As chair of the Senate’s Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee, Sen. Bill Cassidy (R., La.) — has ambitious plans for 2026, which includes tackling everything from pharmacy benefit manager (PBM) reform to lowering the costs of prescription drugs, all while investigating reports of federal childcare programs across the country.
Cassidy, who told the Reporter that he and President Donald Trump are “totally in sync” on a litany of health care policies, said that that remains the case, especially when it comes to “a potential deal for the exchanges.”
“The president wants the money to go to the patient, not the profit to the hospital,” Cassidy said. “Those are my words, but I think he would use them if he wanted to, and we are trying to come up with a plan that does that. As regards what we plan for the coming year, we’re going to have the hearing on misoprostol coming up. We’ll also try and do something on pharmacy benefit managers; the president is all about lowering the cost of prescription drugs. We had a bill that almost passed last year. We’ll try and bring it up again this year, which would lower premiums for people both in Medicare and in commercial insurance and as well as on the exchanges. It’s something across the board to benefit patients. The president’s going to be about that I know for sure, because he’s all about lowering the cost of prescription drugs.”
The fight over litigation finance is expanding on Capitol Hill, with Consumers’ Research (CR) launching its latest campaign, obtained exclusively by the Washington Reporter, against what it calls the “wokest insurance company.” The Reporter will be running a series of articles on the campaign as well as the prospects of litigation finance reform passing Congress or being implemented by executive action this year.
Consumers Research’s latest move includes placing fliers around the Hill with a mock newspaper, called The Daily Chubb, which targets the insurance giant Chubb over policies that Consumers Research calls “woke”.
“These fliers are legitimately everywhere,” a Capitol Hill veteran told the Reporter, “especially outside the Pelosi Caucus Room.”
Rep. French Hill (R., Ark.) is backing up President Donald Trump’s executive order cracking down on “foreign-owned and politically-motivated proxy advisors” from leveraging their power to advance back door Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) policies.
Hill told the Washington Reporter that Trump’s executive order “empower shareholders and provide them with a voice in company oversight.” Trump’s EO singles out both Institutional Shareholder Services Inc. (ISS) and Glass, Lewis & Co., LLC for how they “play a significant role in shaping the policies and priorities of America’s largest companies through the shareholder voting process” in a manner “unbeknownst to most Americans.”
“These firms,” the Trump administration said, “which control more than 90 percent of the proxy advisor market, advise their clients about how to vote the enormous numbers of shares their clients hold and manage on behalf of millions of Americans in mutual funds and exchange traded funds. Their clients’ holdings often constitute a significant ownership stake in the United States’ largest publicly traded companies, and their clients often follow the proxy advisors’ advice.”
A battle over litigation finance will be addressed by the House Judiciary Committee this week in a markup that has flown under the radar, multiple corporations involved in the fight told the Washington Reporter.
One bill, the Protecting Third Party Litigation Funding From Abuse Act, has a scheduled markup following the rollout of a previous bill, the Litigation Transparency Act of 2025. The legislation’s proponents and opponents don’t fall along neat ideological lines. Its proponents argue that addressing risks from foreign and domestic third-party litigation funding (TPLF), the bill can protect Americans’ privacy and free speech rights while ending abusive lawsuits that drive up costs for consumers, a source familiar with the matter told the Reporter.
The bill has a provision that would require litigants in civil actions to disclose entities that are not a named party to the litigation, but which have a right to receive payment contingent on the the litigation.
The bill includes privacy protections d and forbids donor disclosure; it also requires in camera review prior to the production of any litigation funding documents, while requiring courts to allow for redactions that protect individual privacy, a source familiar with the bill said.
The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) spent 2025 laying the groundwork the Trump administration can build off of as it hones in on affordability issues in 2026.
Under Secretary Scott Turner, HUD launched an Innovative Housing Showcase on the National Mall, which spotlighted dozens of American businesses that bring low-cost homes to Americans across the country, announced its headquarters relocation to Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s (R., Va.) Virginia, and reformed its grant-making process so that funds from the department go only to American citizens.
“President Trump is advancing the American Dream of homeownership, and under his leadership HUD made huge steps to fulfill that noble mission in 2025,” Turner told the Washington Reporter. “We’ve slashed red tape, championed common sense policies like Opportunity Zones, and ensured HUD funds go to American citizens, not illegals.”
Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Tulsi Gabbard is scoring some backup from one of her top congressional allies, who told the Washington Reporter that she “has been doing an incredible job not only keeping the American people safe, but also executing President Trump’s peace through strength foreign policy agenda.”
Sen. Eric Schmitt (R., Mo.) told the Reporter that Gabbard’s work is indispensable at a time when the DNI is under fire for reports that the Trump administration undertook much of the planning to capture Venezuela’s illegitimate dictator, Nicolás Maduro and his wife.
Schmitt is the latest high-ranking Republican to reiterate support for Gabbard; allies in the broader Trump orbit have joined Schmitt in rallying behind her.
Vice President JD Vance clarified that reports that both he and Gabbard were intentionally excluded from Trump’s planning to capture Maduro are fake news.
A GOP group dedicated to expanding the number of women in the House and Senate raised a record-breaking fundraising haul ahead of the 2026 midterm elections, the Washington Reporter can exclusively report.
Winning for Women Action Fund (WFW AF) and its affiliated groups raised $4 million, including over $1.5 million in hard dollars, which the groups plan to use to re-elect incumbent GOP women in Congress and to grow their ranks in Congress. WFW AF, which is the primary super PAC dedicated to electing GOP women, has already spent $20 million over the past several cycles, backing GOP women.
WFW Action Fund (WFW AF), the first super PAC dedicated to electing Republican women, has invested $20 million to advance candidates through competitive primaries and general elections. Winning For Women (WFW) is its aligned 501(c)(4), which primarily leads targeted advocacy campaigns, hosts policy briefings with partner organizations and runs mentorship programs to support GOP women leaders.
Those groups have combined to raise or direct almost $50 million to GOP women, and the groups already have their first picks for 2026, including several in hotly-contested primaries in Texas that kick off in March.
Secretary of Labor Lori Chavez-DeRemer spent 2025 traveling to 36 of 50 states on a whirlwind nationwide tour to learn from American workers and to take President Donald Trump’s message on the road.
“Under President Trump’s leadership, the Department of Labor moved quickly to put the American Worker First in 2025 by expanding apprenticeships, cutting burdensome red tape, and enforcing the law to protect hardworking Americans,” Chavez-DeRemer told the Washington Reporter. “From adding nearly 300,000 new apprentices to cracking down on unemployment insurance fraud and H-1B visa abuse, we’re restoring fairness to the labor market and making the American Worker the cornerstone of our nation’s economic comeback.”
“One of the things the president asked when I was nominated,” the Chavez-DeRemer told the Reporter in an earlier interview, “was to bring labor and business together, and I promised him that with my background of having the trades support me, being the daughter of a Teamster, that I could bring that voice to the table and help him grow this economy so that everybody can have a piece of the pie. And the American Dream is alive.”
In the wake of President Trump’s “snatch” operation against Nicolas Maduro and his wife, the question has been raised by Democrats and the media as to what kind of congressional authorization was needed for the strike. It’s a question Sen. Mike Lee posed when news of the operation broke, only for him to confirm later to his satisfaction that it was a legitimate law-enforcement action and not military. But as Sen. Tom Cotton observed on Face the Nation, however you slice it, this was a valid exercise of the president’s inherent authority as commander-in-chief, and complaints about congressional authorization are misplaced. Sen. Cotton is right.
The fact that Maduro is a fugitive drug trafficker should end the matter in and of itself. In early 2020 a Manhattan grand jury issued a scathing indictment against Maduro for his activities in the international drug trade and he now awaits arraignment in the Southern District of New York. At its heart, then, this was a law-enforcement exercise and General Dan Caine was sure to mention that law-enforcement officers accompanied our forces on the snatch operation.
For more than two centuries, the United States has understood a simple truth about its own security: instability in the Western Hemisphere never stays local. From the earliest days of the Republic, American leaders recognized that hostile powers establishing a foothold close to home was not merely a diplomatic inconvenience — it was a strategic threat.
That understanding gave rise to the Monroe Doctrine, articulated by President James Monroe in 1823. It was not a call for conquest, but a declaration of strategic boundaries. The Western Hemisphere, Monroe made clear, was not open terrain for European powers seeking to recolonize, dominate, or project force against the United States.
The doctrine lay mostly dormant until President Theodore Roosevelt made it actionable through the Roosevelt Corollary, asserting that chronic instability in the Americas could justify decisive U.S. intervention and enforcement in defense of regional order.
