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New York to monitor Trump’s deportation efforts with new legal observers | Reuters

NEW YORK, Feb 3 (Reuters) – New York is creating a team of legal observers that will don purple vests to monitor and record the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement officers as they seek to detain and deport migrants, the state’s attorney general said on Tuesday.

The announcement follows weeks of sometimes violent tumult in Minneapolis, where U.S. President Donald Trump has deployed thousands of armed, masked agents as he tries to deport more migrants than any of his predecessors.

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New York Attorney General Letitia James said the state’s new legal observers would be volunteer employees from her office, trained to observe, without interfering, whether Trump’s immigration enforcement “remains within the bounds of the law.”

“I am proud to protect New Yorkers’ constitutional rights to speak freely, protest peacefully, and go about their lives without fear of unlawful federal action,” James, a Democrat, said in a statement. “We have seen in Minnesota how quickly and tragically federal operations can escalate in the absence of transparency and accountability.”

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security, which oversees the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, said James was putting New Yorkers in danger by not working with ICE.

“ICE law enforcement wouldn’t have to be in the field in New York if we had state and local cooperation,” Tricia McLaughlin, a DHS spokesperson, said in a statement.

TRUMP LINKS DEPORTATIONS WITH CRIME REDUCTION

Trump, a Republican, has reserved his most aggressive surges in immigration enforcement for states governed by his political opponents, particularly California, Illinois and Minnesota. New York is home to one of the biggest and busiest DHS field offices, but Trump has not announced any major enforcement surge in the state.

He says the deportations of many migrants, including some who were legally admitted into the U.S., are necessary to reduce crime, although his argument is often contradicted by crime data.

In Minneapolis, residents have come out in protest, many blowing whistles and recording video as immigration agents in military-style gear roam the streets. Twice in January, immigration agents fatally shot U.S. citizens who had come out to protest or observe: Renee Good and Alex Pretti.

Minnesota’s leaders have accused the Trump administration of going too far and violating the constitutional rights of both migrants and U.S. citizens, including their rights to observe and protest government actions.

In New York, small groups of legal observers are common at street protests, sometimes wearing the bright green hats of the National Lawyers Guild, focused on whether local police are violating rights or laws that protect freedom of speech.

But a formal state-organized effort to deploy legal observers to monitor federal law enforcement appears to be new. James, an outspoken foe of Trump who successfully sued him and his real estate firm for financial fraud, says she will use information gathered by the observers to decide whether to bring legal challenges.

Reporting by Jonathan Allen in New York; Additional reporting by Ted Hesson Editing by Rod Nickel and Nia Williams

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Trump signs bill ending government shutdown, starting clock on ICE talks

2026-02-03T19:11:41.977Z / CNN

By [Sarah Ferris]

Updated 1 hr 20 min ago

Updated Feb 3, 2026, 4:48 PM ET

PUBLISHED Feb 3, 2026, 2:11 PM ET

House Speaker Mike Johnson arrives at the start of a press conference with members of the House Republican leadership at the US Capitol February 3, 2026 in Washington, DC.

Win McNamee/Getty Images

President Donald Trump swiftly signed a sprawling spending package into law Tuesday, ending the partial government shutdown after just three days but creating another funding cliff for the Department of Homeland Security in two weeks.

Trump and GOP leaders had pushed hard for their members to fall in line despite their own private grumblings about the bill, eager to avoid a debilitating shutdown like the one that paralyzed Washington for 43 days last fall.

The House earlier Tuesday passed the package in a hard-fought victory for both Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson, who had to cajole the fractious GOP conference to back a deal that only temporarily funds DHS and excludes certain conservative priorities.

Both GOP leaders spent the last several days furiously trying to quash a last-minute conservative rebellion, led by Rep. Anna Paulina Luna of Florida, over demands for stricter voter ID laws. Luna and others had demanded that a voter ID bill be attached to the funding package — ignoring their party leaders who wanted to punt the issue and avoid a dragged-out funding fight.

Trump personally spoke with Luna and others at the White House, in addition to phoning individual members and dispatching his team to Capitol Hill to help lock down the votes for a swift end to the partial shutdown. GOP leaders have privately tried to assuage conservative holdouts that they would find another way to push for the stricter voter ID bill, while acknowledging it doesn’t have the votes in the Senate.

Rep. Andy Ogles, who withheld his votes because of the voter ID bill, said he didn’t get any commitments from leadership but added, “I think we’re working on a plan.”

For many government agencies, Congress’ spending bill now provides long-awaited certainty after months of contentious funding talks, as well as that lengthy fall shutdown. The bill — which funds three-quarters of government agencies — would slightly reduce Congress’ spending overall, but rejects cuts to programs like the NIH, Pell Grants, and election security grants.

