Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., doesn’t have confidence that top congressional Democrats want to fix Homeland Security funding as Congress gears up for tense negotiations in the coming days. 

With the partial four-day government shutdown now over, Democrats and Republicans are readying to relitigate the controversial Department of Homeland Security (DHS) bill, which threatened to completely derail a previous bipartisan funding deal. 

And with nine days on the clock to figure out a way forward, Thune doesn’t believe that House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., or Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., are prepared to actually reach a bipartisan deal on the bill. 

When asked if he viewed Jeffries, who rebelled against Schumer’s funding deal with President Donald Trump, as a good-faith partner in the coming back-and-forth, Thune said, ‘He’s just not.’

‘He and, for that matter, Leader Schumer, both are afraid of their shadows, and they’re getting a lot of rollback and pressure from their left,’ Thune said. ‘So, I don’t think they want to — particularly in [Jeffries’] case, I don’t think he wants to make a deal at all.’

Schumer on Tuesday said that Democrats would have a proposal ready for Republicans to review that same day, but Thune noted that no such list had been handed over to his side of the aisle. 

There may still be lingering discourse between the top Democratic leaders, too, after Jeffries turned his back on the Trump-Schumer funding deal. However, both met on Tuesday night, and Schumer affirmed that they were on the same page.

Meanwhile, DHS is currently operating under a two-week continuing resolution (CR) that maintains previous funding levels until Congress can pass legislation to fully fund it. But Thune and other Republicans believe that the truncated time period just isn’t long enough to actually hash out a deal. 

And it’s an open question whether Congress will again need to temporarily extend the funding patch, or allow the agency to shut down.

Compounding frustrations among Republicans is that the original DHS bill was the product of bipartisan negotiations and included several guardrails and reporting requirements targeting Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) that would limit or block funding if they weren’t met. 

‘I think they want to litigate, have the issue as a political issue,’ Thune said. ‘Whether or not there’s a solution remains to be seen, but at least what they’re saying publicly suggests that that’s not their objective.’ 

President Donald Trump said he spoke to Chinese President Xi Jinping Wednesday to discuss a range of issues, including the war between Ukraine and Russia, while stressing that their relationship ‘is an extremely good one’ that will bring ‘many positive results’ in the coming years.

The president and Xi also discussed Trump’s upcoming trip to Beijing in April, which he said he ‘very much’ looks forward to.

‘I have just completed an excellent telephone conversation with President Xi, of China. It was a long and thorough call, where many important subjects were discussed, including Trade, Military, the April trip that I will be making to China (which I very much look forward to!), Taiwan, the War between Russia/Ukraine, the current situation with Iran, the purchase of Oil and Gas by China from the United States, the consideration by China of the purchase of additional Agricultural products including lifting the Soybean count to 20 Million Tons for the current season (They have committed to 25 Million Tons for next season!), Airplane engine deliveries, and numerous other subjects, all very positive!’ Trump posted to his Truth Social.

‘The relationship with China, and my personal relationship with President Xi, is an extremely good one, and we both realize how important it is to keep it that way,’ he continued. ‘I believe that there will be many positive results achieved over the next three years of my Presidency having to do with President Xi, and the People’s Republic of China.’

The president’s call with Xi comes on the same day the Chinese president announced that he had a separate conversation Wednesday with Russian President Vladimir Putin. 

This is a developing story. Please check back for updates. 

The top congressional Democrats appear to have mended their rift over the controversial Homeland Security spending bill and presented a revamped list of demands to earn the party’s support to fund the agency.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., presented a unified front on Wednesday to unveil a retooled wish list of reforms for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) after the top House Democrat bucked his colleague’s deal with President Donald Trump.

‘We’re united as House and Senate Democrats,’ Schumer said. ‘We’re going to have tough, strong legislation. We hope to have it within the next 24 hours that we will submit together. And then we want our Republican colleagues to finally get serious about this.’

Schumer laid out congressional Democrats’ requirements for their support of a full-year DHS funding bill, which varied little from the same list of demands he unveiled last week. The only difference now is that he had a buy-in from House Democrats.

