This concludes our live coverage of the second Trump administration for the day. Here are the latest developments:

• The US House of Representatives delivered a stunning rebuke to Donald Trump over his war on Iran on Wednesday, as representatives backed a move to force him to seek approval from Congress or withdraw US forces.

• Before signing an executive order related to customs in the Oval Office on Wednesday, Trump took seven minutes to reassure an anxious public, beset by worries about a protracted war with Iran, surging gasoline prices and rising inflation, that progress has been made on at least one front: the resurfacing of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool is nearly complete.

• The president also took time to once again attack the CNN host Kaitlan Collins for not smiling in his presence and blamed her network for the suicides of four January 6 defendants.

• The US treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, refused to say whether Trump, his family and his businesses would still get immunity from IRS audits after the administration yesterday abandoned plans for a $1.8bn fund that would have benefited the president’s allies.

• Bessent did confirm that he threatened to beat up a fellow administration member, Bill Pulte, last summer.

As California counties continue to count votes and report partial results, a reminder on the secretary of state’s website notes that there are just 37 days left until the 10 July deadline for the state to certify the results. In each of those races, the top-two vote getters will then face off in the November general election.

As things stand in the two biggest elections, for California governor and Los Angeles mayor, it looks likely that at least one Democrat will advance to the final round.

Elections analysts at VoteHub project that Xavier Beccera, the former state attorney general and US congressman and Joe Biden’s health secretary, appears to be on track to make the run-off for governor. His most likely opponent looks to be Republican Steve Hilton, an immigrant from the UK who started his career as a political adviser to former prime minister David Cameron in his native London and is now a Trump-backed former Fox News host. The billionaire Democrat Tom Steyer, who is in third place so far, has what some experts call a narrow shot at overtaking Hilton, depending on the partisan make-up of the votes still to be counted.

The Associated Press has already projected that Democrat Karen Bass, the mayor of Los Angeles, will advance to the run-off and get a chance to keep her job in November. A Republican reality TV star, Spencer Pratt, is currently in second place in the primary, but another Democrat, Nithya Raman, could still overtake him.

One race still holds the potential to be a catastrophe for Democrats. In the primary for the newly redrawn sixth congressional district, a Republican congressman, Kevin Kiley, who is running as an independent, currently leads the count but a number of Democrats split the vote, and another Republican, Michael Stansfield, an unknown 50-year-old tech support worker, currently has a 1,108-vote lead over the top Democrat, Richard Pan.

In the Oval Office on Wednesday, before the CNN host Kaitlan Collins could even ask Donald Trump a question, he launched into a tirade against her for not smiling in his presence, and went on to accuse her network of being responsible for the suicides of a number of his supporters who took part in the 6 January 2021 riot at the US Capitol.

The rant began when the president was asked, by another reporter, to explain why he had apparently “decided to drop” the $1.8bn “anti-weaponization” fund his Department of Justice created to funnel taxpayer money to people indicted for committing crimes on his behalf.

Trump began by saying that he was strongly in favor of the fund, which he claimed he had no hand in creating, but that it had been blocked by “a radical left judge”.

“I love it. I think it’s so important,” the president said. He then bemoaned what he said were the injustices committed against “great American people” who were prosecuted by the justice department during the Biden administration, without pointing out that many of his supporters who joined the January 6 riot either pleaded guilty to committing crimes or were convicted by juries of their peers.

As his monologue went on, Trump insisted that all of those indicted for the January 6 riot were innocent victims, himself included.

“These people, their lives have been destroyed. Their families have been destroyed. Many of them. And actually, I’m not just talking about a few people. Many of them,” the president said. “I’m one of them,” he added, calling the FBI raid on his beach club in Mar-a-Lago, where he illegally retained and tried to hide boxes of classified records, “fake and corrupt”.

It was then, entirely unprompted, that Trump turned his attention to attacking Collins, who was standing in the room.

“CNN’s a very corrupt organization, with a corrupt reporter standing right there,” the president said. “Never smiles. She never – she’s a young, beautiful woman, never smiles. I never see a smile off her face [sic]. I see her standing with hatred in her eyes.”