It also funds Trump priorities like a military pay raise and new investments in air safety. And it slashes funding for international aid programs, following the White House’s decision to shutter USAID last year.

But Congress could not agree on a budget for one key department: the Department of Homeland Security.

“The real fight begins over the Homeland bill,” Johnson told reporters Tuesday, previewing the bruising political fight that lies ahead with Democrats over changes to federal immigration enforcement.

Trump had privately agreed to the DHS funding stopgap with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer as a way to diffuse the escalating national debate over ICE after the deaths of Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis.

Trump and Democrats now have two weeks to strike an agreement on how to rein in federal law enforcement, specifically Immigration and Customs Enforcement — or face another shutdown for the department that includes agencies from TSA to FEMA.

This headline and story have been updated with additional developments.

CNN’s Veronica Stracqualursi and Samantha Waldenberg contributed to this report.

NASA plans on-pad leak repair for grounded Artemis II moon rocket before possible March launch

February 3, 2026 / 5:37 PM EST / CBS News

NASA plans an on-pad repair of the fuel leak that derailed an overnight dress rehearsal countdown for the agency’s huge Artemis II rocket. The agency then plans a second fueling test before making another attempt in March to launch four astronauts on a historic flight around the moon.

“We are still in the process of assessing the data that we collected yesterday and developing the (repair) plan,” said Lori Glaze, a senior manager in NASA’s Exploration Systems Development office. “We do believe…at this point that the work that’s in front of us can be conducted out at the pad, and that’s what we anticipate.”

Frost coats NASA’s Space Launch System moon rocket atop pad 39B at the Kennedy Space Center in the pre-dawn hours Tuesday after a dress rehearsal countdown was called off because of a hydrogen leak but before supercold propellants had been drained from the booster’s tanks. NASA has delayed the rocket’s launch to carry four astronauts to the moon and back until March at the earliest. Spaceflight Now

With a February launch ruled out and the moonshot now on hold until March at the earliest, Artemis II commander Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen ended a pre-flight medical quarantine at the Johnson Space Center in Houston Tuesday.

“Immense pride seeing the rocket reach 100% fuel load last night, especially knowing how challenging the scenario was for our launch team doing the dangerous and unforgiving work,” Wiseman said on X Tuesday afternoon. “The crew just shared a peaceful breakfast with our families and we jump back into training tomorrow to start our preps for a March launch to the moon.”

The leak in question is located between two umbilical plates where an 8-inch-wide hydrogen fuel line enters the base of the rocket. During fueling operations Monday afternoon, sensors recorded high concentrations of hydrogen in a cavity between the ground and rocket sides of the umbilical, forcing fueling to halt.

The team ultimately was able to get the leak back to acceptable levels by adjusting flow rates and temperature, and fully loading the Space Launch System rocket with nearly 800,000 gallons of supercold liquid oxygen and hydrogen fuel.

But the leak suddenly spiked in the final six minutes of the practice countdown when the first stage hydrogen tank was being pressurized as it would be for launch. At that point, an automated control system stopped the countdown and the launch team ended the test without accomplishing several major objectives.

“To me, the big takeaway was we got a chance for the rocket to talk to us. And it did just that,” said John Honeycutt, chairman of NASA’s Mission Management Team. “The test gave us exactly what we needed. It was an opportunity for us to wring out the system, as well as the team, before we ask our crew to go fly.”

Shortly after the test was called off early Tuesday, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman announced NASA would forego attempting to launch the mission in February and would instead delay the flight until the next opportunity in March when five launch days will be available between March 6 and March 11.

This is only the second flight of an SLS booster, the most powerful operational rocket in the world. During the ramp up to the rocket’s maiden flight in 2022, engineers ran into multiple propellant leaks and other problems that ended up delaying an unpiloted test flight by more than six months.

Hydrogen is the lightest element in the periodic table. It is extremely flammable and it burns very powerfully when combined with oxygen in a rocket engine. But liquid hydrogen is difficult to work with. It’s very cold — minus 423 degrees Fahrenheit — and it easily slips through even extremely tiny gaps in valves and plumbing.

Hydrogen leaks are notoriously difficult to fix because repairs can only be tested by flowing the cryogenic propellant through the pipe, valve or fitting in question at the sort of flow rates and pressures they encounter on launch day. Such testing is only done at the launch pad, and it is a major production.

During the Artemis I campaign, four “wet dress” rehearsal fueling tests were required and the rocket had to be hauled back to NASA’s Vehicle Assembly Building three times for repairs before the rocket finally blasted off.

The Artemis II moon rocket’s dress rehearsal countdown was derailed by a hydrogen leak in an umbilical connector at the base of the booster. Liquid oxygen and hydrogen fuel lines enter the rocket through two so-called tail service masts, or TSMs. The gray TSMs are visible angled together at the base of the Artemis I rocket in this file photo. NASA

How the Artemis II testing will go remains to be seen. But delaying the launch to March clears the way for a two-man, two-woman crew to blast off next week on a flight to the International Space Station. They’re going to replace four other fliers who had to cut their mission short and return to Earth last month because of a medical issue with one of the crew members.

