President Trump

In a brief ceremony that mixed traditional holiday wishes with predictable humor, President Trump “pardoned” a 36-pound white-feathered tom turkey, Drumstick, from becoming a White House meal.

Climate change will come with a serious price tag, says a report by the Government Accountability Office, urging President Trump to take the phenomenon seriously. The study “says that different sectors of the economy and different parts of the country will be harmed in ways that are difficult to predict,” according to The New York Times.

An Interior Department employee who says he was reassigned because he warned about the threats posed by climate change resigned in a letter that accuses Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke of poor leadership, wasting taxpayer money, and ignoring clear evidence of the damage caused by global warming.

For the second time, the Senate Agriculture Committee will consider President Trump’s nominees for USDA policymaking positions, though it has yet to schedule a hearing for Sam Clovis, co-chair of Trump’s presidential campaign and the most controversial USDA nominee in 15 years. Instead, committee leaders called a hearing for Oct. 5 on Bill Northey, nominated for undersecretary for farm production and conservation, and Greg Ibach, for undersecretary for marketing and regulation.

President Trump’s new threat to terminate NAFTA, made during a rally in Phoenix, is a negotiating tactic rather than a serious possibility, said Canadian and Mexican officials. “This was always a card we knew the president would likely play . . . it may have been a bit earlier than expected,” a Canadian official told Reuters.

President Trump told a rally in Phoenix that he may have to kill NAFTA in order to get better trade terms with Canada and Mexico. “Personally, I don’t think we can make a deal,” he said, days after the first round of negotiations for the new NAFTA. “I think we’ll end up probably terminating NAFTA at some point.”

Senate staffer Rostin Behnam is in line to become one of five commissioners of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission under a nomination sent to the Senate by President Trump. He is the first Democrat Trump has nominated for the agency, which oversees futures trading.

U.S. farmers and ranchers, among President Trump's strongest supporters, are “at a disadvantage” because Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue is running the USDA by himself, said 17 powerhouse farm groups in a letter to the president. It was one of the first expressions of discontent with the administration from the politically conservative farm sector.

On Wednesday, President Trump is expected to order a review of national monuments designated under the controversial 1906 Antiquities Act. Many state politicians, especially in the West where the federal government already owns large tracts of land, have complained that national monuments hurt development opportunities and wrest control away from local decision-makers.

President Trump’s budget slashes all funding to the Chesapeake Bay cleanup program, but environmental activists and bipartisan supporters of the program say they are prepared for a sustained fight with the President, says The Washington Post.