Updated June 4, 2025 at 5:48 PM PDT

The sweeping Republican bill to enact the core elements of President Trump’s domestic policy agenda would add $2.4 trillion to deficits over the next decade while forcing millions to lose health insurance coverage, according to an analysis released Wednesday by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.

The findings, which focus on the version of the bill that narrowly passed the House last month, run counter to GOP talking points that the trillions set aside in the bill to extend Trump’s 2017 tax cuts are offset by spending cuts in other areas and future economic growth to stem from the plan. It was an argument that allowed fiscal conservatives in the House to sign off on the bill.

The CBO is expected to release an additional estimate in the near future that would account for economic growth. The scorekeeper did a similar pair of estimates when the tax cuts passed during the first Trump administration. Those estimates showed the deficit impact decreased slightly thanks to economic growth projections — but not enough to erase it entirely.

The CBO analysis represents a snapshot, as the Senate is opening work on the bill this week and is expected to embrace a number of changes that would reshape the final makeup of the legislation. But it comes at a moment when GOP leaders are facing heightened concerns about the cost of the plan — worries that drew renewed attention on Tuesday after Elon Musk slammed the measure as “a disgusting abomination.”

Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., sought to address Musk’s criticism by saying that changes Senate Republicans make to the bill “are going to lead to significant growth.” Thune said those changes would include more “robust” cuts than were in the House version of the bill.

“At the end of the day, failure is not an option. We are going to succeed,” he told reporters on Tuesday.

In addition to extending the Trump tax cuts, the GOP bill also looks to make good on several of Trump’s campaign promises, including suspending taxes on tips and overtime for the duration of Trump’s second term. It also includes spending to reshape immigration and energy policy.

In its analysis, the CBO said the extension of the tax cut program in the House bill would be the biggest driver of future deficits.

To help pay for the plan, the Republican bill would scale back spending on safety net programs — including the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, once known as food stamps, as well as Medicaid, the joint federal/state health care program for low-income, elderly and disabled Americans.

Those changes would come at a cost. The CBO estimated that nearly 11 million Americans would lose health insurance as a result of how Republicans hope to reshape Medicaid by introducing new work requirements, shortening the enrollment period and eliminating what lawmakers say is “waste, fraud and abuse” in the system. States would also be on the hook for potentially steep administrative costs tied to implementing and enforcing the employment verification process.

The White House was quick to push back against the CBO numbers on Wednesday, and defended the bill as a win for the economy.

“It will improve the deficit. It will help us deal with debt. It has historic levels of mandatory savings. The fact that the Congressional Budget Office doesn’t agree is not particularly new,” said President Trump’s budget chief, Russell Vought, in a briefing with reporters.

The CBO has come under fire in recent days from the White House and Republicans in Congress who claim, without any evidence, the agency is working against them. On Tuesday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt alleged that the CBO had become “partisan and political,” even though its current director, Phillip L. Swagel, served in the George W. Bush administration. The agency’s findings also mirror other estimates by nonpartisan groups that the the legislation would add trillions to the deficit.

Senators still at odds with some House-backed provisions

One thing Republican senators agree on when asked about the House-backed bill is that they expect it will be heavily revised by the upper chamber.

There are several critical sticking points between what the House passed and what groups of GOP senators say they can support. Those include:

Medicaid : The House-passed bill includes new work requirements for Medicaid. Those requirements would apply to recipients without disabilities and without children. While Senate Republicans generally support the idea of work requirements, several senators have expressed concerns about significant cuts to the program itself. That includes Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley, who penned an opinion piece in The New York Times entitled “Don’t Cut Medicaid.”

: The House-passed bill includes new work requirements for Medicaid. Those requirements would apply to recipients without disabilities and without children. While Senate Republicans generally support the idea of work requirements, several senators have expressed concerns about significant cuts to the program itself. That includes Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley, who penned an opinion piece in entitled “Don’t Cut Medicaid.” State and local tax deduction : SALT was a major issue of contention within the House Republican conference, with blue-state Republicans pushing to allow their constituents to be able to deduct more in state and local taxes. But the calculation is different in the Senate, where there are no Republicans who represent high-tax states like California and New York where SALT is a top priority. Various senators have already said that they oppose SALT’s inclusion in their bill, including Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson.