Crew 12 commander Jessica Meir, Jack Hathaway, European Space Agency astronaut Sophie Adenot and Russian cosmonaut Andrey Fedaev plan to fly to the Kennedy Space Center Friday to begin final preparations. Takeoff atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket is scheduled for 6 a.m. EST on Wednesday, Feb. 11.

But launch will depend on Federal Aviation Administration clearance in the wake of a Falcon 9 second stage anomaly of some sort during a flight Monday to launch another batch of Starlink internet satellites.

Even though the Starlink satellites were successfully deployed, the rocket’s second stage did not operate as expected as it was preparing to fire its engine a third time to drop out of orbit. SpaceX said on X that “teams are reviewing data to determine root cause and corrective actions before returning to flight.”

Crew 12 will use the same type rocket and NASA officials said Tuesday the agency will await clearance from the Federal Aviation Administration before proceeding with launch.

Meir and her crewmates originally were scheduled to take off Feb. 15, but NASA moved the flight up four days after Crew 11 commander Zena Cardman, Mike Fincke, Japanese astronaut Kimiya Yui and cosmonaut Oleg Platonov returned to Earth ahead of schedule in January.

With Crew 11’s departure, a single U.S. astronaut, Chris Williams, was left behind aboard the space station. Williams was launched to the outpost last November aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft along with commander Sergey Kud-Sverchkov and cosmonaut Sergey Mikaev.

While Williams is trained to operate U.S. station systems on his own, NASA wants to get Crew 12 launched as soon as possible to resume normal research and to have additional crew members on hand to handle emergencies and to conduct two-person spacewalks.

Schumer faces backlash after calling SAVE Act ‘Jim Crow’ despite previous allegation falling flat

February 3, 2026 3:57pm EST / Fox News

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer stood in the way of the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act (SAVE) this week, claiming that it represents “Jim Crow” segregation laws, leading many on social media to bring up his identical claim about a Georgia voting law that resulted in record Black turnout.

Schumer pushed back on a Republican plan to add the SAVE Act, which would require states to obtain proof of citizenship in-person when people register to vote and remove non-citizens from voter rolls, to the spending package being debated in Congress.

“I have said it before and I’ll say it again, the SAVE Act would impose Jim Crow-type laws to the entire country and is dead on arrival in the Senate,” Schumer said on Monday. “It is a poison pill that will kill any legislation that it is attached to… The SAVE Act is reminiscent of Jim Crow era laws and would expand them to the whole of America. Republicans want to restore Jim Crow and apply it from one end of this country to the other. It will not happen.”

Many on social media quickly pointed to Schumer previously calling a Georgia election integrity law “Jim Crow 2.0” before the law resulted in record Black turnout in the 2022 state election.

RECORD TURNOUT IN GEORGIA PRIMARY DESTROYS LEFT’S LIES ABOUT ‘VOTER SUPPRESSION’

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., speaks at a press conference with Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., and Sen. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii., following the passage of government funding bills, at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 30, 2026.(Nathan Posner/Anadolu via Getty Images)

“Schumer used the same line to describe Georgia laws that indisputably expanded voter access back in 2022,”commentator and writer AG Hamilton[posted on X].

https://www.foxnews.com/video/6388595532112

US plastic surgeons group advises delaying gender surgery until age 19 due to insufficient evidence

By Christy Santhosh

Feb 3 (Reuters) – The American Society of Plastic Surgeons issued a statement on Tuesday recommending surgeons delay gender-related breast or chest, genital and facial surgery until a patient is at least 19 years of age, citing a lack of evidence supporting the procedure’s benefits.

The ASPS, which represents more than 11,000 physicians in cosmetic and reconstructive plastic surgery, said there is currently insufficient evidence showing a favorable risk-benefit ratio for gender-related surgeries in children and adolescents.

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According to ASPS, there is low certainty of evidence regarding mental health outcomes, along with emerging concerns about potential long-term harms and the irreversible nature of surgeries in a developmentally vulnerable population.

The association noted this position reflects recent policy shifts in countries such as the UK, Sweden, and Finland, which have also moved toward more restrictive or research-only models for minors.

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. commended ASPS and said the organization was “standing up to the overmedicalization lobby and defending sound science”.

The American Medical Association in a statement said evidence on gender-affirming surgical intervention in minors remains insufficient, and agreed with the ASPS that such procedures should generally be deferred to adulthood.

In December, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services moved to cut children’s access to gender-affirming care when it proposed rules barring hospitals that deliver such care from Medicare and Medicaid programs, and prohibiting Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program from paying for it.