Fifteen minutes later, when Collins finally got to ask Trump a question, she brought the president back to the topic he had been ranting about when he attacked her.

“Excuse me, Mr President, just to clarify: is the $1.8bn DoJ fund dead or on hold?” Collins asked.

“I’d have to ask the lawyers,” Trump said, before heading off on another tangent, in which he suggested that the people he held responsible for persecuting his supporters, and him, were not Biden administration prosecutors, but journalists like Collins who had reported on the crimes committed on January 6.

“The weaponization fund as far as I’m concerned was a beautiful thing,” Trump said.

He then launched into a strident defense of the January 6 rioters who breached the Capitol and beat police officers, suggesting that they somehow deserved to be compensated with taxpayer funds for having been the victims of unflattering reporting.

“I thought that was the greatest thing because people like you have abused our people so badly,” Trump said to Collins. “The fake news, like CNN, like the New York Times, and like others have abused our people.”

As Collins tried to respond, Trump appeared to become even more irate that he was being questioned by a former reporter for the Daily Caller, a partisan conservative website.

“Wait a minute, be quiet,” the president said. “And you should be ashamed of yourself. You used to be a conservative. She was a conservative from Alabama, can you believe it?

“But CNN, in particular, CNN does such false reporting. But now they have new ownership, so maybe it’ll straighten it out,” Trump continued, referring to the looming takeover of the network’s parent company by David Ellison, a Trump supporter who is currently overseeing the destruction of CBS News as a nonpartisan news organization.

“It’s hard to straighten garbage out. But CNN has abused, and others have abused so badly, people, these are people that are great people that were destroyed. Their families have been destroyed. Many suicides. They committed suicide. People that went there to with love. They went there with love,” Trump went on.

“You know, when I made that speech early in the day,” Trump added, before a digression about the size of the crowd for his speech urging his supporters to go to the Capitol on 6 January 2021. “There was so much love and and friendship. It was the most amazing thing. People were crying.”

When Collins again tried to interject, Trump refused to give way. “Wait a minute. Let me finish,” he said. “Those people have been abused by you.”

“There’s something wrong with you,” the president added after another long digression attacking his political rivals. “It’s a shame.”

He then called on a reliably pro-Trump correspondent, Iris Tao of the Epoch Times’ television channel, NTD, who praised the president’s “stirring words” in a Truth Social post attacking communism. The Epoch Times is owned by members of the dissident Chinese Falun Gong spiritual movement that the Chinese Communist party has banned as a cult.

During a hearing in the US Senate on Wednesday, Scott Bessent, the treasury secretary, confirmed that he threatened to beat the pulp out of Bill Pulte, the federal housing official Donald Trump intends to make his director of national intelligence.

Senator Thom Tillis, a North Carolina Republican who is retiring at the end of his term, began his questioning of Bessent by asking whether reports of the threat last year, from Politico and the New York Times, were accurate.

“Did you actually tell Pulte you were going to punch him in the face?” Tillis asked.

“No, sir,” Bessent replied. “I actually said I was going to kick his ass.”

“I share the emotion,” the senator replied.

The secretary went on to downplay the importance of the threat of physical violence. “As I’ve said, that was last summer, the summer of 25,” Bessent said. “And many teams have fights in the locker room and then go out and win for the team on the field.”

“I was just curious,” Tillis said, before adding that he had made it clear that he would not support Pulte assuming office as acting director of national intelligence after the departure of Tulsi Gabbard at the end of June.

In getting Bessent on the record, Tillis ensured that reports about Pulte assuming the job of intelligence director, without any prior experience, will note the treasury secretary’s distaste for him.

“He lost me when he went after Powell,” Tillis added, referring to Pulte’s role in agitating for the firing or criminal investigation of former Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell.

The three top Democrats in the US House on Wednesday called for the Senate’s Republican leadership to pass the war powers resolution adopted by the House, which directs the president “to remove United States Armed Forces from hostilities with Iran”.

After the House voted 215 to 208 to approve the resolution, the Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries, whip Katherine Clark and caucus chair Pete Aguilar said in a statement:

More than three months ago, Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth plunged America into a reckless and costly war of choice in the Middle East without clear objectives, an exit strategy, public support or the authorization required by the United States Congress. Republicans have since spent billions in taxpayer dollars and carelessly put our brave men and women in uniform into harm’s way while causing gas prices at home to skyrocket out of control.