: SALT was a major issue of contention within the House Republican conference, with blue-state Republicans pushing to allow their constituents to be able to deduct more in state and local taxes. But the calculation is different in the Senate, where there are no Republicans who represent high-tax states like California and New York where SALT is a top priority. Various senators have already said that they oppose SALT’s inclusion in their bill, including Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson. Rolling back clean energy tax credits : The House bill would aggressively roll back clean energy tax credits passed during the Biden administration. Four Senate Republicans sent a letter in April to Senate leadership cautioning against terminating various credits, which they wrote would “create uncertainty, jeopardizing capital allocation, long-term project planning and job creation in the energy sector and across our broader economy.”

Republicans can only afford three “no” votes, assuming there are no absences. Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul and Wisconsin’s Johnson have already signaled their opposition to the House version of the bill out of concerns about the deficit.

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for NPR Andrew Roth (left) stands up from his wheelchair to give Jack Moran a hug at the Shoah Foundation at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. Roth was imprisoned in the Buchenwald concentration camp, which Moran helped liberate while serving in the U.S. Army.

Jack Moran was born in Superior, Wisconsin, in 1925.

Andrew Roth was born on the other side of the world, in Penészlek, Hungary, in 1927. Earlier this month, the two men met in Los Angeles. It was not the first time that events had brought them to the same place.

“Are you the soldier who…” Roth asked from his wheelchair, reaching his hand out.

“You don’t have to get up,” said Moran.

Roth leaned on his cane, and stood. The two men embraced.

“I was much younger,” said Roth. “So were you.”

“How wonderful that you survived,” said Moran.

Eight decades earlier, Roth was a prisoner in the Buchenwald concentration camp in Germany, having already survived the Auschwitz death camp and, before that, a ghetto for Eastern European Jews.

Moran was serving in the U.S. Army, when he arrived with the American military and helped liberate Buchenwald, after facing the brutal combat of the Battle of the Bulge, where he watched his best friends die.

Both men were still teenagers when they endured devastating Nazi atrocities and the horrors of war.

Andrew Roth and his family were deported from Hungary and taken to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where most of his family were murdered in the gas chambers.

Now, both approaching 100 years old, Roth and Moran met to share their stories with the USC Shoah Foundation, which maintains the largest audiovisual archive of Holocaust survivor and witness testimonies.

The Nazis systematically killed an estimated six million Jews in the Holocaust. Today, just over 220,000 Holocaust survivors remain worldwide, according to the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, an organization that helps survivors receive compensation for Nazi atrocities.

Fewer and fewer first-hand witnesses remain alive to tell their stories, and the remaining survivors’ memories are fading. The USC Shoah Foundation is racing against time to gather these testimonies, uncover more Holocaust history, and increase global understanding of the genocide.

“There are so few of the greatest generation or the survivor generation who are still with us,” said Rob Williams, a Holocaust historian and CEO of the USC Shoah Foundation.

Williams said that even though the Holocaust has been the subject of intense historical interest over the years, many parts of that history, particularly in Eastern Europe, remain unexplored or unknown.

The testimonies of remaining survivors can help fill in the gaps.

“And if we are unable to not only record their stories, but share them with the world,” Williams said, “there are aspects of this history or opportunities to build connections that may forever be lost.”

‘Life was so cheap and death came so easy’

Moran enlisted in the Army at 17 years old, and deployed to the battlefields of western Europe in 1944. Decades later, what is most vivid in his memory is the overwhelming loss he and his fellow soldiers endured.

“I saw so many nice young fellows laying in the ditches of France, and in the snow of Belgium, and in the woods of Germany,” Moran said. “19 years old, 20 years old, their lives cut short.”

Jack Moran was stuck in a foxhole for days without food during the Battle of the Bulge.

In one battle, he lost four of his best friends.

“God spared me for some reason,” he said. “Life was so cheap, and death came so easy. It was so, so sad.”

During the brutal winter of 1944-1945, during the Nazi offensive known as the Battle of the Bulge, Moran said he was stuck for days in a frozen foxhole, surrounded by the German military, with no food.