Major medical organizations, including the World Health Organization, American Academy of Pediatrics and American Medical Association, have formally opposed the rules, stating they interfere with the patient-physician relationship and ignore established clinical evidence.

Many children’s hospitals and gender clinics already require patients to be adults before undergoing surgeries, which are considered the final step in gender-affirming care and are rare in those under 18, due to their irreversible nature and higher risk of complications.

Reporting by Christy Santhosh and Siddhi Mahatole in Bengaluru and Julie Steenhuysen in Chicago; Editing by Vijay Kishore

Trump signs spending bill that ends four-day government shutdown | Reuters

By David Morgan, Richard Cowan and Bo Erickson

• Summary
• Companies

• Spending deal ends partial shutdown that started on Saturday
• Democrats seek new limits on Trump’s immigration crackdown
• Sets up a February 13 for Homeland Security funding

WASHINGTON, Feb 3 (Reuters) – U.S. President Donald Trump on Tuesday signed a spending deal into law that ends a partial U.S. government shutdown and gives lawmakers time to negotiate potential limits on his immigration crackdown.

The legislation restores lapsed funding for defense, healthcare, labor, education, housing and other agencies, and temporarily extends funding for the Department of Homeland Security until February 13.

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Funding for those agencies expired on Saturday as Congress did not act in time to avert a shutdown, which has not resulted in major disruptions for government services so far.

Item 1 of 2 U.S. President Donald Trump signs a bill to end the partial government shutdown, while U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), Senator Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV) and Senator John Barrasso (R-WY) stand by his side, at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., February 3, 2026. REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein

[1/2]U.S. President Donald Trump signs a bill to end the partial government shutdown, while U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), Senator Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV) and Senator John Barrasso (R-WY)… Read more

Trump negotiated the spending deal last week with Senate Democrats, who are demanding new restraints on Trump’s aggressive immigration enforcement tactics following the killing of two U.S. citizens by federal agents in Minneapolis last month.

Trump’s administration is already deploying body cameras on immigration agents in Minnesota, partially acceding to one of the Democrats’ demands. Other Democratic proposals will face more resistance.

The deal passed the Senate by a wide bipartisan margin last week and narrowly passed the House of Representatives earlier on Tuesday by a vote of 217-214.

The last shutdown lasted a record 43 days in October and November, furloughing hundreds of thousands of federal workers and costing the U.S. economy an estimated $11 billion.

Reporting by Bo Erickson, David Morgan and Richard Cowan; Editing by Andy Sullivan, Chizu Nomiyama and Mark Porter

The measure includes funding for the Pentagon, the State Department and other key agencies

By Diana Stancy
Fox News

Published February 3, 2026 4:41pm EST

Rep. Jason Smith, R-Mo., joins ‘America Reports’ to discuss Republican efforts to end the partial government shutdown and Democrats’ refusal to assist.

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President Donald Trump has signed legislation ending the partial government shutdown that started Friday at midnight.

The legislation Trump signed funds agencies, including the Departments of State, Treasury and War and others, through the end of September and the end of the fiscal year.

However, it only funds the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) through Feb. 13, meaning Republicans and Democrats will be forced to work together to secure a longer-term funding plan for the agency.

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President Donald Trump has signed legislation ending the partial government shutdown that started Friday at midnight.(Al Drago/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

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While the House had previously passed funding bills to keep the government open through the end of September, Democrats failed to get on board with the measures in response to Trump’s ramped-up immigration efforts in Minneapolis.

DHS announced Operation Metro Surge in December 2025 to dispatch thousands of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents into the city.

SENATE REPUBLICANS TEE UP KEY SHUTDOWN TEST VOTE AS DEMOCRATS DIG IN ON DHS FUNDING

As a result, Senate Democrats refused to get behind the deal due to its funding for DHS after two Customs and Border Protection agents shot and killed Alex Pretti, a Department of Veterans Affairs ICU nurse, while he was recording federal immigration enforcement operations in Minneapolis in January.

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This undated photo provided by Michael Pretti shows Alex J. Pretti, the man who was shot by a federal officer in Minneapolis Jan. 24, 2026.(Michael Pretti via AP)

Ultimately, the Senate passed the compromise spending measure Friday that would fund key agencies, but the House was out of session and couldn’t pass its version of the measure in time to prevent a partial government shutdown. The House ultimately passed the compromise deal Tuesday by a 217–214 margin.

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President Donald Trump signs the funding bill to end the U.S. government shutdown, at the White House, Nov. 12, 2025.(Kevin Lamarque/Reuters)

The most recent shutdown comes on the heels of the longest government shutdown in U.S. history in fall 2025, where the government remained shuttered for more than 40 days in October and November 2025.

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On Nov. 12, 2025, Trump signed legislation that would continue to fund the government at the same levels during fiscal year 2025 through Jan. 30 to provide additional time to finalize a longer appropriations measure for fiscal year 2026.

