Markets tumble after Trump's response to recession question; Congress barrels toward shutdown deadline

Ontario Premier Doug Ford spoke with NBC News’ Tom Llamas about his decision to impose a 25% tariff on Canadian electricity exports to three U.S. states in response to Trump’s trade war.

The House Rules Committee tonight advanced the six-month Republican extension of government funding.

That sets up the measure for floor action tomorrow, with a vote on final passage scheduled for 4 p.m. ET.

The House will first have to vote on the rule, which covers other bills for the week, too. If the rule is approved during a vote series scheduled for 1:30 p.m., the House will then debate the spending bill before a final vote in the 4 p.m. hour.

A federal judge ruled tonight that Elon Musk's Department of of Government Efficiency “likely” falls under the jurisdiction of the Freedom of Information Act, bringing DOGE one step closer to being treated as an official federal agency.

U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper ordered DOGE to process FOIA requests on an “expedited timetable” from the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a nonprofit organization that says it works to expose corruption by government officials.

Cooper noted how quickly DOGE is working through the federal government in making the argument that it should be covered by FOIA.

Senate Democrats are largely condemning the recently released six-month spending bill from House Republicans, calling it “awful,” “a missed opportunity” and “a sort of grab bag of Republican priorities.”

But it’s not completely clear whether they would oppose the measure if the choice were passing the House bill or shutting down the government.

Democrats appear to have taken a stance of criticizing the bill while waiting to see whether the House can pass it with Republican votes before they say where they stand.

Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., took aim at Trump administration tariffs after major stock indexes plunged today.

"The stock market is comprised of millions of people who are simultaneously trading. The market indexes are a distillation of sentiment. When the markets tumble like this in response to tariffs, it pays to listen," Paul wrote on X.

Trump stoked fears in financial markets yesterday when he declined to rule out a recession, saying instead in a Fox News interview that the U.S. economy was undergoing “a period of transition.”

Rep. Chrissy Houlahan, D-Pa., said today that she introduced a resolution to censure Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Colo., over “disparaging, derogatory, and racist” comments she made about Rep. Al Green, D-Texas.

Houlahan's office said in a statement that the resolution calls for censuring Boebert after she said in an interview with Real America’s Voice last week that Green went to "shake his pimp cane" at Trump as he delivered his joint address to Congress.

“After my discussion on the House floor last week when Speaker Johnson told me he’d have to censure half the members if he actually enforced the rules of the Congress, I decided to help, and tonight introduced a resolution to censure Representative Boebert for her racist and derogatory statements about Representative Al Green,” Houlahan said in a statement.

When Trump wanted to make the case for his first term’s success in an interview last month, he turned to the stock market.

“I was very proud to have handed over the country when the stock market was higher than it was, previous to the pandemic coming in,” he said in a Fox News interview Feb. 9. “It was an amazing achievement.”

And in his second term, he has promised that trend would continue. “The stock market is going to be great,” he told the crowd at an investor conference Feb. 19.

But after stocks began a downward spiral last week on fears Trump’s use of tariffs will tip the United States into a recession, his tone has changed.

Read the full story here.

It’s the disaster she didn’t see coming.

Aileen Reneau, 30, had worked at the Federal Emergency Management Agency for less than a year, helping train first responders at FEMA’s Center for Domestic Preparedness, the only such facility in the country. She was also deployed to North Carolina for six weeks after Hurricane Helene.

Reneau, an Air Force veteran and mother of two, was laid off on Presidents Day. 

“It hurts,” she said. “It was a stab in the back.”

Read the full story here.

After one month and one trip to the Supreme Court and back, U.S. District Court Judge Amir Ali has formally ruled on the preliminary injunction in the USAID funding case.

In his ruling, Ali blocked the Trump administration from enforcing any terminations or suspensions to grants or contracts for foreign assistance from Jan. 20 to Feb. 13, the date of the initial temporary restraining order. The order also prevents the Trump administration from blocking any congressionally appropriated foreign aid funds from reaching the intended programs and agencies in the future.

“The constitutional power over whether to spend foreign aid is not the President’s own—and it is Congress’s own,” he wrote. “Defendants have yet to offer any explanation, let alone one supported by the record, for why a blanket suspension setting off a shockwave and upending reliance interests for thousands of businesses and organizations around the country was a rational precursor to reviewing programs.”

Today at 6 p.m. ET was the deadline for the Trump administration to pay back around $670 million to the plaintiffs and their members in foreign assistance from Jan. 20 to Feb. 13. Ali ordered the parties to file a status report by Friday, checking in on how much more of the remaining $1.3 billion has been paid back to the non-plaintiff groups in need of the funding. Ali said he expects at least 300 payments to be made each day this week.