Annie Karni

At Senator John Fetterman’s (D-PA) desk in the Senate chamber, there is a newly installed monitor that rises or lowers, depending on whether he sits or stands, and provides closed captioning so he can follow the proceedings. At the center dais, a custom desk stand has been built to accommodate the same technology for when he takes his shifts presiding over the Senate. The sergeant-at-arms has arranged for live audio-to-text transcription for the committees on which Sen. Fetterman serves, and plans to expand the service to all Senate hearings.

President Biden’s two immediate predecessors had ambitious goals to rebuild the country’s infrastructure, but both left office having made little progress in fixing the nation’s bridges, roads, pipes, and broadband. President Donald Trump announced so many meaningless infrastructure weeks that the term became a running joke of his administration. While the goal of addressing the United States’ infrastructure is bipartisan, the details are not.

Stephanie Grisham, First Lady Melania Trump’s loyal and sometimes combative communications director, will replace Sarah Huckabee Sanders as White House press secretary. She will also take on the added role of communications director, a job that has been vacant since the departure of Bill Shine in March, and will keep her role with First Lady Trump. Grisham joined the Trump presidential campaign in 2015 and is one of the last remaining aides from the campaign still serving in the White House. She became a trusted aide after the Trumps moved into the White House, known for defending Mrs.

Democratic congressional leaders emerged from a meeting at the White House and announced that President Donald Trump had agreed to pursue a $2 trillion infrastructure plan to upgrade the nation’s highways, railroads, bridges and broadband.

President Donald Trump’s post on Sen Al Franken (D-MN) allegations was the latest example of the president's habit of using his Twitter account to draw fire, rather than deflecting it. Controlling potentially damaging tweets was a job left mostly to the legal team in the early days of the administration. Marc Kasowitz, a former Trump attorney, and Jay Sekulow, a current member of the president's legal team, gave Trump one simple rule to guide his tweeting habit: Don’t comment online about the Russia investigation.

Apparently, President Donald Trump is considering scaling back White House press secretary Sean Spicer’s public role, as President Trump also weighs a broader shakeup of his communications shop in the wake of several scandals. The press secretary, who has turned into a household name over the past five months and garnered sky-high television ratings for his daily press briefings, has also drawn the ire of the president. He is no longer expected to do a daily, on-camera briefing after President Trump’s foreign trip, which begins May 19.

White House official Boris Epshteyn, a combative Trump loyalist tasked with plugging the president’s message on television, threatened earlier in 2017 to pull all West Wing officials from appearing on Fox News after a tense appearance on anchor Bill Hemmer’s show. Epshteyn, apparently, got in a yelling match with a Fox News booker after Hemmer pressed him for details of President Donald Trump’s controversial executive order cracking down on immigration from Muslim-majority countries — a topic he was not expecting to be grilled on. “Am I someone you want to make angry?” Epshteyn told the booker, the sources said. When he threatened to pull White House officials from the network, the fed-up booker had had enough. “Go right ahead,” the booker fired back, the sources said, aware that Epshteyn had no power to follow through on a threat that would have upended the administration’s relationship with a sympathetic news network. Ultimately, White House officials have continued to appear on Fox News, and the network said that it handled the flare-up professionally.

Press secretary Sean Spicer is cracking down on leaks coming out of the West Wing, with increased security measures that include random phone checks of White House staffers, overseen by White House attorneys.

After Spicer became aware that information had leaked out of a planning meeting with about a dozen of his communications staffers, he reconvened the group in his office to express his frustration over the number of private conversations and meetings that were showing up in unflattering news stories. Upon entering Spicer’s office for what was described as “an emergency meeting,” staffers were told to dump their phones on a table for a “phone check," to prove they had nothing to hide. He explicitly warned staffers that using texting apps like Confide — an encrypted and screenshot-protected messaging app that automatically deletes texts after they are sent — and Signal, another encrypted messaging system, was a violation of the Presidential Records Act. Spicer also warned the group of more problems if news of the phone checks and the meeting about leaks was leaked to the media.

Former Rep Harold Ford, Jr. (D-TN) is emerging as a possible contender for transportation secretary, or another Cabinet post, in President-elect Donald Trump’s budding administration. The telegenic Ford — who served five terms in Congress representing Tennessee and is the son of a long-serving Democratic congressman from Memphis — has worked as a managing director at Morgan Stanley since 2011, and is a regular news analyst on MSNBC.