Diana Stancy is a politics reporter with Fox News Digital covering the White House.

Fact check: Trump’s WSJ op-ed was littered with false and misleading claims

2026-02-03T19:51:35.443Z / CNN

The Wall Street Journal published an op-ed on Friday under the name of President Donald Trump. Trump criticized experts who warned that his tariff policies would cause economic destruction, writing that “the spectacular economic numbers coming out every single day” are proof that he was right and they were wrong.

But Trump’s rosy case was based in part on figures that are plain false or highly misleading, using cherry-picked beginning and ending points for various calculations to serve the president’s argument. And some of his qualitative claims were also inaccurate.

Here is a fact check.

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Trump repeated his regular false claim that in less than one year back in office, “we have secured commitments for more than $18 trillion” in new investment in the US, “a number that is unfathomable to many.” The number is not only unfathomable but factually incorrect. As of Tuesday, four days after the op-ed came out, the White House’s own website said the figure for “major investment announcements” during this Trump term was $9.6 trillion, and even that is a major exaggeration; a detailed CNN review in October found the White House was counting trillions of dollars in vague investment pledges, pledges that were about “bilateral trade” or “economic exchange” rather than investment in the US, and vague statements that didn’t even rise to the level of pledges.

Trump accurately noted that gross domestic product grew by an annual rate of 4.4% in the third quarter of 2025, but then he said that, despite the impact of the fall government shutdown, “the fourth quarter is projected by the Atlanta Fed to be well over 5%, a number like our country has not seen in many years.” While the Atlanta Fed’s GDPNow model was estimating fourth-quarter 2025 growth of more than 5% just over a week ago, the latest update from the model, released four days before Trump’s op-ed was published, was down to 4.2%. Also, some other estimates suggest fourth-quarter growth was lower than 4.2%.

Trump didn’t define “many years,” but 4.2% growth in the fourth quarter of 2025 would be the fastest since the third quarter of 2023, during the Biden administration, aside from the 4.4% growth in the third quarter of 2025 under Trump.

Trump claimed that, in an incredible achievement, “we have slashed our monthly trade deficit by an astonishing 77% — all with virtually no inflation, which everyone said could not be done.” We’ll address the “virtually no inflation” claim below, but the claim of a 77% decline in the trade deficit is misleading — an apparent reference to a one-time decline in October that quickly reversed in November.

Here are three big reasons why the “77%” claim is misleading.

1) The trade deficit jumped in November after a sharp fall in October. The trade deficit — the difference between the value of goods and services imported to the US and goods and services exported from the US — has been volatile this year amid the trade turmoil caused by Trump’s tariff policies. In October, the deficit fell sharply to just $29.2 billion, the lowest for any month since 2009. This was down about 77% from January 2025, the month Trump returned to office, and down about 39% from September.

But experts cautioned that the sharp October decline was likely to prove short-lived, the result of temporary fluctuations in the trade of pharmaceuticals and gold. And the deficit then spiked in November, jumping 95% back up to $56.8 billion. The November figure was still 56% lower than the January 2025 figure, but 56% is not 77%.

The November figure was released the day before Trump’s op-ed was published. (It’s not clear when Trump’s team submitted it to the Journal.)

2) January 2025 is a flawed starting point. January 2025 had the largest trade deficit on record to that point, $128.8 billion. Trump only returned to office on January 20, 2025, but experts widely attributed the giant deficit figure that month to a corporate rush to import products to the US ahead of the big tariffs Trump had promised as a candidate. So comparing any recent monthly figure to January 2025 — or to February and March 2025, when the import rush continued — is bound to show a large decline.

3) The overall trade deficit has been higher in 2025 than it was in 2024. Through November, the total goods and services trade deficit in 2025 was $839.5 billion. That’s up 4% from the 2024 deficit through November, $806.6 billion. So although Trump was at least directionally correct in the op-ed when he wrote that “American exports are up by $150 billion” — through November 2025, goods and services exports were about $185 billion higher than they were through the same period in 2024 — he didn’t mention that the increase in imports was even bigger, about $219 billion through November.

Trump wrote that “the stock market has skyrocketed” since “Liberation Day,” April 2, 2025, when he announced he was imposing sweeping global tariffs (many of which he ended up paring back). It’s true that the Dow Jones Industrial Average, the market index he mentioned in the op-ed, had increased about 17% between its close on “Liberation Day” and this Monday, February 2, 2026 — but Trump didn’t mention that many foreign stock markets have outperformed the Dow over the same period.

For example, Japan’s Nikkei 225 was up about 47%, China’s SSE Composite up about 20%, South Korea’s Kospi Composite up about 98%, Canada’s S&P/TSX Composite up about 27%, and the United Kingdom’s FTSE 100 up about 20%.