“Thank God the snow was there to give us water,” Moran said.

Each survival was followed by another battle, and more and more fighting.

“I saw grown men — 25 years old was a grown man to me at that time — after a battle, sitting in the corner of a barn, crying like a baby, saying ‘I can’t take this anymore. I can’t stand this anymore,'” Moran said. “And I felt the same way. We all did. But we had to continue. We had no choice but to keep going forward, watching our friends die.”

U.S. Army troops march through Belgium on Jan. 25, 1945, during the Battle of the Bulge.

As the Army advanced into Germany, Moran began seeing signs of another kind of horror.

“In railroad yards, we found boxcars,” Moran said. “We’d open up the door and inside would be six or seven-hundred suitcases that the owners never got back.”

Throughout the Holocaust, the Nazis confiscated the belongings of Jewish people — who, if they were not immediately killed, were deported to ghettos and concentration camps — and used them for the German war effort. Concentration camp guards even shaved inmates’ hair, which was then repurposed as insulation or raw material for German military supplies.

‘I was just very resourceful, and very lucky’

In 1944, the Nazis forcibly took Andrew Roth and his Orthodox Jewish family from their small Hungarian town to a ghetto in Satu-Mare, now part of Romania.

Throughout the Holocaust, the Nazis concentrated European Jews in urban ghettos, which were marked by horrific living conditions, forced labor and the threat of execution.

Life in the ghetto did not last long.

Later that year, Roth and his family were deported to Auschwitz, the Nazi concentration camp in Poland, which was equipped with gas chambers to commit murder on an industrial scale. Around one million Jews were killed at Auschwitz over the course of the Holocaust.

When Roth and his family got to Auschwitz, he recalls, the concentration camp guard was separating new arrivals into two lines.

“Rechts” and “links,” Roth recalls the guard telling them — sending people either “right” or “left.”

“He told me to go rechts,” Roth said, to follow his mother and siblings. But he saw his uncle and a cousin going to the left.

“Without thinking,” he said, he decided to follow his uncle, “not realizing that I made a life and death choice. All those who went to the right were gassed the same night. And I went with my uncle the other way. And here I am.”

With most of his family murdered, Roth survived on minimal rations in the cold, while performing hard labor. Death was a constant presence.

“It was so routine, you just get immune to that stuff,” Roth said.

As the Soviet army approached Auschwitz, the Nazis sent Roth and other inmates to Buchenwald, a concentration camp in Germany.

AP Young, emaciated prisoners stand inside the barbed wire of the Buchenwald concentration camp on April 19, 1945, shortly after the U.S. army liberated the camp from the Nazis.

In his block was another teenager — Elie Wiesel — who would go on to write about his experience in the Holocaust in the memoir Night and later received the Nobel Peace Prize. Wiesel died in 2016.

Roth said survival often boiled down to a fight against freezing cold and starvation. At one point, he recalls discovering where the Nazis fed the German Shepherds used to guard the camp. He risked his life to take just enough dog food to remain alive.

“I was just very resourceful,” Roth said, “and very lucky most of the time.”

‘I couldn’t believe what I was seeing’

By April 1945, as the Nazi regime was collapsing, fate brought Roth and Moran together.

On April 11, inmates began to overtake the camp as the guards fled. U.S. forces arrived soon after and liberated the area. 21,000 inmates remained. 900 of them were children.

Roth said the experience of liberation was “unreal, unbelievable.”

Though he was born in September, he now celebrates April 11 as his birthday.

“I couldn’t believe what I was seeing — how man can seem so mean to his fellow human being,” said Moran.

U.S. Military Government of Germany Andrew Roth’s official questionnaire, completed after the U.S. Army liberated Buchenwald, a Nazi concentration camp in Germany. Roth was given the name “Andor” at birth, and later adopted the name Andrew.

General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in Europe, invited members of Congress and journalists to visit the liberated camps, including Buchenwald, to witness firsthand the evidence of Nazi atrocities.

Roth said he remembers speaking to Germans shortly after liberation who claimed ignorance.

“They kept saying, ‘wir haben das nicht gewusst,'” Roth said, meaning, “we did not know.”