Following repeated attempts to get sycophants in the Republican-controlled House to join us, House Democrats successfully passed our War Powers Resolution today to stand up for the American people and hold Donald Trump accountable. It is now time for Senate Republicans to do the right thing.

Before signing an executive order related to customs in the Oval Office on Wednesday, Donald Trump took seven minutes to reassure an anxious public, beset by worries about a protracted war with Iran, surging gasoline prices and rising inflation, that progress has been made on at least one front: the resurfacing of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool is nearly complete.

The pool, he added, is extremely long.

“We’ll have it open before July 4th,” the president announced, after once again holding up a series of renderings of what he assured the nation would be a beautified “reflecting pond, or the reflecting pool, as some people call it.”

To date, the only person to call it “the reflecting pond” appears to be the current president.

“It’ll last for 50 to 100 years before you have to do anything,” Trump said, pointing to the “very strong, powerful substance” the company he gave a no-bid contract to used to temporarily seal its base.

During his seven-minute monologue on the renovation, the president again made the point he seems fixated on: that the 2,028ft-long reflecting pool is so long that even some of the tallest buildings on the world would be shorter, if, for some reason, they were laid on their side.

He then called on an aide to hand him a poster comparing the length of the pool to three American skyscrapers: Chicago’s Willis (Sears) Tower, New York’s Empire State Building and One World Trade Center.

“I just had this done,” the president told reporters as he held up the poster he apparently commissioned using an image he has posted repeatedly on social media despite a huge and obvious error in the graph scale. (The distance on the graph’s X-axis from 0-1,000 is the same as that from 1,000 to 1,500.)

As he explained the quite self-evident poster to the assembled White House press corps, the president was apparently dissatisfied with one element: the poster includes an accurate measurement of the reflecting pool’s length, slightly rounded up to 2,030ft.

The pool, the president insisted without explanation, is “actually much more than 2,000, close to, including everything its about 2,500ft, in length, to the end”.

The president did not explain what the “everything” was that he was including to reach the higher figure.

The US House of Representatives delivered a stunning rebuke to Donald Trump over his war on Iran on Wednesday, as representatives backed a move to force him to seek approval from Congress or withdraw US forces.

The House voted 215 to 208 in favor of the war powers resolution, as four Republicans voted with Democrats.

Wednesday’s vote came nearly two weeks after House Republicans cancelled an earlier scheduled vote, on the grounds that they lacked the votes to defeat it.

The Senate voted last month to advance a resolution forcing Trump to seek congressional approval after four Republican senators rebelled and voted with the Democrats.

While bragging about how great his deal with Iran will be, once he manages to close it, Donald Trump just told reporters a blatant lie about the 2015 Iran nuclear deal he withdrew from in 2018.

His deal, Trump said, will be “the exact opposite of the Obama deal. The Obama deal was a disgrace, it gave them a nuclear weapon.”

In fact, the very first paragraph of the deal sealed in July 2015 said the exact opposite.

Here is the full text of the agreement’s first words, negotiated by the US, the EU and five other nations:

The E3/EU+3 (China, France, Germany, the Russian Federation, the United Kingdom and the United States, with the High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy) and the Islamic Republic of Iran welcome this historic Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), which will ensure that Iran’s nuclear programme will be exclusively peaceful, and mark a fundamental shift in their approach to this issue. They anticipate that full implementation of this JCPOA will positively contribute to regional and international peace and security. Iran reaffirms that under no circumstances will Iran ever seek, develop or acquire any nuclear weapons.

Speaking to reporters in the Oval Office on Wednesday afternoon, Donald Trump was just asked in the ceasefire with Iran is still on, given the deadly Iranian attack on Kuwait’s international airport, and US strikes on Iran.

The president played down the significance of the Iranian strike that killed at least one person and wounded 63 in the first deadly attack in the Gulf since a ceasefire came into effect on 8 April.

“You know, there’s a reason for everything, and we hit them pretty hard” Trump said, casting Iran’s strike as retaliation. “They did something, not a big deal,” he added. “Some people would say they were slightly provoked because we took a strong action… they were reciprocating.”