Trump wrote, “Factory construction is up by 42% since 2022.” Trump’s choice of 2022 as his starting point for this calculation is misleading given that the op-ed was purporting to provide evidence of the success of his tariffs: he took office and imposed the tariffs in 2025, when spending on factory construction actually declined from 2024. The spike above the 2022 numbers largely occurred in 2023, under President Joe Biden, as you can see in this chart.

“It’s interesting (Trump) would take credit for something that transpired during the Biden administration,” Anirban Basu, chief economist for construction industry group Associated Builders and Contractors, said in a Monday interview. Basu said that after Biden signed two major 2022 laws, the Inflation Reduction Act (which promoted clean energy and electric vehicle manufacturing) and the CHIPS and Science Act (which promoted semiconductor manufacturing), there was a boom in factory construction spending — but the data shows “that boom ends in 2025.”

The federal data set a White House official said Trump was citing here shows that total US spending on manufacturing construction was down about 5% in the first 10 months of 2025 compared to the same period in 2024, the last calendar year of the Biden administration, and that it fell for nine consecutive months in 2025 through October. Basu said Trump’s tariff policies appear to be one of the major reasons for the 2025 decline, leaving companies with less capital to potentially pursue expansion and causing many of them to adopt a wait-and-see approach in response to tariff levels that can change significantly at a moment’s notice.

Trump’s claim in the op-ed was at least more transparent than the similar claim he made in his January address to the World Economic Forum in Davos, when he said “factory construction is up by 41%” without explaining he was using 2022 as the starting point.

But the op-ed didn’t mention the decline in manufacturing jobs in this presidential term to date. Through December 2025, the economy had shed 63,000 manufacturing jobs since January 2025 — and was down 72,000 manufacturing jobs since April 2025, the month of “Liberation Day.”

Biden and real wealth

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Trump claimed that by causing an inflation crisis, Biden and his allies in Congress cost “the typical American family $33,000 in real wealth.” But this figure is misleading: real wealth increased significantly for the middle class, as well as all other groups, if you look at Biden’s presidency from beginning to end. Trump’s claim about a decline in real wealth for the “typical” family is accurate only if you look at a mere fraction of Biden’s presidency.

“There was a dip in 2022-2023 but a clear rebound in 2024,” Emmanuel Saez, a University of California, Berkeley economics professor who studies the issue, told CNN on Monday.

When CNN asked the White House where it got the claim of a $33,000 reduction in real wealth, an official responded by saying it was from an analysis by Senate Republicans on how much the average household had paid in extra costs because of Biden-era inflation. But that doesn’t make sense; you simply can’t track “real wealth,” which measures assets versus liabilities, by looking at inflation-related spending.

It appears possible that the White House, like Trump’s 2024 campaign, actually got the $33,000 figure from a Bloomberg report in July 2023 that noted that tracking by Saez and Berkeley colleagues found that, since the Federal Reserve had started raising interest rates in March 2022, average real wealth had dropped more than $33,000 per middle-class household.

Saez said his team didn’t update the tracker after 2023, but he said the longer-term picture can be seen in public Federal Reserve data – which shows that wealth for the middle class bounced back sharply over the course of 2023 and 2024, finishing Biden’s presidency at a much higher level than where it started.

Bloomberg’s report defined middle class as households in the 50th to 90th percentile, so we’ll do the same. These households had about $37.5 trillion in total real wealth in the first quarter of 2021, Biden’s first in office, and about $48.4 trillion in the fourth quarter of 2024, Biden’s last full quarter in office, according to the Federal Reserve data.

Trump boasted of the stock market repeatedly setting record highs since he was elected again in 2024, then added that this has happened “with virtually no inflation.” He gave himself some fact-check wiggle room with the word “virtually,” but the US certainly has inflation. In December 2025, average consumer prices were up 2.7% from December 2024, Consumer Price Index figures show. Trump also claimed in the op-ed that “inflation has fallen dramatically” despite a sharp increase in tariff rates, but that 2.7% year-over-year rate was only slightly lower than the 2.9% rate of December 2024, Biden’s last full month in office, and the 3.0% rate of January 2025, the month of Trump’s inauguration.

And while Trump attributed the 40-year high in US inflation (9.1% in June 2022) solely to the Biden administration’s “trillions of dollars in wasteful spending” and “extremist green energy agenda,” the real story is more complicated.

Inflation’s rapid ascent, which began in early 2021, was the result of a confluence of factors. Those included effects of the Covid-19 pandemic, such as snarled supply chains, and geopolitical issues, notably including Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in early 2022, that caused shocks in energy and food prices. Heightened consumer demand boosted in part by pandemic-era fiscal stimulus from both the Trump and Biden administrations also led to higher prices.