“It was a blatant lie,” Roth said. “There was no way of ignoring it.” He said that when the Nazis burned the bodies of their victims, the smoke and the smell traveled for miles.

The fight to preserve history

“By and large, knowledge of the Holocaust is decreasing,” said Williams, who previously worked for the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, “even in some of the countries responsible for the crimes of the Holocaust.”

Understanding the Holocaust, he argues, is crucial to understanding the modern world, including the postwar institutions designed to ensure that “never again” would not be an empty promise.

International organizations like the United Nations and NATO were created in the aftermath of World War II, and international treaties on the treatment of refugees and against genocide were ratified. The word “genocide” did not exist before World War II.

Skepticism of such institutions of international cooperation have gained political traction. Authoritarian governments, such as Viktor Orban’s in Hungary, have won power and undermined civil liberties. In Germany, leaders of the far-right political party Alternativ für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany), or AfD, have decried what they call a “cult of guilt” around the Holocaust, and questioned the country’s continued reckoning with Nazi-era crimes. In the U.S., members of the Trump administration, including Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, have expressed support for the AfD.

“I hate to be pessimistic, but I don’t think it’s any coincidence that just as we are casting doubt on the value of democracy or on the value of human rights,” Williams said, “that we’re also beginning to witness a decline in understanding and memory of the Holocaust.”

In the U.S., violent antisemitic attacks have occurred in Boulder, Colo., and Washington, D.C. Popular online influencers with millions of followers have encouraged Holocaust denial. And multiple members of the Trump Administration have promoted antisemitic conspiracies and associated with antisemitic extremists.

Getty Images Two members of an organization dedicated to showing solidarity with hostages held in Gaza embrace at a vigil, one week after an antisemitic attack on the group in Boulder, Colo.

Finding meaning out of horror

After the war, Roth initially moved to France before settling in the United States.

Moran returned to Wisconsin after the Allied victory in Europe, and braced for a possible deployment to the Pacific. When news of Japan’s surrender came over the radio, he sobbed with relief.

Both men settled in California and started families. They still carry their stories of the war.

The process of gathering oral histories, Williams said, isn’t just valuable for historians, but is meaningful for the survivors as well.

Moran said he was moved by his meeting with Roth.

“That anybody survives those camps is a wonderful thing,” Moran said. “And I’m so happy to meet him.”

Jack Moran (left) was among the U.S. Army soldiers who helped liberate Buchenwald, while Andrew Roth was a survivor of the German concentration camp.

During their meeting, Williams was able to share an artifact from Roth’s liberation — the official questionnaire he filled out for the U.S. Military Government.

Roth said he had never seen it.

“Being able to share those documents is, in a certain sense, a way to let him reclaim his own history,” said Williams, “a history that was ripped away from him by the Nazis.”

The questionnaire is written in the blunt language of military bureaucracy.

It lists the dates of his confinement at Auschwitz and Buchenwald.

Under the line “Reason For Arrest,” the document states plainly in cursive lettering:

“Being a Jew.”

At Pride parades from New York City to Budapest over the weekend, communities around the world celebrated and also demonstrated for LGBTQ+ rights and inclusion during the last days of Pride Month. In addition to waving rainbow flags, many held protest signs, amid increasing political attacks in the U.S. by Republicans and President Trump’s administration.

“Our joy is our resistance,” read one sign held by a reveler wearing samba feathers at New York City’s Pride parade, the oldest and largest such event in the U.S. This year, the New York event’s theme was “Rise Up: Pride in Protest.”

Large throngs of New Yorkers celebrated as the parade traveled down Fifth Avenue to downtown. Many of them also demonstrated against President Trump’s recent executive orders and policies targeting transgender people and recognizing only two unchangeable sexes, male and female. Trump’s orders have also banned “gender ideology” and dismantled diversity, equity and inclusion programs.

“At a time when trans youth are under attack, queer art is being erased, and the clock is being rolled back on LGBTQIA+ rights across the country … NYC Pride remains focused on advocating for our community as we face an onslaught of attacks,” NYC Pride media director Chris Piedmont wrote in a statement posted on social media.

The celebrations occurred even as some corporations canceled or cut back donations to Pride events around the country this year.

