against him by spreading knowingly false information about him to media outlets including the Daily Mail, a British tabloid, and the New York Post. The action contends that the resulting damage to his reputation undermines his chances of reelection.

Those outlets have “circulation measured in the tens of millions of print and online readership,” the complaint states, and their articles have been read, viewed or discussed by Miller’s constituents, his congressional colleagues, ”his political supporters and donors, the media, and the general public.”

The suit seeks compensatory damages in excess of $25,000, punitive damages sufficient to deter future similar conduct and attorney’s fees.

“Congressman Miller is seeking to hold those responsible accountable and to obtain damages for the significant personal, professional, and political harm that he has suffered,” his spokesman said in a statement.

Zashin declined comment.

The incident brings to mind a similar situation that played out as Miller, a White House aide to President Trump during the Republican’s first term, made his first run for Congress in 2021.

Miller’s former girlfriend, one-time White House Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham, raised allegations in her book and in a Washington Post op-ed at the time that a former White House staffer later identified as Miller had physically abused her while they were dating. Miller responded by filing a defamation lawsuit against her. He voluntarily dismissed the suit with prejudice in August 2023, just before the case was set to go to trial.

Moreno’s spokesperson, Stefan Mychajliw, cited the earlier lawsuit in a statement Thursday.

“Mr. Miller is upset because he’s tried to silence Emily Moreno the same way he silenced Stephanie Grisham — and Emily won’t let him,” he said, suggesting Miller is “running the same playbook against a woman with photographs of her bruises and burns.” He added, “Mr. Miller will not silence Ms. Moreno.”

Miller married Emily Moreno in 2022. They had a daughter in 2023.

He filed for divorce in August 2024, as her father, Bernie, was making a successful run for U.S. Senate backed by Trump. The abuse allegations — most recently, Moreno said Miller threw boiling water at her, an allegation he denies — come amid a messy custody battle that has included Miller seeking a restraining order against his ex-wife and subpoenaing the senator to testify. The divorce was finalized last June.

Miller’s spokesperson provided documentation that several allegations that he had abused his daughter were investigated by the Cuyahoga County Division of Children and Family Services and deemed unsubstantiated.

Amid the drama, Democrat Brian Poindexter, a five-term local councilman and union ironworker, is looking to oust Miller and flip Ohio’s 7th Congressional District in November.

Smyth writes for the Associated Press.

WASHINGTON — When Kash Patel visited Hawaii last summer, the FBI took pains to note the director was not on vacation, highlighting his walking tour of the bureau’s Honolulu field office and meetings with local law enforcement.

Left out of the FBI’s news releases was an exclusive excursion that Patel took days later when he participated in what government officials described as a “VIP snorkel” around the USS Arizona in an outing coordinated by the military. The sunken battleship entombs more than 900 sailors and Marines at Pearl Harbor.

The swim, revealed in government emails obtained by The Associated Press, comes to light amid criticism of Patel’s use of the FBI plane and his global travel, which have blurred professional responsibilities with leisure activities. The FBI did not disclose the snorkeling session or that Patel had returned to Hawaii for two days after his initial stopover on the island.

“It fits a pattern of Director Patel getting tangled up in unseemly distractions — this time at a site commemorating the second deadliest attack in U.S. history — instead of staying laser-focused on keeping Americans safe,” said Stacey Young, who founded Justice Connection, a network of former federal prosecutors and agents who advocate for the Department of Justice’s independence.

With few exceptions, snorkeling and diving are off-limits around the USS Arizona. The battleship, now a military cemetery reachable only by boat, has stood as one of the nation’s most hallowed sites since Japan bombed and sank it in 1941. Marine archaeologists and crews from the National Park Service make occasional dives at the memorial to survey the condition of the wreck. Other dives have been conducted to inter the remains of Arizona survivors who wanted to rest eternally with their former shipmates.

Still, since at least the Obama administration, the Navy and the park service have quietly allowed a handful of dignitaries, including military and government officials responsible for management of the memorial, to swim at the site. The Navy and park service declined to provide details of those permitted to take such excursions.

Former FBI directors have visited Pearl Harbor on official business, but none going back to at least 1993 has gone snorkeling at the memorial, according to those familiar with their activities and a former government diver who spoke to AP on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution. The diver said it was unusual for a director or anyone not connected to the memorial to be granted such access because the swims come with physical risks and present security, safety and logistical challenges.

Patel has faced scrutiny over his leadership for the past year, with his use of government resources emerging as a recurring storyline of his tenure. The issue flared in February when video surfaced of Patel partying in the locker room  with members of the U.S. men’s hockey team after their gold medal win at the Winter Olympics in Milan.  Patel defended the trip as recently as this week as “purposely planned” in connection with a cybercrime investigation involving the Italian authorities.

Unanswered questions about exclusive outing

Patel’s excursion was in August as he spent two days in Hawaii on his return to the United States from official visits to Australia and New Zealand. On his way to those countries, he stopped in Hawaii to visit the Honolulu field office. An FBI spokesman did not answer questions about the snorkeling session.

The FBI said in a statement that top regional commanders hosted Patel at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam “as they commonly do with US government officials on official travel.” The Pearl Harbor visit, the spokesman said, “was part of the Director’s public national security engagements last August with counterparts in New Zealand, Australia, our Honolulu Field Office, and the Department of War.”

It was not clear how Patel’s snorkeling session was arranged. A Navy spokesperson, Capt. Jodie Cornell, confirmed the outing but said the service was not able to track down who initiated it.

Participants in Patel’s swim were told “not to touch/come into contact with” the sunken ship in any way, Cornell said. She added that the snorkelers were also briefed about “the historic significance of the Memorial as the final resting place/tomb for hundreds of service members.”

A ‘VIP Snorkel’

Government emails obtained by the AP through a public records request show military officials coordinated logistics and personnel for the “VIP Snorkel.”

The National Park Service, which administers the site in coordination with the Navy, told AP it was not involved in Patel’s swim and declined to comment on the excursion. It also declined to answer questions about any other such outings.

Among those afforded invitations to snorkel have been Navy admirals, secretaries of defense and interior, according to the former government diver. The diver added that the swims were intended to provide officials with insights into the memorial and its operations.

The Navy declined to provide examples or numbers showing how frequently it organizes such excursions. It described Patel’s outing as “not an anomaly.”

Hack Albertson, a Marine veteran, is part of a select group from the Paralyzed Veterans of America trained to dive on the Arizona annually to check on the condition of the wreck. He said it was inappropriate for Patel and other political figures to snorkel or dive at the memorial.

“It’s like having a bachelor party at a church. It’s hallowed ground,” he said. “It needs to be treated with the solemnity it deserves.”

Some family members don’t object to snorkeling

Some family members of Pearl Harbor survivors said they were not bothered by such official excursions, though some expressed a desire to also be permitted to snorkel at the site. They said they have not been permitted to do so.

“I have not heard of anyone who would object to these visits as they are very rare and there aren’t any survivors of the Arizona left alive,” Deidre Kelley, national president of the Sons and Daughters of Pearl Harbor Survivors, wrote in an email. “Their children might have some objections but I haven’t heard any.”

Patel visited Pearl Harbor several years ago during a trip he made to Hawaii while serving as chief of staff to Christopher Miller, then the acting secretary of defense, according to the former government diver.

Miller said he snorkeled over the Arizona during an official visit to the base, but Patel was not present for that excursion. Miller said he was invited to snorkel by regional military officials and was told such a tour was for “special occasions and for special visitors, of which you’re one.” He called it a “meaningful” experience.

“It was a very somber and meaningful event,” Miller said in an interview. “It was a historical tour. It wasn’t a recreational thing.”

FBI will not discuss Patel’s return to Hawaii

Beyond the snorkeling excursion, it is not clear what else Patel did during his second stop in Hawaii.

Flight tracking data for the Gulfstream G550 typically used by the FBI director show the jet remained on the island two nights during that stay before flying on to Las Vegas, Patel’s adopted hometown. The jet has a published range of about 7,700 miles, meaning the plane would have needed to refuel somewhere between New Zealand and Washington.

The snorkeling session happened one day after Patel stopped in Wellington to open the FBI’s first  standalone office  in New Zealand. The visit sparked controversy after the AP revealed that Patel had gifted that country’s police and spy bosses inoperable 3D-printed replica pistols that were  illegal to possess  under local gun laws.

Mustian, Tucker and Biesecker write for the Associated Press. Mustian reported from New York. AP writers Audrey McAvoy in Honolulu, and Konstantin Toropin contributed to this report.

A federal judge has ordered the Trump administration to bring a Colombian woman back to the U.S. from Congo, after she was deported to the African nation that had refused to accept her.

The deportation of Adriana Maria Quiroz Zapata “was likely illegal,” U.S. District Judge Richard J. Leon ruled Wednesday.

Zapata, 55, who has diabetes and a thyroid condition, “has been sent to a country that refused to accept her because they cannot provide sufficient medical care,” the ruling said. “As a result, she faces a daily risk of medical complications, up to and including death.”

Black spots began to grow on Zapata’s back and foot while she was in detention, her skin started to peel and her nails blackened, according to a declaration that Zapata submitted in court, and which was provided to the AP by her lawyer.

“She’s not doing well and does worry that she’s going to die,” her lawyer, Lauren O’Neal, said.

Zapata entered the U.S. from Mexico in August 2024 and was taken into Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody. Since being deported, she has lived in a hotel in Kinshasa, Congo’s capital. The hotel gates are locked, O’Neal said. Zapata and other deportees are rarely allowed out, and only with supervision, she said.

Zapata was among thousands of immigrants living legally in the U.S., waiting for rulings on asylum claims, when they were suddenly issued deportation decrees that ordered them expelled to countries where most had no connections.

More than 15,000 third-country deportation orders were issued in the White House push for ever more immigrant expulsions, advocacy groups say, though only a fraction of the orders have been carried out.

Few details are known about the agreements to accept these deportees, though the U.S. has signed them with a range of countries, including Ecuador, Honduras, Uganda, Cameroon and Congo. Advocacy groups estimate only a couple of hundred third-country deportations, at most, have been carried out.

