The Headlines - The Dramatic House Budget Vote, and a New ‘Gold Card’ for Immigrants

Episode Date: February 26, 2025

Plus, how microphones changed music. On Today’s Episode: House Passes G.O.P. Budget Teeing Up Enormous Tax and Spending Cuts, by Catie Edmondson, Andrew Duehren, Maya C. Miller and Robert JimisonTrump Administration Plans to Require Undocumented Immigrants to Register, by Hamed Aleaziz and Zolan Kanno-YoungsTrump Plans ‘Gold Card’ Alternative to Green Cards for ‘High Level People,’ by Shawn McCreeshJudge Blocks Trump Executive Order to Suspend Refugee Program, by Mattathias SchwartzTo Identify Suspect in Idaho Killings, F.B.I. Used Restricted Consumer DNA Data, by Mike BakerChristianity’s Decline in U.S. Appears to Have Halted, Major Study Shows, by Ruth Graham100 Years Ago Recording Studios Got a New Tool: Microphones, by Ludovic Hunter-TilneyTune in every weekday morning. To get our full audio journalism and storytelling experience, download the New York Times Audio app — available to Times news subscribers on iOS — and sign up for our weekly newsletter. Tell us what you think at: [e-mail]. 

From the New York Times, it's the headlines. I'm Tracy Mumford. Today is Wednesday, February 26th. Here's what we're covering. It's been quite the dramatic evening on Capitol Hill leading up to this vote. Republican leaders have spent all day trying to whip or get their conference in line with the votes. Times congressional reporter Robert Jemison was at the Capitol yesterday as House Republicans scrambled to round up support for their first budget resolution under President Trump. They've been trying to push forward on the major tax cuts and spending cuts the presidents promised.

I mean, what was supposed to be a routine vote turned into phone calls, conversations, deal-making. You saw leadership pulling different members into a cloakroom off the side of the House floor. — With their incredibly thin majority, Republican leaders couldn't afford more than one or two defectors. So in a chaotic scene, they cornered the Republicans who weren't on board,

some of whom were concerned about how far the cuts could go. At the same time, Robert says Democrats tried to rally the highest headcount that they could to oppose it. — You had one member fly from California after being in the hospital for some time. We're told that he flew with an IV in his arm on the plane just to get here. When it came time to vote on the resolution, it was clear that Republicans didn't have the votes. They told members to go home, members grabbed their coats, came off of the floor,

and started heading for their cars. But then moments later, the speaker came back and said, no, no, no, one more vote, called all the members back. The ayes and nays are ordered. Members record their votes by electronic device. This will be a 15-minute... People came running through the halls to make sure they get back to the chamber

to make sure that their vote was registered and vote was cast. On this vote, the ayes are 217. The nays are 215. And by the end of the night, they succeeded. They were able to get all of the votes needed to adopt this resolution. Thank you all for staying on a long night.

We got it done. After the vote, House Speaker Mike Johnson thanked Republicans for coming together on the resolution. We have a lot of hard work ahead of us, but we are going to deliver the American First Agenda. We're going to deliver all of it, not just parts of it. And this is the first step in that process. So grateful to my colleagues. The budget blueprint they adopted calls for $4.5 trillion in tax cuts and $2 trillion in federal spending cuts over the next decade.

It does not dictate which taxes should be reduced or which cuts should be made. That will all have to be hashed out now by lawmakers and what are guaranteed to be complex and politically heated negotiations. Democrats and some Republicans have raised concerns that the cuts will likely have to come, in part, from social safety net programs like Medicaid and Medicare. Republicans have largely denied that they'll slash those programs, but because of how the math of the budget deal checks out, those safety net programs will almost certainly be affected if it goes through. Now, three updates on immigration under the Trump administration.

