As lawmakers march toward a vote on President Donald Trump’s ‘big, beautiful bill,’ House Republicans aren’t too worried about primary threats from tech billionaire Elon Musk.

Musk, who once served as the head of Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), has been highly critical of the president’s legislative agenda. He had remained quiet about the bill until earlier this week when Senate Republicans were making strides to pass it.

‘We don’t take threats lightly up here,’ Rep. Buddy Carter, R-Ga., told Fox News Digital. ‘And, you know, Elon, we appreciate all the work he did with DOGE — and he did some fine work, some great work — but at the same time, this is something we’ve got to do.’

Musk again returned to bemoan Republicans for supporting the legislative behemoth for its staggering $3.3 trillion price tag and the impact it would have on the nation’s already massive, $37 trillion debt. He went so far as to threaten to back primary challengers against any Republican that voted for the bill. 

It wouldn’t be the first time that Musk has been involved — he dumped millions into Trump’s campaign last year.

Now, House Republicans are gearing up to vote after hours of delays, negotiations and a near record-breaking amount of open floor time in the lower chamber. Additionally, many don’t care about Musk’s threats.

Rep. Tim Walberg, R-Mi., told Fox News Digital that he was focused on doing the best ‘we could do, which is, frankly, better than what Elon Musk did.’

‘I don’t worry about Elon Musk,’ he said. ‘I do know that DOGE found some good things that we needed to remedy in this government. But the $2 trillion that Elon said he was going to find, he didn’t.’

Musk took particular issue with the Senate’s changes to the bill, too, and slammed it for adding trillions to the deficit.

Rep. Brad Knott, R-N.C., noted that the bill cuts north of $1.5 trillion in an effort to help offset the cost of extending or making permanent Trump’s 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.

‘I appreciate Mr. Musk’s motivation,’ he told Fox News Digital. ‘I appreciate his focus on debt reduction, and I hope he’ll take a step back and realize that we’re still all on the same team here.’

While the Senate’s changes, particularly to Medicaid and a reduction in the rollback of green energy subsidies from former President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, among other cost-driving issues, gave fiscal hawks in the House heartburn, House Republican leadership is confident that the bill will pass.

A recent pause in the U.S. sending Patriot missiles and ammunition to Ukraine is part of a wider, global review of military aid driven in part by the Pentagon’s China-leery policy chief, Elbridge Colby.

‘A capability review is being conducted to ensure U.S. military aid aligns with our defense priorities,’ Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell told reporters this week. 

That review is part of a plan championed by Colby to conserve U.S. resources that may be needed for war in the Indo-Pacific. 

Upon first news of the pause, Pentagon officials said it was due to concerns about the U.S.’ stockpile of munitions, which came after the U.S. and Iran traded strikes on each other in the Middle East. 

However, Parnell wrote on X that it was ‘flat out wrong’ to suggest Colby caught other administration officials off-guard with the aid pause. Colby ‘routinely provides policy recommendations to the Secretary of Defense and the President,’ but they have the ultimate say, he said.

A White House official confirmed to Fox News Digital they were ‘aware of the pause ahead of time.’

‘The President and top officials expect the DOD to regularly review aid allocations to ensure they are in line with the America First agenda,’ the official said. 

Colby has long advocated for limiting resources in Europe and the Middle East in case they’re needed in a war over Taiwan. 

‘What I have been trying to shoot a signal flare over is that it is vital for us to focus and enable our own forces for an effective and reasonable defense of Taiwan and for the Taiwanese, as well as the Japanese, to do more,’ Colby said during his confirmation hearing. 

‘A Europe first policy is not what America needs in this exceptionally dangerous time. We need to focus on China and Asia – clearly,’ he wrote on X. last year. 

The weapons put on pause, including missile interceptors and 155 mm ammunition shells, were already on their way to Ukraine, U.S. officials told Fox News.

Since Russia’s 2022 invasion, the U.S. has provided Ukraine with nearly $66 billion in security assistance, the Pentagon noted.

‘Part of our job is to give the president a framework that he can use to evaluate how many munitions we have and where we’re sending them,’ Parnell added. ‘We can’t give weapons to everybody all around the world.’

Still, critics like former GOP Rep. Adam Kinzinger claimed Colby had ‘blood on his hands’ over the halt. 

Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick, R-Pa., requested an ’emergency briefing’ from the White House and the Defense Department to ‘review our nation’s weapons and munitions stockpiles, and ensure the United States remains fully committed to providing Ukraine with the resources it urgently needs.’

Dan Caldwell, a former Pentagon official who worked with Colby on policy, defended his past colleague on X. ‘The incentives at DoD favor maintaining the status quo: Keep troops in Syria, keep sending weapons to Ukraine that we need for our defense, etc. That is why when patriots like @ElbridgeColby put the interests of their own country and own troops first, they are viciously smeared.’

Six months into President Donald Trump’s second term, U.S. military prowess has largely focused back on the Middle East: an offensive campaign against the Houthis in Yemen, hitting Iran’s nuclear sites and boosting defenses in the region.

Air Force Gen. Daniel Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said defending the Al-Udeid base from an Iranian counterattack was the largest Patriot missile salvo in history. 