Galofaro writes for the Associated Press.

WASHINGTON — The head of U.S. Border Patrol, the agency tasked with securing the nation’s frontiers and increasingly tapped by the Trump administration for immigration operations in American cities, announced his resignation Thursday.

Michael Banks’ decision, announced in a Fox News interview and later confirmed by the Department of Homeland Security, is the latest leadership shake-up of officials implementing President Trump’s immigration crackdown and comes as the Republican administration appears to be recalibrating its approach.

“It’s just time,” Banks was quoted as saying in a report on the Fox News website. “I feel like I got the ship back on course from the least secure disastrous chaotic border to the most secure border this country has ever seen,” he said.

In a statement, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection commissioner, Rodney Scott, thanked Banks for his service “during one of the most challenging periods for border security.”

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

It was not immediately clear who will replace Banks. He led an agency at the forefront of Trump’s high-profile immigration enforcement efforts but kept a lower profile than some other officials such as Gregory Bovino, a now-retired commander who became a public face of the city operations.

CBP is one of the federal agencies that participated since last year in a series of immigration enforcement operations, carried out primarily in cities governed by Democrats —an effort that triggered a spike in arrests and led to the fatal shooting of two U.S. citizens in Minneapolis this year at the hands of federal immigration officers.

Banks’ resignation takes place two months after Markwayne Mullin, a former Republican senator from Oklahoma, became homeland security secretary. DHS oversees CBP and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, also known as ICE.

Banks is stepping down at the same time that ICE is also going through a leadership transition. Todd Lyons, the acting ICE director, is leaving later this month and will be replaced by David Venturella, who worked for years for private contractors before returning to government service.

CBP was established in 2003 and handles customs, immigration, and agricultural regulations to secure U.S. borders.

Banks returned to the Border Patrol last year after a long agency career that had never landed him in its senior ranks. His star had risen as border czar to Gov. Greg Abbott, R-Texas, during a period when illegal crossings reached record highs and the state launched a multibillion-dollar enforcement surge that led to turf battles with the Biden administration.

Banks kept a relatively low public profile as arrests for illegal crossings that have plunged to their lowest levels since the mid-1960s, a trend that began toward the end of that Democratic administration.

Banks did not appear publicly at the Border Security Expo this month in Phoenix, an annual conference at which government officials update contractors on the state of the border. Scott, who was Banks’ supervisor, is a close ally of Trump border czar Tom Homan and has acted more as the agency’s public face.

In the interview with Fox News, Banks said that after 37 years, “it’s time to enjoy the family and life.”

WASHINGTON — Senators unanimously approved a resolution Thursday to withhold their pay during government shutdowns, an attempt to make federal closures financially painful for lawmakers after a string of record-breaking impasses in the past year.

The bipartisan support for the measure comes at a time when federal closures have become longer and more frequent, frustrating lawmakers who say there should be punishment when Congress fails at its most basic legislative duty.

Under the resolution, senators’ pay would be withheld by the secretary of the Senate whenever a government shutdown affects one or more agencies, then released once funding is restored. It will take effect the day after the Nov. 3 general election.

“Shutting down government should not be our default solution to our refusal to work out our issues and our differences,” said Sen. John Kennedy, the bill’s sponsor, in a floor speech Wednesday.

“This is about putting our money where our mouth is,” said Kennedy, R-La.

Two shutdowns in the past year created significant financial hardship for tens of thousands of federal workers, particularly at the Department of Homeland Security. The department reopened last month after a 76-day partial shutdown, the longest agency funding lapse in history.

The Homeland Security shutdown came just a few months after a 43-day lapse of the entire federal government, which was the longest such closure on record.

The Constitution stipulates that lawmakers must be paid so they have received salaries during shutdowns even as federal workers went without paychecks. When the full government shutdown began in October amid a dispute over health care subsidies, Sen. Lindsey Graham proposed a constitutional amendment to require members to forfeit their paychecks when the government is closed.

“If members of Congress had to forfeit their pay during government shutdowns, there would be fewer shutdowns and they would end quicker,” Graham, R-S.C., said at the time.

Graham said his legislation was the most “constitutionally sound” way to deal with the problem, but the process would have been much more laborious as three-fourths of states must ratify an amendment.

Lawmakers in previous shutdowns have often pledged to forgo their paychecks while federal workers went unpaid.

Kennedy told reporters Wednesday that he pushed his measure to ensure there is “shared sacrifice” during shutdowns. He added that it does not go as far as he would like, but that it’s a start.

Asked why it does not extend to the other chamber of Congress, Kennedy said “the House’s business is the House’s business” while also touching on the tensions between the Senate and House.

“There’s a very strong undercurrent of animosity among some of my friends in the House,” Kennedy said.

“It’s quickly becoming like two kids fighting in the back of a minivan,” he said.

Cappelletti and Jalonick write for the Associated Press.

Sacramento — A veteran California political consultant has agreed to plead guilty in a scheme to steal campaign funds from Xavier Becerra, now a leading candidate for governor, when he served in the Biden administration, according to filings in her criminal case on Thursday.

Dana Williamson will plead guilty to three counts, including bank fraud and lying to authorities. In exchange, the federal government will dismiss 20 other counts against her related to her tax filings and a federal COVID-era loan she received.

A court hearing is scheduled Thursday morning.

Williamson, a former chief of staff to Gov. Gavin Newsom, was arrested in November and pleaded not guilty. The government secured guilty pleas in December from two advisors who worked with alongside her to skim money from Becerra.

The case against her and a looming plea deal have taken center stage in the California governor’s race as rivals seek to tie the charges to Becerra, who is a Democratic front runner. He hasn’t been charged, and prosecutors paint him as a victim.

Prosecutors say that Williamson, Becerra’s then-chief of staff Sean McCluskie and lobbyist Greg Campbell took part in a scheme to siphon money from Becerra’s dormant campaign account and funnel it to McCluskie.

McCluskie needed the money, according to prosecutors, so he could afford to fly home frequently to see his family in California while working for Becerra, who was Biden’s health secretary, in Washington, D.C.

As part of the scheme, Williamson and another consultant charged Becerra’s account up to $10,000 a month to manage one of his dormant state campaign accounts.

Becerra approved the payments, even though he had never paid such a high amount for a similar job. He told The Times that McCluskie told him to pay the fees.

Becerra’s rivals in the governor’s race are hammering him over his decision, arguing he should have known something wasn’t right. Becerra has said that he didn’t know about the criminal behavior and has called the charges a “gut punch.”

Known as an hard-nosed and aggressive operator, Williamson’s career in politics also included working for former governors Jerry Brown and Gray Davis and mentoring other women.

McGregor Scott, Williamson’s attorney, told reporters last year that federal authorities initially approached Williamson about helping them with a probe into Newsom. She refused, he said, and was subsequently charged.

Details contained in the indictment and other public records suggest that federal authorities were looking into the state’s handling of alleged sexual harassment at Activision Blizzard Inc., a video game company.

Picking the wildest fantasy promoted by President Trump as a basis for public policy is increasingly challenging — is it his yarn about schoolchildren being secretly abducted from their classrooms and given sex-changing operations? The notion that the vaccines given to children are like “a vat, like a big glass, of stuff pumped into their bodies?”

Here’s one that has disrupted the economics of renewable energy generation and will cost Americans billions of dollars: It’s Trump’s “completely weird war on wind power in the United States,” based on a sheaf of “fact-free arguments.”

That judgment comes from Steven Cohen, a climate policy expert at Columbia University, who points out that wind already accounts for 10.5% of U.S. energy generation, that it’s destined to continue growing — and that most of it is generated today in red states such as Texas, Oklahoma, Iowa and Kansas.

There is no question that Trump’s weird war against wind is full blown. On the day of his second inauguration, he issued an executive order shutting down all new permits for offshore wind farms and ordered the Interior Department to review existing permits.

A federal judge in Massachusetts blocked the executive order in December, and his orders suspending work on existing offshore wind projects have been halted by other federal judges. The Trump administration has blocked or delayed as many as 165 wind projects on private land, citing “national security” concerns, according to the American Clean Power Assn.

Most recently, Trump has reached agreements with offshore wind firms in which the government will pay them a combined $2 billion to abandon their U.S. projects.

At some level, this crusade resembles Trump’s misguided effort to revive the American coal industry, which is on the glide path to inevitable extinction. In that case, Trump is waging an explicitly partisan and ideological battle. “We’re ending Joe Biden’s war on beautiful, clean coal,” he declared last April.

Trump’s anti-wind program is part of his campaign to dismantle U.S. renewables policy because of its roots in the Biden administration.

Additionally, multiple commentators conjecture that his hostility to wind originated in 2011, when he groused that an offshore wind farm would be visible from one of his golf courses in Scotland. He sued to thwart the “ugly” project, and lost.

But Trump has mustered other arguments against wind, on- and offshore, none of which holds water.

During a cabinet meeting in July 2025, he called wind “a very expensive form of energy.” In fact, on average it’s cheaper than natural gas, coal and nuclear generation. Perhaps more important, the cost has been coming down sharply as technology improves and the sector reaches critical mass: falling to eight cents from 21 cents per kilowatt-hour from 2010 to 2024 for offshore projects, and to 3.4 cents from 11.3 cents for land-based wind farms over the same period.

Trump blamed wind turbines for mass killing whales and birds. Neither assertion is correct.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, a federal agency, says “there are no known links between large whale deaths and ongoing offshore wind activities.”

The Audubon Society reported in January that although wind turbines can present hazards to birds, “developers can effectively manage these risks without significantly increasing project costs.” The biggest risks to birds come from the climate: “Two-thirds of North American birds are at increasing risk of extinction from global temperature rise,” the society reported — a threat that wind power can ameliorate.

Trump spokeswoman Taylor Rogers didn’t respond to my questions about the derivation of his anti-wind stance, but told me by email only that “President Trump has been clear: hard-earned taxpayer dollars shouldn’t be wasted on unreliable and costly wind farms that pose serious threats to our national security. Instead, we should be strengthening and expanding our infrastructure that produces reliable, affordable, and secure energy like natural gas plants.”