Among the demands are an end to roving patrols, oversight by state and local governments where ICE and DHS are operating, along with the right to sue. Lastly, Schumer demanded that there be ‘no secret police.’

‘I find it amazing that the Speaker of the House, [is] saying… they should be allowed to have masks,’ Schumer said. ‘This group, which needs to be identified more than any other group, should have a standard much more lenient and hidden than other police forces?’

‘I would bet when Speaker Johnson goes down to Louisiana, the sheriffs and the police deputies are well identified as they are in almost every city,’ he continued.

Jeffries spurned Schumer and Senate Democrats just a day earlier when he and the vast majority of House Democrats rejected the funding deal that the top Senate Democrat struck with Trump that allowed Congress more time to negotiate over the DHS funding bill.

That divide, for now, appears to have been bridged.

The negotiations over the funding bill are expected to largely take place in the Senate, and Republicans are skeptical that Democrats will negotiate in good faith, given that they abandoned an already bipartisan bill and Jeffries’ defection from Schumer over the Trump-backed spending deal.

But Democrats argue that their demands aren’t too burdensome, and should be accomplished with legislation, not through executive action at the White House.

‘These are just some of the commonsense proposals that the American people clearly would like to see in terms of the dramatic changes that are needed at the Department of Homeland Security before there is a full-year appropriations bill,’ Jeffries said.

Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent clashed on Wednesday over President Donald Trump’s economic agenda, with the irate congresswoman asking at one point if someone could ‘shut him up.’

The fiery exchange occurred during Bessent’s testimony before the House Financial Services Committee. Waters, the committee ranking member, posed a series of questions about the inflationary impact of Trump’s tariffs on American consumers — and demanded a yes-or-no answer.

So I ask you, Secretary Bessent, will you be the voice of reason in this administration and urge President Trump to stop waging a war on American consumers, harming housing affordability, and putting the economy at risk? Yes or no. You don’t have to explain.

Representative—

Will you be the voice of reason? Will you be the voice of reason?

A study from Wharton University has shown—

Reclaiming my time. Reclaiming my time. Mr. Chair, will you let him know when I ask to reclaim my time—

The time does belong to the gentlewoman from California.

Ten to twenty million immigrants—

Can you shut him up?

What about the housing stock for working Americans? And can you maintain some level of dignity?

The gentlewoman’s time has expired.

No, my time has not expired.

Your time has expired. The gentleman—

The gentleman took up my time. I think you should recognize that, Mr. Chair.

The gentlewoman’s time has expired.

Bessent’s testimony comes as the Trump administration awaits a Supreme Court ruling on whether some of the trade duties imposed in 2025 exceeded presidential authority, a decision that could have broad implications for current tariff actions. 

Tariffs are taxes levied on imported goods. Although they are paid by companies at the border, the costs are often passed along through higher prices, leaving consumers to bear much of the burden.

A historic nuclear arms reduction treaty is set to expire Thursday, which will thrust the world into a nuclear situation it has not faced in more than five decades, one in which there are no longer any binding limits on the size of Russia’s or America’s nuclear arsenals and no inspection regime to verify what Moscow does next.

Matt Korda, associate director of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists, said the expiration of the New START treaty forces both countries to rethink assumptions that have guided nuclear planning for more than a decade. 

‘Up until now, both countries have planned their respective nuclear modernization programs based on the assumption that the other country is not going to exceed those central limits,’ Korda said. ‘Without those central limits … both countries are going to be reassessing their programs to accommodate a more uncertain nuclear future.’

Russia had already suspended its participation in New START in 2023, freezing inspections and data exchanges, but the treaty’s expiration eliminates the last legal framework governing the size of the two countries’ nuclear arsenals.

With no follow-up agreement in place, the administration has insisted it cannot agree to arms control without the cooperation of China. 

‘The president has been clear in the past that in order to have true arms control in the 21st century, it’s impossible to do something that doesn’t include China because of their vast and rapidly growing stockpile,’ Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Wednesday.