Fox News’ Jen Griffin contributed to this report. 

The State Department has changed its hiring and promoting criteria for foreign service officers to eliminate any diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) considerations. 

Before now, the second of five core precepts used in State Department hiring and promotion emphasized promoting DEI, according to documents obtained by Fox News Digital. That precept has now been replaced with one focused on ‘fidelity.’

A senior State Department official said it was ‘unbelievable’ fidelity was not already part of the promotion criteria. 

‘This is a commonsense and needed change. U.S. Foreign Service Officers represent America overseas and should be judged on their ability to faithfully and dutifully represent and champion our country abroad.’ 

The department’s previous hiring guide for 2022–2025 required foreign service employees to ‘demonstrate impact in diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility,’ according to the internal documents.

Entry-level applicants were expected to proactively seek to ‘improve one’s own self-awareness with respect to promoting inclusivity.’ Mid- and senior-level supervisors were told to recruit and retain diverse teams, respond immediately to non-inclusive workplace behaviors, and ‘consult with impacted staff before finalizing decisions.’

That guidance is now out.

READ THE NEW GUIDANCE BELOW. APP USERS: CLICK HERE

The department’s new document for 2025–2028 lists ‘fidelity’ as the first of five core precepts, followed by communication, leadership, management and knowledge. Under the new policy, mid- and senior-level Foreign Service Officers must demonstrate loyalty by ‘zealously executing U.S. government policy’ and ‘resolving uncertainty on the side of fidelity to one’s chain of command.’

The move comes amid a government-wide effort to eliminate DEI within federal agencies, and root out those who they believe to be working to undermine President Donald Trump’s agenda. 

The State Department has also frozen the Foreign Service Officer Test (FSOT) – typically administered three times a year – as it moves to restructure and potentially downsize its workforce. In May, the department submitted a plan to Congress outlining a 15% reduction of its 19,000 employees and the consolidation of over 300 bureaus and agency offices.

While a court order has temporarily paused mass layoffs across federal agencies, a recent Supreme Court ruling determined that nationwide injunctions issued by federal district courts ‘likely exceed the equitable authority that Congress has granted.’

The House of Representatives’ progress on President Donald Trump’s ‘big, beautiful bill’ has temporarily come to a screeching halt thanks to the chamber’s top Democrat.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., began speaking in the chamber minutes before 5 a.m. and appears to be poised for hours more.

One GOP lawmaker told Fox News Digital that Jeffries was seen arriving with multiple binders, one of which he read from for roughly three hours. If the rest of the binders also hold portions of his speech, the New York Democrat could keep the House floor paused into the afternoon.

He’s able to command the House floor via a ‘magic minute,’ a privilege for party leaders in the chamber that allows them to speak for however long they want.

It comes after the House of Representatives voted to advance Trump’s $3.3 trillion ‘big, beautiful bill’ to its final phase in Congress, overcoming fears of a potential Republican mutiny.

It’s a significant victory for House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., though the fight is not over yet.

Lawmakers voted to proceed with debate on the mammoth-sized Trump agenda bill in the early hours of Thursday – a mechanism known as a ‘rule vote’ – teeing up a final House-wide vote sometime later Thursday morning.

The House adopted the rules for debate on the measure in a dramatic 219 to 213 vote – with all but moderate Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick, R-Pa., voting to proceed.

Next comes a vote on the actual measure, likely sometime on Thursday.

But the timing is largely contingent on when Jeffries finishes speaking. 

‘I feel the obligation, Mr. Speaker, to stand on this House floor and take my sweet time,’ he said at one point.

The first part of Jeffries’ speech saw him read from a binder that he said contained accounts of people who could lose their Medicaid coverage under the GOP bill, taken from residents of states with Republican lawmakers.

‘This Congress is on the verge of ripping food out of the mouths of children, veterans and seniors as a result of this one big ugly bill in order to reward billionaires with massive tax breaks and exploding the debt in the process,’ he said at one point.

Jeffries called it ‘one big, ugly bill’ that ‘our Republican colleagues are trying to jam down the throats of the American people will undermine their quality of life.’

The budget reconciliation process, which Republicans are using to pass the bill, is a mechanism that allows the party in power to completely sideline the minority in most cases. 

That means Jeffries nor his caucus have no real power to stop the bill from moving forward, making delay tactics their only tangible form of opposition right now.

The vote had been stalled for hours, since Wednesday afternoon, with five House Republicans poised to kill the measure before lawmakers could weigh the bill itself.

Several members of the conservative House Freedom Caucus and their allies, meanwhile, appeared ready to skip the vote altogether in protest of GOP leaders’ compromise bill.

But both Johnson and Trump spent hours negotiating with holdouts, apparently to some success.

But the process could still take hours. Democrats could still call up various procedural votes to delay the final measure, as they did when the legislation passed the House by just one vote for the first time in late May.

Plus, the bill itself could still face opposition from both moderates and conservative Republicans.

Conservative lawmakers were threatening to derail the rule vote as recently as Wednesday over changes the Senate made to the legislation, which fiscal hawks argued would add billions of dollars to the federal deficit.