He went on to suggest that talks on a peace deal are continuing. “I hear the negotiation is going well, very well.”

“If it happens, might not happen, but it if happens it could happen over the weekend,” the president said, of a deal to end the fighting he has been promising is imminent for months now.

Asked how he defined ‘ceasefire’, the president joked: “I’d say, in that part of the world, ‘ceasefire’ is when you’re shooting in a more moderate manner.”

As some of his aides laughed, Trump turned to them and praised his own quip about an exchange of fire in which at least one person died and dozens were wounded. “That’s not bad,” he said.

If there was a glimmer of a possibility that the Voting Rights Act survived a body blow of a decision from the US supreme court in Louisiana v Callais in April, the court’s conservative justices extinguished it yesterday evening.

In an unsigned order issued on the court’s emergency “shadow docket”, the court’s six conservative justices allowed Alabama to use a congressional map that gets rid of one of the state’s two majority-Black congressional districts. That map the state will use is one that a three-judge panel ruled was drawn with an intent to discriminate against Black voters.

Even after the supreme court made it nearly impossible to bring Voting Rights Act claims in Callais, there seemed a slim chance that it would uphold Alabama’s map. In Alabama, a lower court had found that the map was drawn with an intent to discriminate, something that wasn’t an issue in the Louisiana case.

But in its Tuesday order, the supreme court said that didn’t matter.

“Under Callais, the District Court was required to deny relief unless the plaintiffs’ alternative map performed ‘just as well’ with respect to all of the State’s constitutionally permissible districting criteria,” the court’s majority wrote. “Yet, the District Court found a violation even though the plaintiffs’ alternative map would not perform just as well as to the State’s constitutionally permissible criteria of keeping together the Gulf Coast community of interest and avoiding the pairing of incumbents.”

The Republican senator Mitch McConnell put out a scathing statement today suggesting that Donald Trump’s pick for acting director of national intelligence, Bill Pulte, is not qualified to serve in the role.

“Very few Senate-confirmable positions come with statutory eligibility requirements,” McConnell said. “There are good reasons why the director of national intelligence is one of them.”

Though he did not name Pulte in his statement, McConnell made clear that he would not vote for him to serve as DNI in a permanent capacity.

“Anyone performing this role of such immense public trust must have the extensive national security experience required by statute, and no nominee who falls short of this requirement will earn my vote,” he said.

McConnell was the only Republican to join with Democrats to vote against the confirmation of former DNI Tulsi Gabbard to the role, citing her “alarming lapses of judgment”.

“When a nominee’s record proves them unworthy of the highest public trust, and when their command of relevant policy falls short of the requirements of their office, the Senate should withhold its consent,” he said at the time.

Senate Republicans have officially dropped language providing up to $1bn for security upgrades to Donald Trump’s proposed White House ballroom from the updated text for their immigration enforcement bill released today.

GOP senators had already decided before the Memorial Day recess that they would not pass the $70bn legislation to restore funding to ICE and border patrol ahead of the 1 June deadline set by the US president amid concerns about the $1bn proposal for security measures and controversial plans to create a $1.8bn “anti-weaponization” fund (though the administration abandoned the latter yesterday).

Some Republican senators were concerned about the optics of funding the ballroom with taxpayer dollars amid a cost-of-living crisis in the lead-up to November’s midterm elections.

Republicans unveiled the revised bill shortly before the first procedural vote on a motion to proceed with the measure at about 2.30pm ET.

At his Senate finance committee hearing earlier today, the US treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, dodged a slew of questions about Donald Trump’s contentious $1.8bn “anti-weaponization” fund – which is as of yesterday dead in the water – and repeatedly deferred to the justice department on the president’s IRS settlement.

“I’m unable to comment because of litigation,” he told the Democratic senator Sheldon Whitehouse. “Treasury is represented by the Department of Justice in all matters. They act as our attorneys, so I would suggest that you direct your questions to acting attorney general [Todd] Blanche.”

Bessent declined to comment on whether the provision that provides Trump and his family with immunity from IRS audits is still in place. Blanche said yesterday that it was.