That brings us to the recent deals with offshore wind developers. The largest single deal, signed in March, was with the French firm TotalEnergies, which is to receive approximately $1 billion from the federal government to abandon all of its U.S. offshore wind projects and invest instead in oil and gas projects, including a liquefied natural gas export facility in Texas.

In his March 23 announcement of the deal, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum called offshore wind “one of the most expensive, unreliable, environmentally disruptive, and subsidy-dependent schemes ever forced on American ratepayers and taxpayers.”

This is what Huck Finn would call a “stretcher,” given the decades of subsidies spooned out to the oil and gas industry, reaching more than $30 billion a year in federal and state tax credits, indulgent regulation of pollution and low-cost access to federal lands. Indeed, the investment firm Lazard recently reported that renewables, including wind, are a cost-competitive form of generation even without subsidies. (Lazard’s calculation is of the “levelized cost of energy,” meaning the average cost over a generating plant’s lifetime.)

TotalEnergies fell into lockstep with the Interior Department in its own announcement, explaining its willingness to renounce U.S. offshore wind power because “offshore wind developments in the United States, unlike those in Europe, are costly,” echoing the agency’s position that “the development of offshore wind projects is not in the country’s interest.” Never mind that one factor that makes U.S. offshore wind development costly compared with Europe is the Trump administration’s opposition.

The government subsequently reached an agreement to pay the French company Ocean Winds $885 million to walk away from two offshore wind projects, including one in the waters off California. Ocean Winds described the deal as one driven chiefly by economics, but hinted at pressure from the White House.

“We welcome the opportunity to engage constructively with the administration on this agreement and acknowledge the clarity they have provided with this decision and deal,” Michael Brown, the chief executive of Ocean Winds North America, said when the deal was announced last month. “Our priority remains disciplined capital allocation and delivering reliable energy solutions that create long-term value for ratepayers, partners, and shareholders.”

The TotalEnergies deal, which the government has described as a “refund” of money the firm paid for its offshore leades, raised the hackles of congressional Democrats, who assert that it violates the law and constitution in multiple ways.

“We will hold you accountable for this billion-dollar ripoff,” Reps. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee and Jared Huffman (D-San Rafael), ranking member of the House Committee on Natural Resources, warned TotalEnergies CEO Patrick Pouyanné in an April 29 letter.

Among other infirmities Raskin and Huffman alleged, the government’s national security rationale for canceling offshore wind leases looks “fabricated”; the payout violates the statutory formula for compensation for canceled leases; the money is to come from a fund designed only to pay court-ordered judgments and settlements of lawsuits, which don’t exist in this case; and includes a provision preventing the deal from being reviewed by a court.

The last of those provisions would have to be authorized by Congress, the letter states, asking for documents and a response from the company by Wednesday. Committee spokespersons weren’t available to say whether they received a response from TotalEnergies, and the company didn’t respond to my request for comment. I received no response from the Department of the Interior.

The California Energy Commission has opened an investigation into the Ocean Winds deal.

“The Trump Administration is recklessly spending billions of taxpayer dollars on backroom deals that would turn back the clock on innovation” CEC Chair David Hochschild said. “Taxpayer dollars should be used to build a sustainable energy future, not to pay to make projects disappear.”

What’s especially wasteful about Trump’s crusade against wind power is that it’s almost certain to be time-limited.

It’s hardly debatable that renewables such as solar and wind will be our principal sources of energy in the future; holding back the clock achieves nothing but injecting uncertainty into investment decisions that need to be made now, at a time when the price of oil is on the upswing thanks to Trump’s Iran adventure and Europe and China are racing to transition away from fossil fuels, while the U.S. remains becalmed by ideology.

“In the long run, fossil fuels will be used for petrochemicals and not for burning,” Cohen told me. “Fifty years from now, people are going to be amazed that we burned these rare, useful hydrocarbons for fuel, when the sun was just sitting up there providing an essentially infinite source of energy.”

SACRAMENTO — Hours before Gov. Gavin Newsom is expected to present his budget plan on Thursday, his office released new projections of a $16.5-billion state revenue windfall over three years and offered a rosy outlook on California’s fiscal position during his final year in office and the year after.

Newsom’s office provided few details about his plan to reduce spending or other adjustments that he would need to propose in combination with the increase in revenue to eliminate projected deficits from 2026-27 through 2027-28.

The unusual early look at his budget proposal comes as Newsom begins to wind down his time at the state Capitol and considers a run for president in 2028.

Two weeks ago, the Legislative Analyst’s Office issued an analysis of state spending that said California could not, in the long term, afford to pay for existing services and the new programs that Newsom and Democratic lawmakers have enacted since he took office in 2019. State spending has outpaced California’s strong revenue growth by about 10%, creating a perennial budget shortfall, defined as a structural deficit.

California’s spending problem threatens to define Newsom’s fiscal legacy and could provide ripe fodder for his critics. If projections of the unexpected tax windfall, which analysts attribute to stock market interest in artificial intelligence companies, bear out, the upswing could mark a lucky break for Newsom.

The governor has largely resisted adopting new across-the-board tax increases or sharply curtailing his expensive policy proposals in order to align state spending with revenue.

His budget proposal includes a call to increase taxes on corporations by limiting state tax credits to no more than $5 million, or 50% of a company’s tax liability, beginning in the tax year 2027. No estimates were offered to explain how much revenue the new cap would bring in to support the state budget.

The preview of his budget has several new spending proposals, including providing $300 million to help low-income Californians keep $0 monthly premiums on healthcare coverage through the Affordable Care Act in response to cuts by the federal government, as well as $100 million to help wildfire victims afford construction loans to rebuild their homes. Two days before Mother’s Day, Newsom also introduced a plan to provide 400 free diapers for every California newborn at select hospitals beginning this summer.

Newsom is expected to present his budget in more detail late Thursday morning in Sacramento.

Three political ads meant to break through our collective indifference caught my eye this week, as we come down to the wire on the June 2 primary election.

Each one says less about the candidates involved, and more about this moment in politics and where the races for California governor and L.A. mayor may be headed. Each ad also hints at deeper issues that haven’t quite reached the water-cooler conversation level, but maybe should.

Becerra blunder

The first ad that grabbed my attention was a quick-turn by San José Mayor and gubernatorial candidate Matt Mahan (still stuck in single-digit polling numbers), who jumped on Xavier Becerra’s first major mess-up.

Becerra chastised KTLA interviewer — on camera — not to give him too many hard questions because, “This is not a gotcha piece, right?”

That left a lot of folks wondering about his temperament and transparency, something rival Katie Porter knows a bit about.

The video went viral, and Mahan mashed it up with now-infamous clips of Porter walking out of a different interview earlier in the campaign cycle.

The result was a fast, funny, pointed jab that made both Becerra and Porter look prickly and unaccountable. For Porter, that damage was done long ago. But this moment for Becerra, the very-slim-margin front-runner, could have sticking power.

New polls, which likely don’t account for the impact of this gaffe, have Becerra edging up in a lead over Tom Steyer or maybe just tied. If Becerra is leading, it’s not by much, and he’s not a shoo-in by any means.

The bigger issue is that there are many hard questions that Becerra will likely need to answer if he does make the general election — questions he’s largely been dodging with pat answers.

This week, one of the lobbyists charged in a scheme that allegedly stole more than $200,000 from one of Becerra’s old campaign accounts will appear in court again.

She’s apparently been working on a plea deal, so it’s likely either that will be formalized, or the case will move forward to a trial. Becerra is not accused of any wrongdoing and told my colleague Dakota Smith that he had testified before the grand jury in the case.

But Becerra has also said he was aware that up to $10,000 a month was being paid out of a dormant campaign account to manage that money, since his role as the Health and Human Services Secretary made it illegal for him to be involved directly.

The question that seems relevant in this age of fraud-and-waste panic is who pays $10,000 a month to have someone watch over a dormant account and doesn’t think that’s excessive? Becerra may have been an innocent victim, but $120,000 a year is a lot of money to pay someone to babysit a largely unused stack of cash.

If Becerra does make it through to the primary and faces Hilton or potentially Steyer, both successful businessmen, expect this lack of financial acumen to be an issue — a hard question that is fair to ask of the person who wants to run the fourth largest economy in the world.

Steyer backers

Speaking of money, the second ad (or sort-of ad) that caught my attention is tied to Steyer, the billionaire who has spent more than $100 million of his own money in this race.

The Sacramento Bee reported that Steyer’s campaign has been paying influencers to post support of him online. The account mentioned in the Bee’s report seems to have removed those videos, but others have archived some of them.

These posts are meant to decidedly not feel like advertisements, but just organic support from Steyer supporters. Steyer’s is far from the first campaign to do this and won’t be the last.

Trump, Kamala Harris, Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA — all of them have courted influencers, paid or unpaid, to reach voters, especially young ones. California is one of the few states with a law that tries to regulate some of this type of content, but it’s not a strong law.

While there may be nothing shocking in Steyer’s digital strategy, it should alarm us on the larger level of having a healthy democracy. We’ve largely forgotten the black hole of delusion that millions of Americans fell into during the pandemic era from online misinformation brokers. Remember QAnon?

Influence campaigns are shockingly powerful, and growing in sophistication by the minute. While Steyer’s efforts may be run-of-the-mill, it’s an area of political communication that demands greater transparency and regulation.

Pratt problems

Which brings us to Spencer Pratt, and the ad (ads, really) that caught everyone’s attention — the AI-generated mini-movies that blatantly steal the “Batman” and “Star Wars” intellectual property and which have earned so much viral attention that the mayor’s race can now fairly say it’s got national reach.

Pratt did not make these ads, but he’s reposted them, and millions have watched. Though it may seem obvious they are made by artificial intelligence, they are not identified as such.

Pratt has portrayed himself as angry with what he’s sees as Bass’ failure after the Palisades and Eaton fires — a fair criticism that many share. He’s made his own ads highlighting how his family is forced to now live in an Airstream trailer, though TMZ reported Wednesday that Pratt has actually been camping out at the Hotel Bel-Air, where rooms were starting at $1,420 a night this week. (Pratt disputes this reporting and said Wednesday that he doesn’t live anywhere.)