A White House official told Fox News President Donald Trump will decide the path forward on arms control ‘on his own timeline.’ ‘President Trump has spoken repeatedly of addressing the threat nuclear weapons pose to the world and indicated that he would like to keep limits on nuclear weapons and involve China in arms control talks.’

Experts are skeptical that China would ever agree to limit its nuclear stockpile until it’s reached parity with the U.S., and Russia has said it would not pressure China to come to the table. 

China aims to have 1,000 nuclear warheads by 2030, but even that figure pales in comparison to the aging giants of the Cold War. As of early 2026, the global nuclear hierarchy remains top-heavy, with the U.S. and Russia holding roughly 86% of the world’s total inventory. Both the U.S. and Russia hold around 4,000 total warheads, with close to 1,700 deployed by each. Global nuclear stockpiles declined to about 12,000 in 2025, down from more than 70,000 in 1986.

In February 2023, Russia announced it was suspending its participation in the New START treaty, halting inspections and data-sharing under the pact while saying it would continue to respect the numerical limits. But, more recently, it floated the idea of extending the treaty by another year.

Korda said that proposal reflected shared constraints rather than a sudden change in Russian intentions. 

‘It’s not in Russia’s interest to dramatically accelerate an arms race while its current modernization programs are going so poorly and while its industrial capacity is tied up in Ukraine,’ he said.

Korda said that without inspections and data exchanges, countries are forced to rely on their own intelligence, increasing uncertainty and encouraging worst-case planning. 

‘Without those onsite inspections, without data exchanges, without anything like that, all countries are really left with national technical means of being able to monitor each other’s nuclear forces,’ Korda said.

With New START’s limits gone, experts said the immediate concern is not the construction of new nuclear weapons but how quickly existing warheads could be deployed. Ankit Panda, a Stanton senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said Russia could move faster than the United States in the near term by ‘uploading’ additional warheads onto missiles already in service. 

‘Uploading would be a process of adding additional warheads to our ICBMs and submarine-launched missiles,’ Panda said. ‘The Russians could be much faster than the United States.’

Korda said a large-scale upload would not happen overnight but could still alter force levels within a relatively short window. 

‘We’re looking at maybe a timeline of about two years and pretty significant sums of money for each country to execute a complete upload across the entire force,’ he said, adding that, in a worst-case scenario, it could ‘roughly result in doubling the sizes of their deployed nuclear arsenals.’

That advantage, however, is constrained by longer-term industrial realities. Panda noted that the U.S. nuclear weapons complex lacks the production capacity it once had, limiting how quickly Washington could sustain a larger arsenal over time. 

‘The United States is currently unable to produce what is going to be a target for 30 plutonium pits,’ a fraction of Cold War output, he said.

Nicole Grajewski, a fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said Russia’s ability to produce nuclear weapons may be faster than the U.S. in some, but not all, parts of the development chain. 

‘Russia is very good at warhead production,’ she told Fox News Digital. ‘What Russia is really fundamentally constrained on is the delivery vehicle side of it.’

Grajewski added that this is particularly true as the war in Ukraine continues. Russia’s production of missiles and other delivery systems relies on facilities that also support conventional weapons used in the war, limiting how quickly Moscow could expand the intercontinental missiles, submarine-launched weapons and bombers that made up the core of New START.

As a result, Grajewski said she is less concerned about a rapid buildup of those treaty-covered forces than about Moscow’s continued investment in nuclear systems that fall outside traditional arms control frameworks. 

‘What is more concerning is Russia’s advances in asymmetric domains,’ she said, pointing to systems such as the Poseidon nuclear-powered torpedo and nuclear-powered cruise missiles, which are not covered by existing treaties.

President Donald Trump has previously said he wants to pursue arms control with both Russia and China before suggesting the U.S. should resume nuclear testing.

‘If there’s ever a time when we need nuclear weapons like the kind of weapons that we’re building and that Russia has — and that China has, to a lesser extent, but will have — that’s going to be a very sad day,’ Trump said in February 2025. ‘That’s going to be probably oblivion.’

But, in October, he declared, ‘Because of other countries’ testing programs, I have instructed the Department of War to start testing our Nuclear Weapons on an equal basis. That process will begin immediately.’