The Democratic senator Catherine Cortez also pressed Bessent on whether other taxpayers whose returns were leaked alongside Trump’s would receive “the same immunity as President Trump and his family received”, but Bessent deflected once again.

“Treasury does not give any of that,” Bessent said. “We are represented by the justice department.”

Pressed again, he said only: “We will follow the instructions and the settlement.”

Mario Rubio, the US secretary of state, told the House foreign affairs committee today that Donald Trump will be attending the Nato meeting of heads of state in Turkey next month.

“The president himself will be attending,” Rubio said.

Trump has long criticized Nato but has escalated his rhetoric over the war in Iran. In April, he called the 77-year-old alliance a “paper tiger” and suggesting the US may consider leaving after Nato member countries ignored his call for military assistance to help reopen the strait of Hormuz.

“I think the next meeting of Nato and Turkey in July is probably the most important meeting in Nato’s history, because there are some things here that need to be cleared up and fixed,” Rubio said on Wednesday.

Donald Trump’s appointment of a close political ally with no intelligence experience to lead the nation’s spy agencies has thrown last-ditch efforts to renew a critical surveillance program into doubt.

Bill Pulte, currently head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), major Republican donor and heir to a home construction fortune, was tapped by Trump to serve as acting director of national intelligence days after Tulsi Gabbard departed the role.

Senior Democrats immediately said the move could doom a fragile bipartisan agreement to renew section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which is due to expire next week.

Section 702 permits US intelligence agencies to collect communications of foreign targets operating outside the country without a warrant. Congress is working toward a deadline of 12 June.

More here:

Jacobs then asked Rubio who won the 2020 presidential election.

Rubio declined to answer, insisting that he was “not here to answer” questions about that because “this is a foreign affairs committee”.

“I don’t answer the question because as secretary of state, I do not participate in domestic political issues,” he said.

Jacobs replied that the question wasn’t about a political issue but about democracy.

Donald Trump has threatened tariffs of between 10% and 12.5% on 60 trading partners including the UK, the EU and Australia over alleged forced labour failures, in the latest attempt to revive his signature trade policy.

The European Union immediately hit back, saying it expected the US to respect the tariff deal it entered into last July and arguing that stealth tariffs breached the spirit of that agreement.

The proposed levies on partners accused of allowing imports of goods produced by workers under coercion come after the US supreme court ruled in February that the president’s “liberation day” tariffs were illegal.

Trump responded by imposing 10% across-the-board tariffs, but last month the US trade court found those were also unlawful, although they remain in place during the appeal process.

The latest proposal for tariffs on the grounds of forced labour, which would affect major partners including Canada, Japan, Norway, Taiwan and China, would enable Trump to skirt those previous court-imposed limits on his protectionist agenda. They come as the US threatens to impose fresh levies of 25% on Brazil.

The US trade representative, Jamieson Greer, said: “The failure of our most important trading partners to address the importation of goods made with forced labor is unacceptable. This creates a dynamic where American workers are forced to compete globally on an unlevel playing field. We will no longer tolerate this disparity.”

Here’s Lisa’s full report:

The secretary of state then claimed that changing the government of Iran was not a goal of the operation.

“Look, we would love to see a change in Iran … but that was not the goal of our mission,” Rubio said.

As you might remember, that is contrary to Donald Trump stating regime change as an objective in the early days of the war and repeatedly (and dangerously) urging Iranians to overthrow their government.

In a heated exchange with Democratic ranking member Gregory Meeks, Marco Rubio initially skirted a question on whether he had warned Donald Trump that launching a war on Iran would drive up costs on gas, food, travel and shipments.

Rubio then refused to give a yes or no answer on whether or not he warned the president that starting a war against Iran “could result in the regime placing a chokehold on the strait of Hormuz”.

But he added: “The president and the administration was aware there would be consequences to action, but the consequences of Iran having a nuclear weapon were worse.”

He added: “All the risk factors were understood, but the important risk factor was Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon.”

Asked again if he warned Trump of the potential consequences, Rubio said: “Everyone was aware of what Iran might do in retaliation … but they cannot have a nuclear weapon.”