Though parody is protected speech, one of the AI videos Pratt has promoted ends with a crowd, including a child, pelting L.A. Mayor Karen Bass, Gov. Gavin Newsom and Kamala Harris with fruit until they flee.

Jeb Bush, the former governor of Florida, posted online that it was “maybe the best political ad of the year.”

I disagree. While a certain segment of conservative white male voters might find it hilarious to pelt women of color until they run in fear, I’m pretty sure there are some messages in that missive that aren’t getting the scrutiny they deserve.

The links between hate speech and political violence are well documented. Outrage and action are tied, but now increasingly removed from reality. How AI — especially AI depicting political rivals as unhinged, evil villains — will affect voters, and democracy in general, isn’t yet understood.

I doubt these ads on behalf of Pratt will change the minds of many voters, but they do change politics.

And not for the better.

What else you should be reading

The must-read: Ex-gubernatorial candidate Stephen Cloobeck interfered with witness in girlfriend’s case, authorities say
The deep dive: How a fast food taco showed us who Steve Hilton really is
The L.A. Times Special: A bombshell fraud case takes the spotlight in California’s high-stakes race for governor

Stay Golden,
Anita Chabria

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Ahead of President Trump’s arrival in Beijing on Wednesday for his summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping, longtime China expert Kurt M. Campbell offered a novel way of watching the two leaders’ high-stakes faceoff. Think of it not as nation-versus-nation or army-versus-army, but as the sort of “single combat” celebrated in ancient literature, along the lines of David and Goliath in the Bible or Achilles and Hector in “The Iliad.”

“This one has the feel of a geopolitical heavyweight matchup,” Campbell, chairman of the Asia Group strategic consulting firm, wrote in Foreign Affairs this week.

Unlike in their initial get-together early in Trump’s first term, both men now are seasoned leaders in their separate ways — Xi an unchallenged dictator, and an envious Trump seeking to be. Both act with few immediate checks on their power, though Xi acts strategically and Trump impulsively and transactionally. And both, as leaders of super-powers, have the capability to shape the economic and security fates of a wary world.

That world, Campbell concluded in his essay, is “eager to see whether the two leaders emerge driving together in the chariot, or with one dragging the other behind,” as Achilles did the vanquished Hector.

However the Trump-Xi meeting ends, Trump is no Achilles going into this match. In fact, in the six decades of U.S.-China relations, perhaps no American president has entered the summit arena in a weaker position than Trump, the would-be strongman and artiste of the deal. Worse, his weakness — and by extension his country’s — is mostly self-inflicted.

Trump had postponed what was intended as an early April meeting in hopes of striding triumphantly into Beijing as the conqueror of Iran, a China ally. Instead China is receiving him as a “giant with a limp,” in the phrase of its Communist Party-controlled Global Times newspaper.

Trump’s Mideast war, the sort he’d promised never to start, lingers for a third month in a costly stalemate — $29 billion and counting — that has humiliated the president in the public words of Germany’s chancellor and the private thoughts of many more global leaders, Xi likely among them. Trump can’t “project the same arrogance” as he did visiting China in 2017, a former Chinese army officer, Yue Gang, told the New York Times.

At home, the conflict has caused gasoline prices and inflation to spike while tanking Trump’s already depressed polls. A newly released CNN poll conducted April 30 to May 4 had 65% of Americans disapproving of his overall job performance and a whopping 70% against his handling of the economy — the issue that arguably got him elected. With experience, American consumers and soybean farmers now know that they, not the Chinese, have paid for Trump’s beloved tariffs.

The president’s standing at home could hardly have been helped by his parting words to reporters at the White House. Asked “to what extent are Americans’ financial situation motivating you to make a deal” with Iran, Trump blithely replied, “Not even a little bit.” He added, in the sort of political gaffe that journalist Michael Kinsley defined as telling the truth: “I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation. I don’t think about anybody.”

He’s already a loser in the negotiations with Xi. For weeks the Trump administration has unsuccessfully urged China to use its leverage to goad Iran to accept a peace on Americans’ terms or, at a minimum, to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, given China’s self-interest as Iran’s biggest oil customer by far. As China scholar Henrietta Levin of the Center for Strategic and International Studies told the Associated Press, “I don’t think China has any interest in solving the problems the U.S. has created for itself in the Middle East.”

Not least, perhaps, because China has seen that, by the Pentagon’s own reckoning, the war has depleted U.S. stockpiles of weaponry after thousands upon thousands of strikes against Iran. And that has further raised questions in China and beyond about whether Trump would have the United States come to the defense of Taiwan, the self-governing, U.S.-armed island that China claims as its own.

After all, the thinking goes, if the United States can’t bring a lesser power like Iran quickly to heel, how might it fare against a near-peer such as China, especially with a diminished U.S. arsenal and Mideast distractions?

It’s mostly a mystery what the leaders’ talks might yield. In a break with diplomatic tradition, though not with Trump’s seat-of-the-pants style, apparently little planning went into this super-power summit — another reflection of a distracted U.S. side. Still, with a number of tech, agribusiness, finance and aerospace chieftains in tow, Trump and his team are hoping for a few politically appealing deliverables, such as sales of U.S. soybeans and Boeing aircraft, to give the president a lift back home.

But don’t look for progress on the longstanding issues dividing the United States and China over trade and military dominance in the Pacific region. And as for another of those perennial issues — climate change and clean-energy technology — the U.S. under Trump has willfully surrendered global preeminence to China, ceding markets for solar, wind energy, electric vehicles, grid storage and more in his backward-looking, ostrich-like obsession with drilling oil and mining coal.

Whatever hyperbolic claims Trump makes for his China trip, the outcome of the summit (on top of his quagmire in Iran) should at least be this: retiring the myth of Trump the deal-maker and savvy businessman.

If he were such a visionary, Trump would be prodding the nation to global leadership in technology and clean-energy investments, not reversing past progress and paying companies billions of taxpayers’ dollars to stop clean-energy projects. In markets worldwide, the future is now and America is forfeiting the game to China.

In this contest, Trump is letting Xi drive the chariot. Unfortunately, average Americans are the ones being dragged through the dust as China rides into the 21st century.

Bluesky: @jackiecalmes
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Reporting from Columbus, Ohio — Donald Trump romped to victory Tuesday in Florida, chasing Marco Rubio from the race, but Ohio Gov. John Kasich won his home state, raising hopes for those seeking to stop Trump and settle the presidential contest on the floor of the Republican National Convention.

Trump also won North Carolina and Illinois and was locked in a close fight with Sen. Ted Cruz in Missouri.

“I’m getting ready to rent a covered wagon, we’re going to have a big sail and have the wind blow us to the Rocky Mountains and over the mountains to California,” Kasich said at a jubilant rally outside Cleveland.

That is just the sort of extended nominating fight the GOP establishment sought to avoid by stacking the political calendar with big early contests, capped by Tuesday night’s winner-take-all primaries in Florida and Ohio. California votes on June 7, near the close of the primary season.

Now, many of those same party types see an inconclusive nominating contest as the best and perhaps only chance of thwarting Trump, even if it threatens to shred the GOP in the process.

The setback in Ohio, where Trump campaigned hard, was his most disappointing performance since he finished second to Cruz in February’s Iowa caucuses.

His unhappiness was evident as he addressed reporters at his posh Mar-a-Lago private club in Palm Beach, Fla., and complained about the miseries of running for president.

“Lies, deceit, viciousness. Disgusting reporters. Horrible people,” the Manhattan businessman and reality TV star said. “Some are nice.”

Cruz, speaking with 99% of the Missouri votes counted, once more insisted he was the only candidate who could defeat Trump.

“Starting tomorrow morning, every Republican has a clear choice. Only two campaigns have a plausible path to the nomination — ours and Donald Trump’s,” the Texas senator told supporters in Houston. “Nobody else has any mathematical possibility whatsoever. Only one campaign has beaten Donald Trump over and over again.”

With Trump’s unmatched string of victories, no other candidate is nearly as well positioned to win the nomination ahead of the July convention in Cleveland. He padded his overall delegate lead with Tuesday’s victories, putting him ahead of Cruz and Kasich, who had not won a state before Ohio.

But there were signs Tuesday that not just the establishment but rank-and-file Republicans have yet to rally around the party’s polarizing front-runner.

Nearly 3 in 10 Republican voters across the five states said they would not vote for Trump if he wins the party’s nomination, according to exit poll interviews. Four in 10 said they would consider voting for a third-party candidate if the choice came down to Trump or the Democratic front-runner, Hillary Clinton.

Defections of that magnitude could badly undermine Trump in the general election, and that prospect will probably be stressed by his opponents going forward into next week’s contests in Arizona and Utah.

Rubio spoke to the controversy surrounding the GOP front-runner as he departed the race.

In a Miami concession speech delivered less than half an hour after the polls closed in Florida, the freshman senator congratulated Trump, wagging a finger and shushing members of the audience who booed his kind words.

Ohio Gov. John Kasich votes Tuesday in Westerville, Ohio.

(Matt Rourke / Associated Press)

Rubio then devoted the bulk of his lengthy remarks to warn against succumbing to the anger and frustration that have fueled Trump’s improbable rise.

“The politics of resentment against other people will not just leave us a fractured party,” Rubio said, as disconsolate family members stood by onstage. “They’re going to leave us a fractured nation” where people hate each other for their political views.

“Do not give in to the fear,” Rubio said. “Do not give in to the frustration.”

The son of Cuban immigrants and, at age 44, the youngest candidate in the field, Rubio was seen as one of the GOP’s rising stars, with a capacity to broaden the party’s support among millennial voters and the nation’s fast-growing Latino population.

But he failed to win more than a few contests and was never seriously competitive in his home state. Trump captured 99 delegates in Florida’s winner take-all-primary, more than a quarter of those at stake in Tuesday’s balloting.