For the fifth year in a row, New York Police Department and corrections officers were officially barred from marching in the parade while wearing their full dress uniforms, which include firearms. On the sidelines of the parade, New York City Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch joined members of the Gay Officers Action League New York to protest the exclusion.

The New York event also commemorated the legacy of the 1969 Stonewall Riots, when a violent police raid at a gay bar in Greenwich Village sparked the beginning of a national movement for LGBTQ+ rights. The parade marched past the Stonewall Inn, now a national monument.

Ten years after the landmark Supreme Court decision legalizing same-sex marriage in the U.S., there were also major Pride parades in San Francisco, West Hollywood, Chicago, Denver, Seattle and Minneapolis.

“Especially this year with everything going on, I think it’s really important to show force and show our support,” Angela Loudermilk told NPR member station KQED at the San Francisco parade, which she rode in with her motorcycle club.

Other cities around the world, including Tokyo, Paris and São Paulo, held their events earlier this month. And some, including London and Rio de Janeiro, will celebrate later this year.

At a Pride event in Budapest on Saturday, around 100,000 people marched in defiance of police orders and a ban by the Hungarian government.

In April, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s conservative populist governing party outlawed LGBTQ+ public events, saying they violated children’s rights to moral and spiritual development. It was the latest Hungarian crackdown after banning same-sex marriage and adoption, and outlawing transgender people from changing their sex in official documents.

Ádám Kanicsár, a 35-year-old Hungarian LGBTQ+ activist and journalist, told The Associated Press he and others were defying the ban. “We don’t really care about the consequences, we are here because we are proud.”

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The number of homicides is falling dramatically nationwide.

In 2024, murders fell by at least 14% across the U.S., according to analyses by the data firm AH Datalytics and the Council on Criminal Justice, a nonpartisan think tank. Official data from the FBI goes only through 2023 but shows similar drops. Early analyses from AH Datalytics suggest the drop will be even bigger in 2025.

In Detroit, for instance, city officials say the number of homicides is at its lowest since 1965, and Police Chief Todd Bettison says that has led to a huge difference for his officers.

“They’re not drinking from a fire hose,” he says.

City officials around the country often point to policing as a key component of why crime falls, highlighting how many officers a city has or how they’re being deployed. That can play an important role, but crime analysts say the reasons behind these drops are more complex and broader.

Jeff Asher, co-founder of AH Datalytics, says the number of crimes typically rises or falls by only a few percentage points each year: “You think about a really large ship — it doesn’t turn fast,” he says. “These things don’t change fast.”

And yet they have — despite fewer police officers nationwide now than before the COVID-19 pandemic. Graphs of the number of murders over the last five years look like a roller coaster hill: After a surge of violence in 2020 and 2021, the trend line has fallen over the last three years.

“We’re seeing really not just declines, but large declines and large across-the-board declines. I mean, it’s everywhere,” Asher says.

Researchers who study crime caution that no one thing causes violence to rise or fall, but Asher and other crime analysts have zeroed in on what they say is a primary driver of the rise and subsequent decline: the COVID-19 pandemic.

John Roman, who directs the Center on Public Safety & Justice at NORC, a research group at the University of Chicago, said they wanted to figure out why crime rose and then fell in recent years.

“The only thing that happened in America during this period that is of that same scale is the pandemic. And what the pandemic really did was it changed how you spend your day, what you do.”

All of a sudden, there were a lot of young people — who are more likely to commit crimes than older people — at home, with little to do. And, Roman says, a vital support system was ripped away: public services. Between March and May of 2020, the country’s local government workforce shrank by nearly 10%.

“They’re the biggest employer of teachers. They employ coaches and counselors and aides and all the people that young people connect with,” Roman says. “They employ physical health, mental health, behavioral health providers, and they fund all the local programming in the area. They fund your community center.”

Five years after the start of the pandemic, local government employment is finally back at pre-pandemic levels. Municipalities are also bringing in more money, and their spending has rebounded as well. That means many services are coming back — and with them, places where young people can find support.