They will be fingerprinted. They must announce that they are here. And if they do so, they can avoid criminal charges and fines. The Department of Homeland Security says it will require all undocumented immigrants over the age of 14 to register with the government or face prosecution. It's unlikely that the millions of people living in the U.S. without permission will choose to come forward, but the administration says it hopes that the threat of criminal charges, not just deportation, will make undocumented immigrants choose to leave the country on

their own. Also on Tuesday, We're going to be doing something else that's going to be very good. We're going to be selling a gold card. You have a green card. This is a gold card. President Trump rolled out a new visa program he's calling a Gold Card. It's effectively a replacement for a long-standing program that gives wealthy foreign investors a path to U.S. citizenship. It's a program that's been rife with fraud in the past and has even been used by international fugitives.

Trump gave few details about how Gold Card recipients will be vetted. He said the price tag for each card will be about $5 million. And a federal judge has ordered the administration to temporarily restart a major refugee program that lets thousands of refugees into the country each year. The judge said Trump likely overstepped his authority when he paused the program, which was established by Congress in 1980.

The administration is likely to fight the judge's order in court, but even before that, it's not clear it will comply with it at all. Under Trump, federal agencies have been systematically finding loopholes to keep their policies in place, even after judges have told them to stop. Newly released court records show that the FBI used DNA databases that were supposed to be off limits to track down the suspect in a high-profile murder case. The revelation comes from a hearing about the killing of four students

at the University of Idaho back in 2022. Investigators found DNA at the scene and ran it through their records, but didn't get a precise match. Then they turned to consumer databases of genetic information, the kind millions of people have been submitting samples to as they try to build out their family trees

or do genetic testing for health reasons. Some of those databases have privacy terms that allow for law enforcement access. But the FBI tapped a pair of services where the company and its customers had not consented. That appears to have violated the government's own policy. Within days, the FBI landed on a suspect who had not been on their radar, a PhD student who was then arrested and charged with the murders. His lawyers have tried to challenge the DNA evidence, saying the government violated his constitutional rights with their database search, but a judge rejected that argument.

The FBI's actions raise questions about how people's sensitive genetic data is stored and accessed. Its use of restricted data could mean that any company's promise of privacy is essentially meaningless. A new survey about religion in the U.S., published this morning, gives one of the clearest views of Americans' faith in over a decade. A study from the Pew Research Center found that 62% of adults describe themselves as Christian, 30% say they're religiously unaffiliated,

and 7% practice other religions. The most significant revelation is that the number of Christians has started to hold steady after decades of sharp decline. My colleague Ruth Graham, who covers religion, says one of a few factors driving people away from the church had been politics. Democrats spent the last few decades leaving Christianity, not identifying as Christians, leaving churches. And there's a lot of things going on there, but social scientists say that it includes how closely the reputation of Christianity is bound up with conservative politics. So what some of the social scientists I talked to

for this story suggested is everyone who was gonna leave by now has left, and now you're kind of hitting the bedrock of people who it's gonna be sort of harder to peel them away. And finally, 100 years ago this week, the music industry blew people's minds when it turned to a new innovation, the microphone. People could record music before microphones, but it was extremely old-school. They used a recording horn, not funneled sound waves down to a stylus,

which then cut grooves into a wax disc. With the horn, all audio was basically captured at the same level. You can hear that those early recordings sound a little flat compared to what we're used to. recordings sound a little flat compared to what we're used to. With microphones, the industry went electric. You could amplify things in a new way. Quietest voice could be the loudest. The strings didn't have to fight with the brass. At first, people complained that it sounded tinny,

but the technology quickly became standard and completely changed how people performed and listened to music. That was bad news for performers who built their whole careers on the old tech, focusing on projecting, like one blues artist, Bessie Smith, who literally called herself the Shouter. But it paved the way for so-called microphone singers, who learned to perform with nuance, instead of just singing at the top of their lungs, going for volume. Those are the headlines. Those are the headlines. No, sorry. Those are the headlines. Yeah,

there we go. I'm Tracy Mumford. We'll be back tomorrow.