The victory in winner-take-all Ohio gave Kasich 66 delegates, more than doubling his total but still leaving him well behind Trump. His goal is to build momentum with a series of wins positioning him as the strongest candidate heading into the Cleveland convention even if, as seems inevitable, Kasich is shy of the 1,237 delegates needed to win the nomination outright.

Pennsylvania, where Kasich was born, is the next big target on April 26.

The results Tuesday followed one of the oddest, most contentious weeks in a campaign that has been filled with strange and surreal moments.

The precipitating event was a racially charged near-riot at a Trump rally Friday night in Chicago, which was canceled out of security concerns.

Trump’s opponents quickly seized on the moment and the violent imagery that played around the world to once more challenge his temperament and fitness to be president. They accused him of fomenting the unrest through belligerent remarks that seemed to egg on his audiences into physically confronting dissenters.

Trump denied any responsibility, blaming the violence on what he called professional agitators linked to Democratic hopeful Bernie Sanders. He said the protesters provoked his supporters and were stifling their rights to free speech and assembly.

“I don’t condone violence,” Trump said repeatedly, though he sympathized with backers who chose to “be effective” with protesters in the audience. (Previously he used more pugilistic language.)

Trump said he might even pay the legal fees for a supporter who sucker-punched a demonstrator at a North Carolina rally, drawing widespread condemnation. He won the state anyway.

Indeed, for weeks increasingly desperate Republican opponents have mounted an effort to stop Trump, to seemingly little effect.

More than $10 million in negative ads blazed across the Florida airwaves in just the last week alone, attacking Trump for his ethics, the failings of his business empire and his all-over-the-map political ideology.

Those meant nothing to Mark Owens, who stepped into the Miami Beach sunshine Tuesday and lighted a cigar after casting a ballot for the political neophyte.

“We’ve trusted politicians for 200 years to run our country,” Owens said. “It’s time to give someone else a shot.”

With polls suggesting Florida was firmly in Trump’s grasp, much of the campaign focused on Ohio, another traditional fall battleground.

Trump laid on extra events, including an election-eve rally outside Youngstown in place of a planned Florida appearance, and he turned his attention to attacking Kasich after long ignoring the Ohio governor.

He assailed him for his support as a congressman for the North American Free Trade Agreement, a pact with Canada and Mexico that, Trump said, devastated the state’s economy. He also laid on personal insults in a bid to snatch a victory in Kasich’s home state and clear the governor from the race.

Kasich, whose strategy centered on staying above the salvos flying among other candidates, accused Trump of creating a “toxic” political atmosphere and, wrapping himself in the establishment mantle, spent Monday stumping alongside Mitt Romney, the party’s 2012 nominee.

With Kasich suddenly a factor in the GOP contest, the skirmishing here in Ohio seems a likely preview of what is to come.

While he pledged to take the high road at his victory party Tuesday night, Kasich sent a different message speaking to reporters earlier in the day.

He said, “I will be … forced going forward to talk about some of the deep concerns I have about the way this campaign has been run by some others — by one other in particular.”

There is no doubting who he had in mind.

mark.barabak@latimes.com

Twitter: @markzbarabak

Times staff writers Michael Finnegan, Kurtis Lee and Seema Mehta in Los Angeles and Kate Linthicum in Miami contributed to this report.

SAN DIEGO — Republican presidential candidates renewed their criticism of President Obama’s healthcare program Monday in a double-barreled assault from both coasts.

Standing before a “Repeal and Replace Obamacare” banner at a medical device manufacturer in San Diego as he opened a campaign swing in the state, Mitt Romney called the president’s policies “an attack on free enterprise, an attack on economic freedom unlike anything we have ever seen before.”

“We’ve got to make sure that we replace President Obama with someone who truly understands what it is that makes America’s economy work,” Romney said.

Decrying a tax on medical devices that is a component of the healthcare law, he argued that the Obama administration was thwarting the endeavors of entrepreneurs like NuVasive’s chief executive “tax by tax, regulator by regulator, regulation by regulation.”

“Washington is crushing the dreams, and crushing the dreamers. We can’t let it happen,” he said.

Rick Santorum, who has doggedly criticized the healthcare program his rival Romney pushed as Massachusetts governor as “the blueprint” for Obama’s law, made an unannounced stop outside the Supreme Court, where the first day of arguments were being held in a challenge to the law.

He called for its repeal and underscored what he says is a key argument for his candidacy — that he would be a stronger adversary against Obama in November.

“There’s only one candidate who has a chance of winning the Republican nomination, who can make this [Obama’s healthcare law] the central issue, a winning issue for winning the presidency back, and that’s Rick Santorum,” the former senator from Pennsylvania said. “The worst person to make that case is Mitt Romney.”

Later, in an interview on CNN, Santorum chided Romney for campaigning in California. “The whole world is watching what’s going on here in Washington,” he said. “Mitt Romney is 3,000 miles away. He should be here.”

Romney, who has defended his Massachusetts healthcare mandate as an appropriate statewide approach, brushed aside Santorum’s criticism by asserting that he was “not going to worry too much about what Rick is saying these days.”

Romney’s speech at NuVasive, whose chief executive, Alexis V. Lukianov, is an avowed critic of the Obama healthcare law, was a brief diversion from his main objective in California: raising money.

Over two days, he plans to hold five fundraisers headlined by leading figures in the state Republican establishment: 2010 gubernatorial nominee Meg Whitman, former Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan, real estate mogul Donald Bren and former Gov. Pete Wilson.

Alex Spanos, owner of the San Diego Chargers, is hosting one of the fundraisers at his Villa Angelica mansion in Stockton. Dean Spanos, Alex’s son and president of the Chargers, is leading another fundraiser at the U.S. Grant hotel in San Diego.

His star-studded political events stood in contrast to those of Santorum, who will visit California later this week. While donors were asked to contribute as much as $25,000 at Romney’s events, Santorum supporters were asked for a maximum of $2,500. Santorum’s admirers may gain entree for as little as $125 at a dessert reception Thursday at the Alamo home of Ubokia.com Chief Executive Mark Pine. Hosts include former Rep. Bill Baker and tea party activist Bridget Melson.

Though Romney has built what his campaign views as an insurmountable lead in the Republican delegate count, his rivals have refused to step aside — lending greater importance to California’s June 5 primary, when 172 delegates will be at stake.

“I need you guys to get ready, to organize your effort, to get your friends to vote, to collect some money, to get campaign contributions,” Romney said in San Diego on Monday. “We’ve got a ways to go.”

A new USC Dornsife/Los Angeles Times poll showed Romney drawing the support of 42% of registered Republican voters. Santorum trailed him by 19 percentage points, with Newt Gingrich and Ron Paul a distant third and fourth.

Gingrich and Santorum acknowledged Monday that they were unlikely to pass Romney in delegates through the remaining primaries, but they said the race for the nomination would go to the party convention in August.

“If he can get to 1,144, he’s the nominee. But if he can’t get to 1,144 on the 26th of June, the last primary, then it is going to be a wide-open electronic convention for 60 days of talking among the American people,” Gingrich said on CNN.

Santorum, speaking on the same program, said the likelihood was that no candidate would accumulate enough delegates by the time the voting contests concluded.

“This race is going to — is [in] all likelihood going to go to the convention,” he said.

—

maeve.reston@latimes.com

seema.mehta@latimes.com

Reston reported from San Diego and Mehta from Los Angeles. Ian Duncan in the Washington bureau contributed to this report.

WASHINGTON — Senate Republicans on Wednesday again blocked Democratic legislation that would halt President Trump’s war with Iran, but the number of GOP senators voting against the war grew.

Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska voted against the war for the first time since it began at the end of February. Two other Republicans, Sens. Susan Collins of Maine and Rand Paul of Kentucky, also voted against the war, as they had done previously.

The war powers legislation ultimately failed to advance 49-50, with Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania the only Democrat to oppose it, yet the close tally reflected growing unease with Trump’s war. Several other Republican senators have signaled they want Congress to weigh in on the direction of the conflict.

“There will be a day — and it might be soon, I believe — where this Senate will say to the president, ‘Stop this war,’” Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia, who has spearheaded his party’s tactic of forcing repeated votes on the war, said before the vote.

Even if it passes the Senate, a war powers resolution would have a slim chance of passing the House and would also certainly be vetoed by Trump. But Democrats say the votes are about building political pressure on the president either to withdraw from the conflict or seek congressional authorization to wage the war.

Trump officials downplay role for Congress

The White House, meanwhile, has asserted that it does not need congressional authorization for the war and has circumvented legal requirements to gain approval from Congress to continue the military campaign. It claims that it has “terminated” hostilities with Iran because the U.S. has entered a ceasefire.

That posture has created tension between the Republican-controlled Congress and the White House because presidents under the War Powers Resolution of 1973 are required to obtain authorization from Congress after 60 days of engaging in a conflict.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told lawmakers this week that the U.S. could start attacking Iran again without the White House seeking congressional approval. He told Murkowski during a hearing on Tuesday that the Trump administration believes it has “all the authorities necessary.”

Murkowski voiced skepticism about that argument. She pointed to the troops and war ships deployed to the region, saying, “It doesn’t appear that hostilities have ended.”

GOP leaders back the war, but unease grows

Republican leadership has continued to back the war with Iran, arguing that the stalemate in the Strait of Hormuz that has blocked most commercial shipping puts more economic pressure on Iran than it does on the U.S.

“Iran’s economy is on life support. Its leadership is eliminated,” said Sen. John Barrasso, the No. 2 Republican in leadership, during a floor speech Wednesday.

He also argued that the Democratic effort on the war is all about undermining Trump. Forcing the issue just as he arrived in China for a summit would “pull out the rug from under him,” Barrasso said.

Still, Republicans are also growing uneasy about the high gas prices, especially as the November elections draw near.

Sen. Mike Rounds, a Republican from South Dakota, said Wednesday he’d prefer that the two branches of government work out the constitutional issues instead of a congressional war powers vote or a potential challenge in court.

The two sides should sit down together and say “we have shared constitutional responsibilities,” Rounds said.

Democrats plan to keep forcing weekly votes on war powers resolutions and are looking ahead to put limitations on Trump during the debate over annual legislation that authorizes and funds the military.