“We’re spending money on stuff, and when stuff is nicer, people have places to go. It creates jobs,” Asher says. “It creates environments where people are hanging out. It’s not the broken-windows concept of ‘we need to arrest people for graffiti,’ but it’s more like the kind of idealized version of broken windows that, ‘if we make things nice and people are around it, it provides a means of interrupting cycles of violence.”

In Detroit, Police Chief Bettison credits some of the murder decline there to changes in policing techniques and to higher officer staffing levels. But he also sees things more holistically.

“It is not one thing that drives violence. And so we are always consistently looking for the root causes,” he says.

Two years ago, the city invested $10 million in six community organizations. Each group was assigned a section of the city. Their goal was to reduce violence in that area using what is known as community violence intervention.

Negus Vu is the executive director of one of those groups, the Detroit People’s Community, which is also known as The People’s Action. The essential element to the group’s work, Vu says, is building relationships with young people who may be at risk of committing violence.

“You have outreach workers who have lived, shared experiences that are the ones who establish these relationships,” he says. “And because these relationships are genuine and sincere, they’re able to refer them to get wraparound services such as substance abuse, job referrals, therapy.”

If you meet people’s needs, he says, they’re less likely to turn to violence.

A year after the program started, all six groups had seen fewer shootings and homicides in their zones than the citywide average.

“The numbers are there. We’ve shown collectively that what we’re doing is impactful, effective and is saving lives,” Vu says.

Their funding, though, came from the American Rescue Plan Act, the stimulus bill passed in 2021. That money will go away at the end of this summer. The city is funding the program through next summer.

City officials are now pushing for the state to enact a Public Safety Trust Fund, which would fully fund and expand the program. That bill is making its way through the Michigan Legislature.

Copyright 2025 NPR

Updated June 30, 2025 at 5:31 AM PDT

Local authorities said an armed man started a fire on a mountain in northern Idaho and then began shooting at responding firefighters, killing two and injuring a third.

Additionally, authorities in Kootenai County, Idaho, said the body of the man recovered on the mountain is believed to be the only suspect responsible for the fatal shootings. A weapon was found near the body, said Kootenai County Sheriff Bob Norris.

Norris also made clear that he and other authorities believe the shootings were intentional.

“We do believe the suspect started the fire, it was an ambush and it was totally intentional,” Norris said. “This was a total ambush. These firefighters did not have a chance.

Norris added: “Based on the preliminary investigation, we believe that is the only shooter on the mountain at that time. There is no threat to the community at this time.”

Earlier Sunday, local authorities had lifted a shelter-in-place order.

Speaking at a late Sunday evening news conference, Norris said a cell phone signal led authorities to discovering the dead body.

Authorities went through a timeline of the deadly events on Sunday:

— At 1:21 p.m. local time, first reports of a wildfire on Canfield Mountain

— A 2 p.m., firefighters first reported coming under gunfire

— At around 3:15 p.m., authorities picked up an active cell phone signal on the mountain.

— Norris said the body of the person believed to be the shooting suspect was found about an hour and a half later.

Norris and other authorities gave no information about the dead body pending identification, or any possible motive for the shootings. Norris did not say if the dead person had fatally shot himself.

“We believe that there was only 1 shooter, based on weapons found, type of injuries incurred from that weapon,” Norris said.

The sheriff also said investigators don’t believe the shooting suspect is the person who made the 911 call to report the fire.

Norris said investigators believe the suspect ran and shot during the attack on the firefighters. At the news conference, local authorities also said firefighters are not trained to respond to ambush situations.

Norris added: “This is a situation where a lot of people in this room haven’t processed this.”

Bill Buley/Coeur D’Alene Press / AP / AP People watch a procession from Kootenai Health headed to Spokane, Wash., after two firefighters were killed Sunday when they were ambushed by sniper fire while responding to a blaze in a northern Idaho mountain community, in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho.

Earlier Sunday, Idaho Gov. Brad Little said firefighters were “attacked while responding to a fire in North Idaho.” In a post on X, the governor said, “This is a heinous direct assault on our brave firefighters.”

Norris said the investigation will resume Monday morning. More weapons may be found from the investigation, he said.

The sheriff acknowledged that the crime scene is compromised because of the fire, but they prioritized removing the dead body for further investigation. “We had to do what we had to do to preserve the body.”

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