- U.S. national debt tops $40 trillion for the first time: America’s gross national debt surpassed a record $40 trillion Wednesday, with the country on track to borrow more than $2 trillion this year alone amid spending on the Iran war and 2025 tax cuts. Rising interest payments now account for about half the country’s annual borrowing.
- Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who set a goal of cutting the deficit to 3% of GDP by 2028, acknowledged that the deficit is moving in the wrong direction this year.
- His department unexpectedly announced on Wednesday that it would “at least double” its long-dated debt buybacks, from $2 billion to at least $4 billion per operation, after yields on long-term government bonds surged to their highest levels in nearly two decades.
- The move, targeting 10- to 30-year debt, sent the 30-year yield down nearly 10 basis points and pushed the dollar sharply lower.
- Trump pushes crypto industry’s Clarity Act with ethics concerns looming: President Donald Trump called on Congress to pass the Clarity Act, a bill establishing federal regulatory rules for digital assets, at a White House event Wednesday attended by executives from Coinbase, Ripple, and other crypto companies.
- The bill would split crypto regulatory authority between the SEC and CFTC, impose anti-money-laundering rules, and ban senior officials, including the president, from creating digital assets while in office.
- Trump held this meeting and advocated for this legislation amid concerns about his personal ties to the industry, having taken in more than $1.4 billion from cryptocurrency-related ventures in 2025. The Trump family’s crypto business has expanded under his second term as well, with Trump’s World Liberty Financial company and personal meme coins having netted the family hundreds of millions of dollars each.
- LA prosecutor reduces felony charges against officer who recorded colleagues’ bigoted remarks: Los Angeles County District Attorney Nathan Hochmansaid Wednesday he would reduce felony charges against LAPD officer Daniel Flores, who secretly recorded 16 colleagues making racist, sexist, and homophobic remarks, to misdemeanor charges.
- Hochman, who was heavily criticized for his charging decision, maintained the recordings themselves violated California’s two-party consent eavesdropping law, though he called the comments themselves “abhorrent.”
- Flores, who taped co-workers 122 times over about a year before filing a complaint with the police commission in January 2025, will now be eligible for judicial diversion that could leave him with no criminal record if he avoids breaking the law for a year.
- Democratic-aligned “VoteVets” official also runs credit card industry lobbying front group: Peter Kauffmann, vice chair of the Democratic-aligned veterans group VoteVets and treasurer of its philanthropic arm, also serves as chief spokesperson for the Small Business Payments Alliance, a group funded by the credit card industry that fights to protect swipe fees charged by Visa and Mastercard, according to new reporting from The American Prospect.
- The Small Business Payments Alliance, a project of the credit-card-industry-funded Electronic Payment Coalition, has spent millions lobbying against the Credit Card Competition Act, and a report from Demand Progress found many of its member businesses have received funding directly from Mastercard, JPMorgan Chase, and Capital One.
- VoteVets’s political action committee has separately raised more than $20 million this year from billionaire donors to intervene in Democratic primaries favoring moderate, veteran-affiliated candidates over progressives, including $10 million spent boosting Iowa state Rep. Josh Turek over progressive Zach Wahls. Read the full report here.
- Florida Democratic Senate nominee Nixon calls Netanyahu a “war criminal”: Angie Nixon, who won Tuesday’s Democratic Senate primary in Florida, called Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a “war criminal” during on “Morning Joe” on Wednesday, saying he “needs to answer for his [crimes]” and that she opposes “sending any money or weapons to Israel at this moment.”
- “Right now, here in our state, in our country, we have veterans that are living unhoused on the streets,” Nixon said. “We have teachers that are calling my state office monthly because they can’t afford to live in the state of Florida anymore.”
- Analysis of Nixon’s victory published by the Washington Post on Wednesday found that she depended on a new coalition, performing strongest in counties that were younger, poorer, less college-educated and had larger Black populations. Nixon won the least college-educated and Blackest counties by roughly 30 points, carried counties with median household incomes below $65,000 by 20 points, and dominated areas with the largest shares of young adults.
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