Sen. Jeff Merkley, an Oregon Democrat who sponsored Wednesday’s resolution, told reporters that he believes there is an “erosion of support, erosion of enthusiasm, an increase in skepticism” about the war from Republicans.

Groves writes for the Associated Press.

SACRAMENTO — Gov. Gavin Newsom will propose a new $100-million fund to help wildfire victims afford loans to rebuild their homes under a revised budget plan set to be released Thursday.

The Newsom administration estimates that thousands of victims of the Los Angeles wildfires cannot afford to rebuild, blaming a lack of access to affordable loans and a gap between insurance payouts and the cost to build again.

“We have been on the ground in L.A. since Day One of recovery from these fires, and we aren’t turning our backs now,” Newsom said in a statement. “This community deserves continued support to help them get back on their feet, and rebuild their homes and their lives. “

The new fund would be designed to cover loan-loss guarantee to lenders, in which the state would commit to paying back a percentage of a loan amount if a borrower defaults, in order to lower the risk for lenders and encourage them to award construction loans to borrowers who might not otherwise qualify or only be eligible for loans at high interest rates. The money would also be available for homeowners to buy down their interest rates during the construction period, according to Newsom’s office.

The Eaton and Palisades fires killed 31 people and destroyed over 16,000 structures in January 2025.

A recent survey of the wildfire victims found that homeowners estimate they need more than $600,000 on average above their insurance payouts to rebuild their homes, according to a report from a wildfire recovery nonprofit called the Department of Angels. The gap in Altadena was about $550,000, and between $1.19 million and $1.73 million in Pacific Palisades and Malibu.

Under Newsom, California has also provided mortgage relief to more than a thousand wildfire survivors under CalAssist, a program that provides grants to eligible homeowners to cover mortgage payments for 12 months up to $100,000.

The governor’s new proposal will be included in his funding plan for the upcoming 2026-27 budget year that begins July 1.

State revenue from income tax collection is higher than initially forecast, a boon that is expected to wipe out a projected deficit in the year ahead. Analysts attribute the revenue increase to an artificial intelligence boom in the stock market.

Though likely temporary, the extra funding is expected to give Newsom enough cushion to balance the state budget without major cuts and lower a projected shortfall in 2027-28.

The proposal to create the rebuilding fund requires support from both houses of the California Legislature and would move forward as a trailer bill accompanying the state budget. The funding would be available to disaster survivors, though details on eligibility will be determined during the legislative process.

WASHINGTON — David Venturella, a former executive at a private prison operator, will serve as the acting head of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Trump administration says, after the agency’s current leader steps down at the end of the month.

A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security said late Tuesday that Venturella would succeed Todd Lyons, who led the agency through much of the administration’s tumultuous crackdown on immigration. ICE did not immediately respond to an email seeking additional information Wednesday.

Venturella left the Geo Group in early 2023 and has been working at ICE leading the division that oversees detention contracts, members of Congress wrote in a public letter earlier this year.

At the Geo Group, which houses around one-third of ICE detainees, Venturella served in a number of posts, including executive vice president overseeing corporate development, according to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing. He also oversaw removal operations for ICE in 2011 and 2012 after working for federal contractors, including one that specializes in security clearances and background checks.

Geo has benefited from President Trump’s mass deportation push, garnering big contracts to open three shuttered facilities. Among them was a $1-billion, 15-year deal for a detention center in New Jersey’s largest city.

“Last year was the most successful period for new business wins in our company’s history,” Geo’s CEO George Zoley said during an earnings call last week.

Geo owns and operates 23 ICE detention facilities, with about 26,000 available beds. Zoley also said that ICE’s air transportation subcontract had continued to steadily increase and that it secured a new contract last year for electronic monitoring.

Venturella will lead ICE at a time when the public mood has soured on Trump’s immigration crackdown, which sent surges of federal immigration officers into American cities to round up immigrants. Those raids sent tensions soaring and prompted clashes between protesters and law enforcement, leading to the fatal shootings of two U.S. citizens in Minneapolis earlier this year.

Trump returned to the White House on a promise of mass deportations, and ICE has been a central executor of that vision. Under Lyons’ leadership, the agency used a massive infusion of cash to expand hiring and detention capabilities, and it ramped up arrests to meet demand from the Republican administration.

Federal officials announced Lyons’ departure last month from ICE, which had gotten $75 billion from Congress to fulfill Trump’s mass deportation campaign.

Venturella’s appointment comes as Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin settles into his role atop the Cabinet agency overseeing ICE. Mullin has promised to keep his department out of the headlines and has indicated a softer tone on immigration, although he is expected to align with the president’s priorities on mass deportations.

One contentious issue confronting Homeland Security now is a plan for converting warehouses into immigrant detention centers. Conceived while Kristi Noem led the department, the effort has encountered multiple lawsuits and intense community blowback, including in Republican-led states.

The $38.3-billion plan would increase detention capacity to 92,000 beds and mean acquiring eight large-scale facilities, capable of housing 7,000 to 10,000 detainees each, and 16 smaller regional processing centers.

Those, and other sites, were supposed to be running by the end of November. But after Noem’s departure, the department paused the purchase of new warehouses as it scrutinizes all contracts signed during her tenure.

Last month a judge extended a pause on transforming a massive Maryland warehouse into a processing facility for immigrants, and there are signs that federal officials are scaling back the plans.

This could be good news for Geo. The Florida-based company has about 6,000 idle beds at six company-owned facilities, Zoley said last week.

Zoley had offered a note of skepticism about the warehouse plan during an earlier earnings call in February, noting that renovating a warehouse is “more complicated than you may think.” At that point, he said the company was “cautiously” looking at whether to bid to help operate some of them.

Hollingsworth writes for the Associated Press.

BEIJING — An extraordinary display of power and precision along Tiananmen Square greeted President Trump in Beijing on Thursday, kicking off a two-day summit with particularly high stakes for the Americans.

Trump’s meetings with his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, began at the Great Hall of the People moments after a welcome ceremony that seemed to impress the president, featuring a Chinese military honor guard and a greeting from excited school children. American flags waved as “The Star Spangled Banner” rang out on a smoggy day in the heart of the capital.

Children holding Chinese and U.S. flags rehearse before the welcome ceremony for President Trump.

(Maxim Shemetov / Associated Press)

Trump reflected on the stakes of his visit at the top of the meeting, telling Xi that the ceremony was an honor “like few I’ve seen before.”

“There are those who say it may be the biggest summit ever,” he said. “I have such respect for China, the job you’ve done.”

Both men struck a conciliatory tone, despite the agenda for the summit featuring some of the thorniest issues facing the two superpowers today, from the U.S. war in Iran to trade relations and the future of Taiwan.

“We’ve gotten along — when there have been difficulties, we’ve worked it out,” Trump added. “We’re going to have a fantastic future together.”

Trump is expected to ask Xi for help reopening the Strait of Hormuz, a vital commercial waterway disrupted by Iran since the start of the war, and for the extension of a truce in the trade war he started at the beginning of his second term.

China, in turn, will ask the Trump administration not to proceed with arms sales to Taiwan, despite their approval by Congress, and for a declaration of opposition to Taiwanese independence. Beijing also seeks access to top-end chips made by American manufacturers.

Chinese President Xi Jinping and President Trump shake hands at the Great Hall of the People.

(Kenny Holston / Associated Press)

The agenda exposes the mutual dependence of the two rival superpowers, marked by distrust but driven by a quest for cooperation and stability.

The welcome ceremony outside of the Great Hall kicked off with Xi shaking the hands of Trump’s delegation, including figures such as his political advisor, James Blair, his communications director, Steven Cheung, and his daughter-in-law, Lara Trump.

They were just a few members of a U.S. delegation accompanying Trump filled with curiosities.

Chinese officials were surprised to learn that Pete Hegseth was joining Trump in Beijing this week, marking the first time a president has brought his secretary of defense on an official state visit. It wasn’t immediately clear to the Chinese what his inclusion was meant to convey.

Eric Trump, the president’s son, is here, seeking to leverage the family name for lucrative business deals as Beijing aggressively campaigns against government corruption at home. And First Lady Melania Trump decided to stay at home, an unusual snub of such a high-level event.

A contingent of U.S. business leaders was given little notice to prepare for the trip, including the CEO of Nvidia, who raced to join Trump aboard Air Force One at a refueling stop in Alaksa.

The diplomatic faux pas follow weeks of Chinese frustration over what they see as the Trump administration’s lack of preparation — a perceived display of incompetence that boosts their confidence heading into the negotiations.

Over the course of the visit, Trump is expected to visit the Temple of Heaven, a monument to imperial China and Confucian thought in the center of Beijing. Ahead of Trump’s arrival, an area roughly the size of 400 American football fields was closed in preparation for a stop here.

On Thursday night, local time, Trump will return to the Great Hall of the People for a banquet dinner. Additional meetings are scheduled for Friday morning before Trump departs midday for home.

WASHINGTON — The Senate confirmed President Trump’s nominee to lead the Federal Reserve, Kevin Warsh, bringing new leadership to the world’s most powerful central bank at a fraught moment for the global economy.

Warsh was confirmed Wednesday in a largely party-line vote. His nomination had been thrown into doubt in recent months after Republican Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina said he would block the nomination while the Justice Department investigated Fed Chair Jerome H. Powell. The Powell inquiry was dropped in April, clearing the way for the Senate to confirm Warsh.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) urged colleagues to support Warsh during a floor speech Wednesday morning, saying it’s crucial that a Fed chair “understand not only the macro” but also “appreciate the microeconomy: and that’s the hardworking Americans, their jobs and their livelihoods.”

“Kevin Warsh is just such a person,” Thune said.

Warsh, 56, a former top Fed official, will become chair at an unusually difficult time for the independent agency.

Inflation has topped the Fed’s 2% target for five years and is now rising faster because of surging gas prices. The Fed’s interest rate-setting committee is divided and saw the most dissenting votes in more than three decades last month. And Powell, after years of personal attacks from the Republican president and an unprecedented legal investigation by the Justice Department, plans to stay on the Fed’s board even after his term as chair ends, potentially creating a competing power center.