And asked if he warned the president that Iran would launch retaliatory attacks against US partners, allies and Americans living or working in the region, Rubio said: “Everyone knew what Iran would do in response, we were prepared for any response … but they can’t have a nuclear weapon.”

That the administration knew that attacking Iran would place the US’s regional allies in the line of fire and drive up costs but went to war anyway is quite an admission from the secretary of state.

I wonder what Gulf allies who have come under attack and lost residents during this war, such as Kuwait today, will make of that, not to mention everyone else around the world who has been affected by the crisis in the strait, among them Americans who will be voting in the midterms in a few short months.

Also last night, Karen Bass came out ahead in the heated primary for Los Angeles mayor, but with less than 50% of the vote will have to defend her seat in November’s general election.

She will face either former reality TV star Spencer Pratt or city council member Nithya Raman, in November. As of yesterday evening, it was still unclear who would move on.

In remarks to voters yesterday evening, Bass said she would spend the next four years addressing homelessness and building more housing units.

She described LA as a rebounding city, and vowed to build on the progress made over the last three and a half years. Invoking the “dark day” a year ago when Donald Trump sent immigration troops into the city, Bass declared: “We are a city that is unified.”

Here’s Uwa’s full report:

Iowa voters cast their ballots in yesterday’s heated primaries, setting up for months of fervent campaigning ahead of the November midterms in contests that could determine the balance of power in Congress.

A red state that the GOP has dominated for the past decade, Democrats believe they can be competitive in three of its four House races, its Senate election, and the contest to replace Kim Reynolds, the retiring Republican governor.

Last night, Josh Turek, the state house representative who benefited from millions of dollars in outside spending and the endorsement of a slew of top Democrats, won the Democratic primary in a race to replace retiring Republican senator Joni Ernst.

In a proxy battle for which direction the party would take, he defeated Zach Wahls, the state senator who pitched himself to voters as an outsider who would stand up to party elites including Chuck Schumer, the US Senate minority leader whom he blamed for weakening the party.

Turek will face Ashley Hinson, a Republican US representative who Donald Trump endorsed to replace Ernst.

In the gubernatorial race, Democrats believe they have a historically strong candidate in Rob Sand, the auditor who is the last member of the party holding statewide elected office. Sand ran unopposed in the primary.

Five candidates vied for the Republican nomination, with Zach Lahn emerging as the winner. Representative Randy Feenstra, who came in second, had been endorsed by Trump. His loss marks an end to Trump’s streak of winning endorsements – until yesterday, every candidate Trump backed since March had won their primary.

Read Chris’s full report here:

More now from Donald Trump’s interview with the New York Post’s Pod Force One podcast.

The president confirmed Axios’s report that he yelled and cursed at Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu over Israel’s threats to resume airstrikes on Beirut’s southern suburbs earlier this week.

Israel’s continued assault on Lebanon had threatened to derail talks on ending the president’s war against Iran.

Axios reported, citing two US officials and a third source briefed on the call, that Trump told Netanyahu he was “fucking crazy” and “you’d be in prison if it weren’t for me”.

Asked if he said what Axios reported, Trump told the podcast: “I did.”

I don’t want to say ‘angry’. I was a little bit perturbed at his constantly fighting with Lebanon, you know, at some point I said, ‘Bibi, we gotta stop this, we gotta stop it.’

Trump then insisted that they have “worked very well together”. “I like Bibi a lot. And I work very well with him,” he added.

In his interview with the ‘Pod Force One’ podcast, Trump said that vice-president JD Vance and US secretary of state Marco Rubio running together in 2028 would be “unbeatable”.

Both men are seen as contenders for the 2028 Republican nomination, and Rubio’s recent turn at the White House podium drew praise from Republicans and even some Democrats who noted his smooth performance, which included quips and a 1990s hip-hop reference to describe Iran’s negotiating position.

“I would think that JD and Marco as a team would be very hard to beat,” Trump told Miranda Devine in a podcast aired on Wednesday.

“It’s interesting, human thing, the human equation. So I watch them together, they get along great,” he added.

Trump has continued to fuel the succession talk even as both Vance and Rubio downplay their 2028 ambitions.

Donald Trump said he believed he would make acting attorney general Todd Blanche permanent the top US law enforcement officer.

