POLICY RUNDOWN LABOR NOM GETS A BOOST — Democratic Sen. Maggie Hassan will vote to advance Lori Chavez-DeRemer through Senate HELP on Thursday, Lisa scooped with Lawrence Ukenye, significantly boosting the chances Trump’s Labor secretary nominee will get confirmed. Hassan is the first Democrat on the HELP Committee to say she will vote for Chavez-DeRemer, making up for potential opposition from panel member Rand Paul. GOP MEETING ON SPENDING DEAL — House and Senate Republican leaders will meet Wednesday to hash out a unified plan for approaching government funding negotiations with Democrats, Jennifer Scholtes and Katherine Tully-McManus report. “The best-case scenario is that we walk out united about what we need to do,” House Appropriations Chair Tom Cole said in an interview. The shutdown deadline is just over two weeks away. DEMS JOIN ON CRA — Three Senate Democrats joined Republicans Tuesday night in voting to repeal a Biden-era regulation that limited offshore drilling. It was the Senate's first action this year under the Congressional Review Act, Garrett Downs and Kelsey Brugger report. Both chambers have a slew of so-called CRA resolutions in the pipeline, with the House poised to vote as soon as tomorrow on rolling back Energy Department efficiency standards affecting water heaters and regulations implementing a methane leak fee on the oil and gas industry. WHAT’S WASTE, FRAUD AND ABUSE? — House GOP leaders have stressed that the only Medicaid cuts they’re looking at in their budget pertain to waste, fraud and abuse. Energy and Commerce Chair Brett Guthrie shed some new light on what that looks like. In an interview Tuesday with our Robert King, Guthrie said that could include changes to provider taxes that states use to help fund Medicaid programs and reducing payment rates for healthy working-age people in states that expanded Medicaid, putting them on par with traditional enrollees. He also said that improper payments could come under the microscope, as well as Biden-era Medicaid rules. JUDICIARY DEAL ON ICE — Don’t expect a bipartisan agreement to add judges to the federal judiciary anytime soon, our Hailey Fuchs reports. At a House Judiciary subcommittee meeting on the topic, Republicans and Democrats repeatedly blamed each other for the demise of last year’s deal to add judges. The committee’s top Democrat, Rep. Jamie Raskin, floated a proposal to allow the next president to appoint more judges, but it doesn’t seem like that will fly with Republicans. DEMS HIJACK HEARING — Democrats hijacked a House Energy and Commerce markup of Republicans’ oversight plan Tuesday, frustrating their GOP colleagues as they offered more than 100 doomed amendments on hot-button issues, including GOP Medicaid proposals and Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, our Ben Leonard reports. Republicans said Democrats were wasting their time; Rep. Morgan Griffith said at one point that at the pace they were going, the panel could forget about “getting any work done.” Democratic Rep. Greg Landsman accused his GOP colleagues of “doing absolutely nothing to stop the mayhem that is going on.” SPOTTED IN THE HOUSE: Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker. His office later confirmed to our colleague Shia Kapos that Pritzker was meeting with Jeffries to talk about federal funding cuts. The governor also joined Democratic members of the Illinois delegation in a letter warning OMB Director Russ Vought about their ramifications. Best of POLITICO Pro and E&E:
CAMPAIGN CORNER Republican Rep. Byron Donalds is officially running to become governor of Florida following Trump’s endorsement last week, Kimberly Leonard and Gary Fineout report. Donalds could face Florida first lady Casey DeSantis.
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