Trump and wars

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Trump repeated his regular false claim that “in nine months, I settled eight raging conflicts, WARS,” saying that “tariffs deserve much of the credit.” While Trump has played a role in resolving some wars (at least temporarily), the “eight” figure is a clear exaggeration.

Trump has previously explained that his list of supposed wars settled includes a war between Egypt and Ethiopia, but that wasn’t actually a war; it is a long-running diplomatic dispute about a major Ethiopian dam project on a tributary of the Nile River. Trump’s list also includes another supposed war that didn’t actually occur during his presidency, between Serbia and Kosovo. (He has sometimes claimed to have prevented the eruption of a new war between those two entities, providing few details about what he meant, but that is different than settling an actual war.) And his list includes a war involving the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda, but that war has continued despite a peace agreement brokered by the Trump administration in 2025 — which was never signed by the leading rebel coalition doing the fighting.

Trump’s list also includes an armed conflict between Thailand and Cambodia, where fighting temporarily erupted again in December despite a peace agreement brokered by the Trump administration earlier in 2025.

Trump claimed that “with the help of tariffs, we have cut that federal budget deficit by a staggering 27% in a single year.” But the White House arrived at this “27%” figure by calculating changes in the deficit in an atypical way, specifically by cherry-picking convenient start and end dates.

A White House official told CNN on Monday that it got the “27%” figure by comparing the cumulative deficit from February 2025 (Trump’s first full month back in office) to November 2025 with the cumulative deficit over the same February-to-November period in 2024. The deficit during the 2025 period was about $1.4 trillion, or roughly $516 billion less than it was in 2024. That equates to a 27% reduction.

To be sure, the increase in federal revenue from Trump’s tariff changes helped narrow the budget gap. The government took in a total of $229 billion in net customs duties, which include tariffs, between February and November of 2025.

However, the typical method of measuring changes in the deficit is to compare one full fiscal year to the next. The deficit dipped by $41 billion, or 2.3%, in fiscal year 2025 (which ended September 30) compared to fiscal year 2024, a much smaller change than the one Trump cited.

The 2025 fiscal year, which started October 1, 2024, included most of the last four months of the Biden administration. But Trump’s methodology isn’t just eliminating the Biden months, it is also selecting a specific period where the budget gap was unusually narrow.

There are several one-time reasons why the deficit dropped during the first 10 months of the Trump administration, according to Chris Towner, policy director for the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a fiscal watchdog group.

The federal government was shut down for about six weeks during October and November 2025, which delayed some federal spending and payments —temporarily reducing the size of the monthly budget deficits. That spending will be subsequently reflected in the months the payments were eventually made.

Also, because February 1 fell on a weekend in 2025, the payments due that day were made at the end of January, reducing federal spending for February. Plus, the period the White House chose includes $130 billion in one-time savings from the student loan changes in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act Trump signed in 2025, though those measures don’t take effect right away.

What Trump didn’t mention is that the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office expects that the deficit reduction won’t last long. The hefty tax cuts and increases in defense and homeland security spending in the legislation are expected to add a total of $4.1 trillion (including interest payments) to the deficit over the next decade, according to the CBO.

The partial government shutdown is in its 4th day

By Elizabeth Elkind, Alex Miller | Fox News

Published February 3, 2026 2:14pm EST

The House of Representatives passed a federal funding bill aimed at ending the partial government shutdown on Tuesday, which will bring the four-day standoff to a close shortly after the legislation gets to President Donald Trump’s desk.

The funding bill, which passed the House 217-214, is a compromise struck between Senate Democrats and the White House that would fund roughly 97% of the federal government through the end of fiscal 2026.

Trump played an integral role in hashing out the new deal and quelling a subsequent rebellion by conservative lawmakers to get it over the finish line.

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House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., signaled he was strongly against the plan, despite his Senate counterpart’s role in putting it together. But 21 Democrats bucked his concerns in the end to vote in favor of it.

HOUSE CONSERVATIVES THREATEN EXTENDED SHUTDOWN OVER ELECTION INTEGRITY MEASURE

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The House of Representatives sent a bill to end the government shutdown to President Donald Trump’s desk after several Democrats bucked House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries’ warnings the left would not support it.(Stefani Reynolds/Bloomberg via Getty Images; Nathan Posner/Anadolu via Getty Images)

Jeffries and his top lieutenants in the House Democratic Caucus all voted against the bill, however.

On the GOP side, 21 Republicans voted against the legislation while 196 were in favor.

Democrats had initially walked away from a bipartisan House deal to finish funding the federal government through the end of fiscal 2026 on Sept. 30, rebelling against a bill funding the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) over Trump’s handling of unrest in Minneapolis.

Their mutiny left roughly 78% of the government’s yearly funding hanging in the balance because the DHS bill was lumped into a wider package authorizing budgets for the departments of War, Labor, Health and Human Services (HHS), Transportation, Housing and Urban Development (HUD), and Education.

