Who Holds the Levers
President Donald Trump is going to a Mack Truck facility in a battleground district in swing state Pennsylvania Tuesday, trying to shift attention to the U.S. economy after signing an interim agreement to end the Iran war. The visit to the Allentown-area business comes as Trump tries to push the conflict and the higher gasoline prices it caused out of view while November midterm elections draw closer. It is the president’s fifth second-term visit to Pennsylvania, a state whose support in 2016 and 2024 helped him to the White House.
The trip lands in the 7th Congressional District, where incumbent Republican Rep. Ryan Mackenzie faces Democratic challenger Bob Brooks in November. The district is one of the places where the machinery of electoral power matters most to the parties that want to keep control of the House. Support from districts like this one is pivotal to Republicans holding narrow control of the House, where a loss could hobble the president’s final two years in office.
About one-third of U.S. adults approved of Trump’s approach to the economy, according to a June Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll. The same poll found about two-thirds, 65%, of U.S. adults disapprove of how the president is handling issues with Iran. Most Democrats and independents view Trump’s actions negatively, while only about 3 in 10 Republicans are unhappy.
The People Paying for the Power Game
The economic backdrop is not a campaign prop for workers so much as a bill being handed down from above. The visit comes amid rising prices that could color the verdict voters render on Trump’s stewardship in the fall. Trump’s predecessor, Democrat Joe Biden, also visited the Mack Truck facility to highlight regulations aimed at promoting manufacturing jobs.
Manufacturing employment peaked in 1979 at nearly 19.6 million jobs. It trended downward after the 2001 recession and the 2007-09 Great Recession. The figure now stands at 12.6 million as of May, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Trump has used Pennsylvania as a stage for repeated political messaging. He visited Mount Pocono in December to road test messages that he is addressing affordability; in July 2025, he was in Pittsburgh to tout tens of billions of dollars of recent energy and technology investments in the state; in June 2025, he was in West Mifflin to tell steelworkers he was doubling the tariff on steel imports to protect the industry; and in March 2025 he attended the NCAA wrestling championship in Philadelphia.
Grant Money as a Blunt Instrument
Separately, the Trump administration is threatening to withhold tens of millions of dollars in federal homeland security funds from states unless they adopt a sweeping set of election changes, according to multiple sources and internal documents obtained by CNN. The move is part of Trump’s campaign to root out alleged voter fraud and exert more federal influence over how elections are run.
Under new rules governing several homeland security grant programs, states must phase out certain electronic voting systems and move to hand-marked paper ballots. They must also run their voter rolls through a controversial Department of Homeland Security citizenship verification database. If not, states would lose out on some funding from DHS.
These grants, expected to total more than $1 billion in the current fiscal year, are one of Washington’s main vehicles for helping state and local governments prevent terrorism, protect infrastructure and prepare for major disasters. For years, the DHS grants, which states apply for, have required that at least 3% of the funds be spent broadly on election security. The new guidelines, which CNN obtained and are expected to go out to states later this month, impose mandatory reforms and steep penalties for noncompliance. States that refuse would lose 20% of the grant money, potentially millions of dollars in security funds.
A DHS spokesperson said, “No changes to grant requirements or funding distributions are official until they are formally announced and published through proper, authorized agency channels,” adding that the administration considers election security to be a core national security priority. “Any recipient of federal funding should expect accountability for how taxpayer dollars are spent,” the spokesperson said.
The gambit fits a broader Trump playbook: using federal funds as leverage to pressure states to adopt policies aligned with his agenda. The administration has taken similar steps to punish states over immigration policies and diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives. Courts have blocked some of those efforts, and this one could soon face legal challenges as well.
Courts, Databases, and the Right to Vote
A federal judge on Monday ruled that a recently revamped version of a federal tool central to the Trump administration’s efforts to nationalize elections can no longer be used. U.S. District Court Judge Sparkle L. Sooknanan sided with advocacy groups that argued the recent upgrades to the program, called Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, aggregated Americans’ sensitive personal data in a way that could result in voters being wrongly purged from voter rolls.
Sooknanan said, “All in all, the federal government has knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens in a manner that threatens the sacred right to vote.” She added, “This Court cannot stand idly by while that happens.” She said Congress had expressly prohibited the government from centralizing Americans’ personal identifying information and that the federal agencies that created the SAVE program “knew that the database violates those statutory protections.”
The decision is a major legal setback for Trump in his efforts to use federal agencies to encourage a nationwide crackdown on having noncitizens illegally on state voter rolls. The modified SAVE system had been a key pillar of the second election executive order the Republican president signed earlier this year.
James Percival, general counsel at the Department of Homeland Security, said in a social media post, “It’s amazing how hard the Left will fight to stop us from solving problems they insist do not exist.” DHS referred to his post as its comment on the ruling. The Department of Justice said in an emailed statement that it would “continue to aggressively defend President Trump’s immigration enforcement agenda and DHS’s use of the SAVE system to verify citizenship.”
Voting by noncitizens is already illegal and punishable as a potential felony that could lead to deportation. It also is rare, accounting for just a tiny fraction of those on state voter rolls.
The SAVE program was created under an immigration law mandating that DHS help federal, state and local agencies prevent government benefits from going to noncitizens. At least 25 states used it to check their voter rolls since April 2025, after the Trump administration significantly expanded its search abilities. Since then, at least 67 million registrations have been scanned through the program, but critics worry it could end up purging valid voters from the rolls.