Asked in an interview broadcast on Wednesday on ‘Pod Force One’ if Blanche would be US attorney general, Trump replied: “I think he will.”

US federal workers laid off by the Trump administration said they are experiencing mental health effects, including PTSD-like symptoms, from losing their jobs, according to a new survey.

More than 300 fired probationary employees were surveyed, with 95% reporting ongoing mental health effects, according to 27UNIHTED, a network of former National Institute of Health (NIH) employees. Nearly half said they are experiencing PTSD-like symptoms, and a quarter are taking new medications to manage symptoms.

Survey respondents were located across 43 states and the US Virgin Islands and had worked in 12 different departments across 15 agencies, bureaus and subgroups.

The employees are a tiny fraction of the more than 300,000 federal workers who were laid off or pushed to resign or retire since the start of Donald Trump’s second term. More than 25,000 workers were laid off in the middle of their probationary period, meaning they had started their positions within a year or two when they were abruptly fired.

Hello and welcome to the US politics live blog.

California’s crowded primary for governor remains up in the air after three leading candidates tested voters’ appetites for an experienced politician or promises of sweeping change.

Though votes were still being counted, Democrats Xavier Becerra and Tom Steyer and Republican Steve Hilton started looking to November, laying out their visions for leading the nation’s most populous state and one of the world’s largest economies.

It followed Tuesday’s primary votes, that could see critical districts flip in both the House and Senate, setting up a series of high-stakes general election contests in a midterm year expected to favor Democrats.

Among the most watched races are: a New Jersey Democrat who could oust a Republican incumbent absent with a mystery medical issue for months, several Iowa Democrats hoping to flip their red-leaning state, as well as California’s redrawn maps that have given Democrats an advantage in the heavily blue state.

In the golden state’s governor race, only two will advance to the general election, however, and the Associated Press has not yet called the primary for any candidate but Hilton and Becerra were leading so far, with Steyer running slightly further back.

“Change is coming to California, and it’s long overdue,” Hilton told supporters after polls closed, reflecting his campaign message that the state needs a dramatic reset after more than 15 years of Democratic rule.

Steyer also campaigned on change and declared Tuesday that he would prevail over monied interests that strived to defeat him.

Becerra pitched himself as the steady hand who can lead the state against intrusions from the Trump administration. “The underdog stayed in the fight,” Becerra said to applause.

In other developments:

• Karen Bass came out ahead in Tuesday’s heated primary for Los Angeles mayor, but with less than 50% of the vote will have to defend her seat in November’s general election. She’ll likely run against either Spencer Pratt, a former reality TV star, or city council member Nithya Raman.

• Iowa state representative Josh Turek won the Democratic nomination for the state’s open US Senate seat – setting him up to face off against Ashley Hinson in the November general election. A former television anchor turned state senator, Hinson was endorsed by Donald Trump and retiring senator Joni Ernst.

• Adam Hamawy won the Democratic nomination for New Jersey’s 12th congressional district, teeing the army doctor and political newcomer up to face off against Republican Gregg Mele in November’s general election. Hamawy decided to run for office after returning from a medical mission in Gaza in 2024 and meeting congresswoman Bonnie Watson Coleman, who announced her retirement in November 2025.

• Deb Haaland won the Democratic nomination for governor in New Mexico. If elected in the November general election, Haaland would become the first Native American woman governor elected in the country.

• Christina Bohannan won the Democratic nomination for Iowa’s 1st congressional district. She will compete against incumbent Republican congresswoman Mariannette Miller-Meeks in the November general election

• Zach Lahn narrowly won the Republican nomination for governor, and will face off against Democrat Rob Sand in Iowa’s general election this November. Five Republicans competed for the nomination to replace retiring Republican governor Kim Reynolds.

• Former Navy helicopter pilot Rebecca Benett won the Democratic nomination for New Jersey’s 7th congressional district, and will challenge Republican congressman Tom Kean Jr. in the general election. Kean, who’s been absent from Congress, citing a health issue, since March shared a statement on social media saying he’s “more energized than ever” and will “be completely transparent as to the nature of my medical condition” when he returns to work in “a matter of weeks”.