Trump has demanded change at the Federal Reserve

The Fed has faced numerous threats to its independence from Trump, who has repeatedly attacked Powell for not cutting interest rates. Trump also sought to fire Fed Gov. Lisa Cook and launched an investigation into brief Senate testimony by Powell on a building renovation.

Kevin Hassett, director of the White House’s National Economic Council, said in a Fox News interview on Sunday that he believes the markets are relieved that Warsh “is going to help lower interest rates over time.”

“Obviously, data driven,” said Hassett. “I’m not putting any pressure on Kevin Warsh.”

In December, Trump said on his social media platform that he wanted a Fed chair who would cut interest rates when the stock market rose — the opposite of what traditional economics would prescribe — and added, “Anyone that disagrees with me will never be the Fed chairman!”

Trump’s comments have fueled concerns over whether Warsh will set rates based on economic conditions or seek to cut rates to appease Trump, even if doing so could worsen inflation. At Warsh’s confirmation hearing last month, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a Democrat from Massachusetts, derided him as a “sock puppet” for Trump. Warsh declined to say that Democrat Joe Biden had won the 2020 election against Trump, who has falsely claimed that voter fraud cost him reelection.

Still, Warsh denied at the hearing that Trump had pressured him to reduce the Fed’s key rate.

“The president never once asked me to commit to any particular interest rate decision, period,” Warsh said then. “Nor would I ever agree to do so if he had. … I will be an independent actor if confirmed as chair of the Federal Reserve.”

A critic of the Fed’s leadership in the past

Warsh has been highly critical of the Fed’s recent track record, particularly the inflation spike in 2021-22, the worst in four decades, and has called for “regime change.” Yet he has provided only broad outlines of what that change would involve.

He has called for limiting the Fed’s communications, which would be a sharp shift after decades of increasing transparency. He has argued that some of its communications tools, such as quarterly forecasts of where its key rate may head, have made it harder for officials to switch gears.

Senate Democrats also have condemned Warsh for not fully divulging the details of his extensive wealth, which disclosures show amounts to at least $100 million. His investments include stakes in Polymarket and SpaceX, but he hasn’t revealed how large those holdings are. He promised to sell all such assets within 90 days of being sworn in.

“He will be the wealthiest Fed chair in history, but he refuses to provide transparency to the American people about who he is entangled with,” Warren said.

Warsh faces difficult economic conditions

The Fed is still grappling with how to respond to the 50% jump in gas prices from the Iran war. The increase has boosted inflation, which reached 3.8% in April.

The Fed is tasked by Congress with keeping prices stable, which it seeks to do by raising its short-term rate to make borrowing and spending more expensive, cooling growth and inflation.

The Fed typically looks past temporary price increases that stem from supply disruptions, such as the war’s cutoff of oil through the Strait of Hormuz, because those prices typically level off — or even fall back down — once the supply is restored.

But the Fed also followed that approach after the COVID-19 pandemic snarled global supply chains for goods, lifting prices for things such as cars, furniture and electronics. Inflation turned out to last longer than expected, and Powell and other Fed officials have acknowledged they waited too long to raise rates. Inflation surged to 9.1% by June 2022.

The Fed’s rate-setting committee has kept rates unchanged for three straight meetings as it evaluates the effect of the gas price spike. At its most recent meeting last month, three members of the committee objected to language that suggested its next move would be a rate cut. They preferred more neutral language that would allow for a hike. Many Fed watchers saw those dissents as a warning shot to Warsh that he won’t be able to easily engineer rate reductions.

A fourth member of the 12-member committee, Stephen Miran, dissented in favor of a rate cut, as he has at every meeting since Trump appointed him to the Fed’s board last September. Miran is serving until a replacement is named, and Warsh will take his spot.

Powell, meanwhile, said at a news conference April 29 that he would remain as a Fed governor until the Justice Department closes its investigation into the Fed’s building project, the first time a chair may stay on the board for an extended period since 1948. His term as a governor lasts until January 2028.

U.S. Atty. Jeanine Pirro has dropped the government’s investigation, but she has said it could be reopened if the Fed’s inspector general office, which has looked into the renovation project since last July, finds evidence of criminal activity.

Rugaber and Cappelletti write for the Associated Press.

SAN SALVADOR — The number of people deported to El Salvador from the U.S. nearly doubled in the first months of 2026, according to official figures, coming as Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele has positioned himself as an ally willing to help the Trump administration accelerate deportations, a central priority.

The U.S. deported 5,033 Salvadorans back to their country in the first three months of 2026 compared with 2,547 deportees in the same period in 2025, according to El Salvador migration authority figures obtained by the Associated Press on Tuesday.

That marks nearly a 98% increase at the same time that the Trump administration has boosted deportation flights across the world. Globally, deportation flights from the U.S. rose an estimated 61% between 2024 and 2025, according to data compiled by the Asociación Agenda Migrante El Salvador, or AAMES, and other organizations.

The U.S. has stopped regularly releasing deportation data, so experts instead are relying on other information from countries such as El Salvador, deportation flights and other numbers.

The sharp increase in deportations “confirms a real hardening of the U.S. immigration system toward the region,” said César Ríos of AAMES.

The jump comes as Bukele, a tough-on-crime politician, has sought to align himself with President Trump, and the U.S. government has lined up allies across Latin America to help the Republican carry out his agenda. While Mexico and other Central American nations have quietly accepted deportees from third countries, Bukele has boldly embraced Trump’s efforts in Latin America.

In March 2025, Bukele most notably accepted 238 Venezuelan deportees accused of being members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua and locked them up in a mega-prison built for accused gang members in the Salvadoran leader’s ongoing offensive on domestic gangs. The incident fueled widespread accusations of human rights abuses.

The geopolitical firestorm came after Trump’s government struck a deal with Bukele to accept what they described as transfer and imprisonment of foreign criminals to El Salvador. Under the agreement, El Salvador would receive $6 million from the U.S.

In March 2025, the Trump administration mistakenly deported Kilmar Abrego García, a Maryland resident and Salvadoran citizen with protected status in the U.S., setting off yet another legal and political controversy. Bukele originally refused to return Abrego García and denied accusations of beating and torture — which have been widely documented by human rights groups in Salvadoran prisons.

He was returned to the U.S. in June to face charges that he helped bring immigrants to the U.S. illegally, something his lawyers call “baseless.” Abrego García has pleaded not guilty and asked a judge to dismiss his case as the U.S. Department of Homeland Security announced that it hoped to deport Abrego García to Liberia.

Even more recently, Bukele joined a coalition of other right-leaning Trump allies in a group of countries that the Republican president dubbed the Shield of the Americas, purportedly aimed at cracking down on criminal groups in Latin America, even though the two most essential countries in that effort — Mexico and Colombia — refused to attend.

Meanwhile, many migrants in the U.S. are turning their eyes on U.S. Supreme Court arguments as Trump seeks to stop shielding hundreds of thousands of migrants from Haiti and Syria, a decision many of the more than 200,000 Salvadoran migrants with temporary protections worry might eventually affect them.

Bukele has helped the U.S. with its immigration agenda even before Trump entered office.

In 2023, El Salvador’s government began to slap a $1,130 fee on travelers from dozens of countries connecting through the nation’s main airport, amid pressure from the Biden administration to help control the number of migrants moving toward the United States’ southern border. At the same time, migration from El Salvador, fueled by gang violence and poverty, dipped after Bukele’s contentious war on the gangs.

Analysts said that Bukele’s government used dips in migration as a bargaining chip to offset human rights criticisms by the U.S.

Alemán and Janetsky write for the Associated Press. Janetsky reported from Mexico City.

Vice President JD Vance said Wednesday that the Trump administration is deferring $1.3 billion in Medicaid reimbursements to California over concerns the state is allowing “fraudsters” to drive up costs to taxpayers, including by pushing unnecessary medications on unsuspecting patients.

“There are California taxpayers and American taxpayers who are being defrauded because California isn’t taking its program seriously. But also, you have people who’ve been prescribed medications that they don’t even need,” Vance said. “Sometimes they’ve had drugs put into their bodies that they don’t need because fraudsters have actually encouraged false prescriptions and false administration and medications.”

Vance, standing alongside Dr. Mehmet Oz, the administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, said the administration is also sending letters to all 50 states informing them that if they do not “effectively and aggressively prosecute Medicaid fraud in their states,” they will see federal funding cut off as well.

“We want California to get serious about this fraud,” said Vance, who President Trump named his “fraud czar” last month.

Oz called out what he said was widespread fraud in hospice services and similar in-home care programs nationally — and particularly in the Los Angeles region — and announced a six-month moratorium on new Medicare enrollment for hospices and home health agencies.

“A third of all these programs in the entire country are in Los Angeles. Ask yourself, how is that possible? It’s not,” Oz said. “They’re not that many people dying in Los Angeles. We’re not talking about California, just Los Angeles.”

He said he and others in the administration determined that “at least half of the hospices, in the entire area around Los Angeles, are fraudulent,” and had shut down 800 of them that last year had “charged the federal taxpayer $1.4 billion,” which “will no longer be paid.” That is a major increase from the 450 providers the administration said it had suspended as of last month.

The announcement was the latest attempt by the Trump administration to highlight and rein in fraud in federal healthcare benefits programs, particularly in blue states. The actions were met with immediate push back from California officials.

“We hate fraud. But that’s NOT what this is,” Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office posted on the social media site X. “Vance and Oz are attacking programs that keep seniors and people with disabilities OUT of nursing homes. Pretty sick.”

Newsom’s office said that the growth of In-Home Supportive Services placements in California was “simple,” and due to California “keeping more people OUT of far more expensive nursing homes!”

Such services cover assistants who help people with daily tasks such as bathing, laundry or cooking; provide needed care such as injections under the direction of a medical professional; and accompany them to and from doctor’s appointments. A 2020 report by the California state auditor found that nearly three-quarters of IHSS caregivers assist a family member.

Newsom’s office wrote IHSS care costs $30,000 a year, while nursing home care costs $137,000 a year. “SAVING TAXPAYERS: $107K per person,” it wrote.