But those concerns appear to have been outweighed by pressure from House GOP leaders and the president himself – who urged House Republicans to coalesce around the bill.

The Senate passed its version of the bill late on Tuesday morning, making modifications to the House’s provisions on Medicaid cost-sharing with states, some tax measures, and raising the debt ceiling.

Moderates are wary of Senate measures that would shift more Medicaid costs to states that expanded their programs under Obamacare, while conservatives have said those cuts are not enough to offset the additional spending in other parts of the bill.

Two members of the conservative House Freedom Caucus who also sit on the House Rules Committee, Reps. Ralph Norman, R-S.C., and Chip Roy, R-Texas, voted against the measure during the Rules Committee’s 12-hour hearing to consider the bill.

Johnson himself publicly urged the Senate to change as little as possible in the run-up to the vote. But the upper chamber’s bill ultimately passed by a similarly narrow margin as the House – with Vice President JD Vance casting the tie-breaking vote.

‘I’m not happy with what the Senate did to our product,’ Johnson told reporters late on Tuesday afternoon. ‘We understand this is a process that goes back and forth, and we’ll be working to get all of our members to yes.’

But Trump took to Truth Social after the Senate passed the bill to urge House Republicans to do the same.

‘It is no longer a ‘House Bill’ or a ‘Senate Bill’. It is everyone’s Bill. There is so much to be proud of, and EVERYONE got a major Policy WIN — But, the Biggest Winner of them all will be the American People, who will have Permanently Lower Taxes, Higher Wages and Take Home Pay, Secure Borders, and a Stronger and More Powerful Military,’ the president posted.

‘We can have all of this right now, but only if the House GOP UNITES, ignores its occasional ‘GRANDSTANDERS (You know who you are!), and does the right thing, which is sending this Bill to my desk. We are on schedule — Let’s keep it going, and be done before you and your family go on a July 4thvacation. The American People need and deserve it. They sent us here to, GET IT DONE.’

Both the House and Senate have been dealing with razor-thin GOP majorities of just three votes each.

The bill would permanently extend the income tax brackets lowered by Trump’s 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA), while temporarily adding new tax deductions to eliminate duties on tipped and overtime wages up to certain caps.

It also includes a new tax deduction for people aged 65 and over.

The legislation also rolls back green energy tax credits implemented under former President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, which Trump and his allies have attacked as ‘the Green New Scam.’

The bill would also surge money toward the national defense, and to Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in the name of Trump’s crackdown on illegal immigrants in the U.S.

The bill would also raise the debt limit by $5 trillion in order to avoid a potentially economically devastating credit default sometime this summer, if the U.S. runs out of cash to pay its obligations.

New and expanded work requirements would be implemented for Medicaid and federal food assistance, respectively.

Democrats have blasted the bill as a tax giveaway to the wealthy while cutting federal benefits for working-class Americans.

But Republicans have said their tax provisions are targeted toward the working and middle classes – citing measures eliminating taxes on tipped and overtime wages – while arguing they were reforming federal welfare programs to work better for those who truly need them.

Progressive Rep. Maxwell Frost, D-Fla., told reporters it was Democrats’ intent to delay proceedings on Wednesday for as long as possible.

‘This last go around, we were able to delay the bill upwards of 30 hours. And so we’re going to do the same thing, do everything we can from a procedural point of view to delay this,’ Frost said.

Meanwhile, there were earlier concerns about if weather delays in Washington could delay lawmakers from getting to Capitol Hill in time for the planned vote.

‘We’re monitoring the weather closely,’ Johnson told reporters. ‘There’s a lot of delays right now.’

Fox News’ Dan Scully contributed to this report.

President Donald Trump’s administration released its annual report revealing the salaries for every staffer inside the White House on Thursday.

The report shows employees’ earnings in a range of $59,070 at the lowest to $225,700 at the highest, though a few aren’t accepting salaries at all.

The top-paid staffer at the White House is Jacalynne Klopp, a senior advisor and the sole staffer earning $225,700. Behind her is Edgar Mkrtchian, an associate counsel, making $203,645.

Behind them comes a group of 33 staffers making $195,200, which includes many well-known names. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt takes in this level of salary, as does border czar Tom Homan, chief of staff Susan Wiles, trade advisor Peter Navarro, communications director Steven Cheung and police chief of staff and homeland security advisor Stephen Miller.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Fox News Digital.

According to the report, there are 108 employees who make between $59,000 and $80,000, while Trump’s speechwriters earn between $92,500 and $121,500.

Eight employees do not receive salaries at all, though some of those are due to overlapping roles in other sections of government.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio is chief among these, not receiving any compensation for his White House role as national security advisor. Special envoy Steve Witkoff also receives compensation from the State Department rather than the White House.

Trump’s own compensation is not listed in the report, but the pay scheme for the president is laid out in federal law. As president, Trump earns a base salary of $400,000, as well as a $50,000 expense allowance, $100,000 for travel and $19,000 for entertainment.

Trump donated his salary to government agencies during his first term in office and said he will do the same during his second term.

The White House did not immediately respond when asked about Trump’s compensation.