The deal struck between Senate Democrats and the White House would fully fund those remaining areas while only extending current funding levels for DHS through Feb. 13, in order to give Democrats and Republicans time to hash out a longer-term bipartisan plan.

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‘OPENING PANDORA’S BOX’: MIKE JOHNSON BACKS TRUMP AFTER WARNING WHITE HOUSE ABOUT DEAL WITH DEMOCRATS

Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., told reporters on Tuesday that the legislation would succeed, though he hinted at some dissatisfaction with how negotiations played out.

“This is not my preferred route. I wanted to keep all six bills together,” Johnson said. “But listen, the president agreed with Schumer that they would separate Homeland, and we’ll do that, and we’ll handle it.… The Republicans are going to do the responsible thing.”

The Senate’s federal funding deal survived an important hurdle late Tuesday morning, clearing a House-wide “rule vote” to allow for lawmakers to debate the measure and set up a vote on final passage by early afternoon.

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House Speaker Mike Johnson walks from the chamber to speak with reporters at the Capitol in Washington, Nov. 12, 2025.(J. Scott Applewhite/AP Photo)

SENATE REPUBLICANS PUSH FOR HOUSE GOP REBELLION AGAINST FUNDING PACKAGE, VOTER ID LEGISLATION

It comes after a pair of House conservatives announced they would be backing off their threats to sink the legislation during the rule vote if the legislation was not paired with an unrelated election integrity bill called the SAVE America Act.

Reps. Anna Paulina Luna, R-Fla., and Tim Burchett, R-Tenn., warned they would not support the bill during the rule vote without the SAVE America Act attached but pivoted on Monday night after a conversation with the White House.

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“As of right now, with the current agreement that we have, as well as discussions, we will both be a yes on the rule,” Luna said. “There is something called a standing filibuster that would effectively allow Sen. Thune to put voter ID on the floor of the Senate. We are hearing that that is going well, and he is considering that… so we are very happy about that.”

GOVERNMENT SHUTS DOWN AGAIN AFTER DEMOCRATS REVOLT OVER DHS FUNDING

The SAVE America Act would require voter ID at the polls and create a new proof of citizenship mandate in the voter registration process.

But it appears Luna’s insistence that Thune had embraced the standing filibuster, a little-known and antiquated legislative maneuver, was not quite accurate.

Still, Thune said there were Senate Republicans who “expressed an interest in that, so we’re going to have a conversation about it. But there weren’t any commitments made.”

He noted that forcing the standing filibuster to try and pass the SAVE America Act, or any of its variations coming from the House, would be a massive drain on time in the Senate.

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Senate Majority Leader John Thune speaks at a press conference following a policy luncheon in Washington, Oct. 28, 2025.(Nathan Posner/Anadolu via Getty Images)

Doing so “ties up floor time indefinitely,” Thune said. That’s because of rules that guarantee any senator gets up to two speeches on a bill. That, coupled with the clock being reset by amendments to the bill, means that the Senate could effectively be paralyzed for months as Republicans chip away at Democratic opposition.

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“There’s always an opportunity cost,” Thune said.

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“Well, at any time there’s an amendment offered, and that amendment is tabled, it resets the clock,” he continued. “The two-speech rule kicks in again. So let’s say, you know, every Democrat senator talks for two hours. That’s 940 hours on the floor.”

It’s not immediately clear when Trump will sign the funding bill, but it’s expected the White House will want to move fast. The longest government shutdown in history, which lasted 43 days, just ended in November.

Elizabeth Elkind is a politics reporter for Fox News Digital leading coverage of the House of Representatives. Previous digital bylines seen at Daily Mail and CBS News.

Follow on Twitter at @liz_elkind and send tips to elizabeth.elkind@fox.com

Measles cases in South Carolina rise by 29 to 876, state health department says

By Reuters

Feb 3 (Reuters) – South Carolina reported 876 measles cases on Tuesday, state health data showed, including 29 additional infections since Friday, as officials warned the widening outbreak could last weeks or months amid lagging vaccine uptake.

There are 354 people in quarantine and 22 in isolation. The latest end of quarantine for these is February 24, the state health department said.

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The outbreak, which began in October, has been centered in the northwest part of the state, which includes Greenville and Spartanburg, according to the South Carolina Department of Public Health.

The health department confirmed a case of measles in a Sumter County resident but could not say whether this new case was linked to the outbreak centered around Spartanburg County or if the exposure was from measles occurring in other locations.

Of those infected, 800 were unvaccinated, 16 were partially vaccinated with one of the recommended two-dose measles-mumps-rubella vaccines, 22 were fully vaccinated and 38 had unknown vaccination status.

Reporting by Christy Santhosh in Bengaluru; Editing by Krishna Chandra Eluri

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