California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta also criticized the administration’s moves.

“Once again, California appears to be targeted solely for political reasons,” Bonta said. “The Trump administration is planning to defer over $1 billion in Medicaid funding for vital programs that helps seniors and people with disabilities remain safely in their homes.

“My team is carefully reviewing all available information. We have not hesitated to challenge unlawful actions by the Trump administration, and we will continue to act whenever Californians’ rights or access to critical services are threatened,” he said.

Democratic Sen. Alex Padilla also lashed out at the Trump administration.

“The Trump Administration is attacking California over claims that they can’t back up,” Padilla wrote on social media. “Let’s be real, this isn’t about fraud — it’s about punishing a state that didn’t vote for him. Political retribution plain and simple.”

Fraud in California’s hospice industry has been a problem for years.

Authorities in the state promised to crack down on the issue after a Times investigation in late 2020 revealed that unscrupulous providers were billing Medicare for hospice services and equipment for patients who were not actually dying — with the hospice industry in the state exploding in size.

California’s Medicaid program, known as Medi-Cal, is expected to cost about $222 billion for the budget year starting July 1, including both state and federal funding. Roughly 15 million Californians, more than a third of the state, are on Medi-Cal.

Vance, a potential 2028 presidential hopeful, has taken up his work as “fraud czar” with vigor, traveling around the country to drive home the idea that the Trump administration is working diligently to bring down healthcare costs by addressing waste, fraud and abuse that is rampant across the system.

He has said that waste and abuse is particularly prevalent in Democratic-led states such as California, New York and Minnesota.

“We have red states and blue states that go after fraud aggressively, but we also, unfortunately, have some states, mostly blue states, unfortunately, that do not take Medicaid fraud very seriously,” he said Wednesday.

Vance specifically threatened to cut off what he said is billions in federal funding for state-run fraud control units that are meant to prosecute people who abuse the system, but which he said aren’t doing the work. “This is a tool that we want the states to use, but unfortunately, a lot of states aren’t using these tools at all,” he said.

The focus on fraud comes against a backdrop of criticisms that other policy measures pushed by the administration have driven healthcare costs up or made it harder for people to access healthcare — including cuts to Obamacare subsidies and new work requirements in Medicaid, which are expected to strain hospitals around the country and led to millions of people losing healthcare coverage.

Democrats and Republicans have argued over who is to blame for rising healthcare costs, and Vance and Oz have clashed with California leaders before.

In January, Newsom filed a civil rights complaint against Oz after he posted a video accusing Armenian crime groups of carrying out widespread healthcare fraud in Los Angeles. In the video, Oz was shown driving around Van Nuys, saying about $3.5 billion worth of Medicare fraud had been perpetrated by hospice and home care businesses — and “run, quite a bit of it, by the Russian Armenian mafia.”

Newsom called Oz’s claims “baseless and racist.”

The administration previously launched investigations into potential healthcare fraud in at least five states — California, Florida, Maine, Minnesota and New York — and halted some $243 million in Medicaid payments to Minnesota over fraud concerns.

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services has also acknowledged using errant figures to justify a fraud probe in New York, deepening concerns in the administration’s methods for identifying problematic activity.

Vance said the deferral of funds to California and the letters warning other states to get serious is not about political retribution, but a wake up call. He said the Trump administration wants to help states root out fraud and abuse, including with new technologies — but can’t do so if they are not “willing to help themselves” first.

“We don’t want to turn off any money. What we want to do is ensure that people are taking fraud seriously. We want to protect Medicaid, we want to protect Medicare,” Vance said. “But we can’t do that if the states that are administering those programs are allowing those programs to be fleeced by fraudsters.”

The Associated Press contributed to this article.

ORLANDO, Fla. — Environmental groups say that the timing of the expected closure of an immigration detention center in the middle of the Florida Everglades, likely in the next month or two, is no accident because it will come as their lawsuit challenging its existence returns to a federal judge who had previously ordered it shut down.

A federal appellate court decided last month to keep open the detention center nicknamed “Alligator Alcatraz,” for the time being, blocking a lower court decision ordering it to wind down operations. But the case was sent back to the lower court judge who now gets jurisdiction over the lawsuit as the litigation over the facility’s fate continues.

“Knowing that the same district judge who previously enjoined the operation would soon reassume oversight — the defendants are now effectively waving the white flag,” said Paul Schwiep, an attorney for the environmental groups that had sued, saying the facility’s construction hadn’t undergone a required environmental review.

When asked about the future of the state-run facility and its costs on Wednesday, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said that he hadn’t gotten any “official word” that federal authorities are going to stop sending detainees to the center.

But vendors who supply and help run the facility have been told that the closure could be as soon as next month, according to reports Tuesday by the New York Times and CBS News Miami. The Florida Department of Emergency Management, which operates the detention center, didn’t respond to an emailed inquiry on Wednesday. The Republican governor’s press secretary, Molly Best, referred questions about the facility to the state emergency management agency.

“We didn’t build any permanent facilities down there because we knew it was going to be temporary,” DeSantis said Wednesday at a news conference in Titusville, Fla.

DeSantis’ administration opened the facility in July to support the immigration crackdown by the administration of President Trump, who visited the detention center last summer. An attorney for two detainees has accused guards of severely beating and pepper-spraying detainees. Other detainees have said worms turn up in the food, toilets don’t flush and mosquitoes and other insects are everywhere.

“This monument to cruelty, waste and environmental and tribal lands abuse should have never been built,” U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a Democrat from Florida, said Tuesday.

Friends of the Everglades and the Center for Biological Diversity sued state and federal officials a short time after the facility opened, claiming the remote airstrip site in the Everglades wasn’t given a proper environmental review required by federal law before it was converted into an immigration detention center. U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams in Miami agreed and ordered in August that the facility must wind down operations within two months.

The appellate court blocked the order, saying the Florida-run facility wasn’t under federal control and didn’t need to comply with federal law requiring an environmental impact review.

But the appellate court made clear that once Florida got federal reimbursement for the facility, it would have to comply with the federal environmental law, Schwiep said.

DeSantis said Tuesday that the state expected to be reimbursed by the federal government for $608 million, which has already been approved by the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

“There’s no negotiations on that,” he said.

Schneider writes for the Associated Press.

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration on Wednesday pursued new efforts in a sweeping initiative to root out fraud in federal health programs, including announcing a nationwide six-month freeze on some new Medicare enrollments and warning states to actively investigate Medicaid fraud or risk losing funding.

The moves are related to Vice President JD Vance’s anti-fraud task force, which has been accelerating its messaging before the November elections. The panel set up by Republican President Trump seeks to crack down on potential misuse of public money.

The most significant step Wednesday came from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services with a nationwide six-month moratorium on all new Medicare enrollments by providers of hospice and home care.

“We’ve seen systemic and deeply troubling fraud in the hospice and home health space, with bad actors exploiting some of our most vulnerable Medicare patients and stealing money from the American taxpayer,” the agency’s administrator, Dr. Mehmet Oz, said in a statement. “Today we’re shutting the door on fraud — preventing new bad actors from entering Medicare while we aggressively identify, investigate, and remove those already exploiting them.”

The Department of Health and Human Services’ internal watchdog has sent letters to state attorneys general warning them to vigorously investigate possible fraud or risk losing federal money.

People across the United States have raised concerns about rising healthcare costs and barriers to access, sometimes from the federal government’s actions. New work requirements in Medicaid, for example, are expected to strain hospitals around the country and result in millions of enrollees losing their health coverage.

Several alleged fraud schemes have been prosecuted in the hospice and home health care categories, and states have acknowledged that it is a legitimate concern. But some have pushed back on the administration’s aggressive tactics and raised concerns that the catchall efforts could needlessly punish law-abiding providers that are trying to serve patients.

What the freeze does

The administration contends the enrollment freeze and other actions it is taking will help prevent potential fraud in Medicaid and Medicare and preserve funding and resources for people most in need. Under the six-month pause, existing hospice and home health care providers will continue to operate as usual. But the Medicare and Medicaid agency said it will “intensify targeted investigations, deploy advanced data analytics, and accelerate the removal” of providers in the category that are suspected of fraudulent activity.

Such a freeze is not unprecedented, said Tricia Neumann, a senior vice president and executive director for the program on Medicare policy at the healthcare research nonprofit KFF. She said President Clinton’s Democratic administration also imposed a temporary moratorium on home health agencies.

“A brief moratorium gives the administration time to crack down on true fraud and prevent new fraudulent entities from popping up,” she said.

Maine becomes a focus

Vance, a potential 2028 White House hopeful, has used the high-profile assignment from Trump to remind Americans struggling with high costs that he is trying to claw back taxpayer dollars. Vance has promoted the task force’s work during campaign stops for Republican candidates and is expected to focus on the effort Thursday in Maine, where there are closely watched primary races on June 9.

Oz said earlier in the year that he was calling for corrective action on alleged fraud in government health programs in Maine, a request characterized by the state’s Democratic governor, Janet Mills, as a “political attack.”

Federal investigations and oversight

In recent months, the Medicare and Medicaid agency has suspended payments to hundreds of hospice and home care agencies in Los Angeles over alleged fraud and issued another six-month moratorium on suppliers of durable medical equipment, prosthetics, orthotics and certain other supplies in Medicare.

The administration also has approached at least five states with investigations into potential healthcare fraud and halted about $243 million in Medicaid payments to one of them, Minnesota, over fraud concerns. Last month, Oz announced his agency would add to that oversight by requiring all 50 states to share how they planned to revalidate some of their Medicaid providers.

In at least one case, the administration has erred in its accusations against states. In April, the Medicare and Medicaid agency acknowledged to the Associated Press that it made a significant error in figures it used to help justify a fraud inquiry in New York. The acknowledgment deepened doubts about the administration’s methods and raised a common criticism about the second Trump administration — that it tends to attack first and confirm the facts later.

Swenson and Price write for the Associated Press. Swenson reported from New York. AP writer Geoff Mulvihill in Haddonfield, N.J., contributed to this report.