Anthony Nel was one of those whose registrations were wrongly flagged. The South Africa native became a U.S. citizen more than a decade ago but had his voter registration in Denton, Texas, north of Dallas, canceled temporarily last year after Texas ran its voter file through SAVE. The check wrongly identified him as a potential noncitizen. Nel said, “I hope others can see this fight and not take their right to vote for granted.”
The plaintiffs, including the League of Women Voters, the Electronic Privacy Information Center and five unnamed U.S. citizens, had alleged the revamped SAVE program violated Americans’ privacy and voting rights. The groups also alleged the Trump administration violated federal privacy laws by ignoring transparency requirements about the changes to the system.
The judge wrote, “The agencies were scrambling to comply with an Executive Order aimed at reshaping federal elections, which directed them to create a system for mass voter verification.” She added, “So they haphazardly combined and repurposed the private information of millions of Americans, including citizenship data that they knew to be unreliable.”
Plaintiffs attorney Nikhel Sus told the court during the October hearing that naturalized citizens face a greater risk of unlawfully being purged from voter rolls. “They are uniquely vulnerable to errors in the database,” said Sus, an attorney for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. Sus said Monday he sees Sooknanan’s ruling as an “across the board victory” and noted the plaintiffs were pleased the judge’s ruling reinforced their argument that the federal government does not have implied authority to freely share sensitive data across agencies.
Mark Johnson, who teaches at the University of Kansas law school and regularly pursues lawsuits over election laws, said “it couldn’t be more clear” that the SAVE program violates federal privacy laws. He said an executive order from Trump cannot override a federal law. “It’s an illegal idea. Plus it’s a bad idea,” he said.
During the 2024 presidential campaign, as Trump pushed false claims of widespread noncitizen voting, Republican secretaries of state began requesting improvements to the SAVE system to make it more efficient for catching noncitizens on their rolls. One limitation was that the system had been able to check just a single individual at a time. DHS, Citizenship and Immigration Services, and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency delivered on those requests in 2025, according to public announcements. They made SAVE free for election officials, allowed agencies to search voters by the thousands and began permitting queries using names, birthdays and Social Security numbers, as opposed to requiring DHS-issued identification numbers.
Several secretaries of state have said the SAVE overhaul improved its value as one of multiple tools they use to assess voter citizenship. But in her ruling, Judge Sooknanan said the plaintiffs had shown that the updated system had indeed been identifying some lawful voters as noncitizens and that states using it “are actively removing United States citizens from voter rolls based on inaccurate information.”
Housing, Grants, and the Same Old Gatekeepers
The Senate advanced a massive, Trump-backed housing package that proponents say will prevent the U.S. from becoming a “nation of renters.” The upper chamber sent the 21st Century Road to Housing Act to the House on Monday after months of delay. After the heads of the House Financial Services Committee and Senate Banking Committee reached a deal last week, the package is on a glide path to Trump’s desk.
It is the first major push by Congress to address housing regulations in decades, and one Trump has been calling on lawmakers to complete as the midterm elections near. Loaded with nearly 60 different provisions, the package broadly tackles rolling back some permitting regulations, launches several pilot grant programs to build, repair and push affordable housing construction, and blocks investors from buying up housing stock, a key provision pushed by Trump.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., one of the architects of the package, said the legislation was “not the federal government big footing local government,” but instead the federal government laying out tweaks to current programs and policies that “over time will make housing more affordable.” Warren said, “This is a housing package that will help increase supply and bring down costs.” She added, “One way is by beating back private equity, so they won’t invade your neighborhood, buy up all the houses, and turn America into a nation of renters.”
Warren said the package increases access to manufactured housing by changing the federal definition to open up for more units to be constructed, pre-approved plan books for local governments to quickly approve new construction, and the waiving of some environmental review regulations for the construction of new homes. “It’s not just one piece that’s gonna solve a problem,” Warren said. “It’s a whole lot of smaller pieces that push in the same direction that’s important.”
The package also tries to turbocharge housing stock by tying federal grants and incentives sought by local governments to housing construction. There are tweaks to mortgages, with a push for small-dollar mortgages at $100,000 and updates to lending standards for manufactured homes.
Sen. Bernie Moreno, R-Ohio, whose provision to establish pre-approved housing designs to speed up home construction made it into the package, said the legislation “sends a signal to state and local communities, to say, ‘Hey, guys, you really have to drive down the cost of housing, and you do that by not torturing homebuilders.’”
While there are several moving parts to the 21st Century Road to Housing Act, it does not tackle every facet of housing costs. It does not allocate fresh federal funding for the issue, as Senate Banking Committee Chair Tim Scott, R-S.C., has lauded the package as being deficit neutral. Nor does it directly address rising costs of homeownership, given that much of the thrust is focused on building new homes and lowering the barrier of entry for Americans to get into a home.
And for some, it does not go far enough to address permitting issues. Sen. Alan Armstrong, R-Okla., argued that the “legislation as drafted fails to meaningfully address” the issues of housing costs. “Instead, this legislation makes a half-hearted attempt to waive minor environmental laws while failing to address the need for permitting reform at large,” Armstrong said. “Our permitting process deserves its own committed effort, and attaching weak slivers of those reforms to unrelated legislation undermines the work currently being done to pass comprehensive, meaningful permitting reform,” he said.