President Donald Trump visited a Mack Truck facility in battleground Pennsylvania Tuesday, pivoting to economic messaging as his administration simultaneously leverages federal homeland security funds to compel sweeping election reforms across the nation—moves that underscore the high stakes of November's midterm elections for Republican House control.
Trump's trip to the Allentown-area business marks his first major public event beyond the capital since signing an interim agreement to end the Iran war, as he works to shift attention from the conflict and resulting higher gasoline prices. The Macungie, Pennsylvania, facility sits in the 7th Congressional District, where incumbent Republican Rep. Ryan Mackenzie faces Democratic challenger Bob Brooks in November.
Economic Headwinds and Political Calculations
The visit comes amid challenging economic perceptions that could shape voters' verdict on Trump's stewardship. 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, unchanged from the previous month. The Iran war, which began Feb. 28, has also proven politically difficult. Most Americans continued to disapprove of his handling of Iran, according to the June AP-NORC poll, which was being fielded as Trump announced a tentative deal with Iran and concluded just before the interim agreement was signed last week. It found about two-thirds, 65%, of U.S. adults disapprove of how the president is handling issues with Iran, unchanged from May.
Still, while most Democrats and independents view Trump's actions negatively, only about 3 in 10 Republicans are unhappy. Support from districts like the one he is visiting Tuesday are pivotal to Republicans holding narrow control of the House, where a loss could hobble the president's final two years in office.
Mackenzie, a freshman lawmaker, is looking to hold onto a district Democrats have targeted to flip. Brooks, president of the state firefighters' union, has support from Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro, who is also seeking reelection this year. 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.
Federal Leverage on Election Administration
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 President Donald Trump's campaign to root out alleged voter fraud and exert more federal influence over how elections are run. It comes as multiple states have passed laws that seek to prevent the federal government from interfering with elections.
Under new rules governing several homeland security grant programs, states must take a number of steps, including phasing out certain electronic voting systems and moving 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. But the new guidelines, which CNN obtained and are expected to go out to states later this month, impose a set of 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.
Legal Setbacks and Constitutional Questions
Trump's attempts to unilaterally overhaul how elections are run, with executive orders and demands for sensitive voter data, have also run into legal hurdles. The Constitution gives states control over administering the ballot. Congress can pass election regulations, but the president has very limited powers to force election rule changes on his own, courts have found. David Becker, a former Justice Department lawyer who now advises election officials, said, "I expect (the new requirements) will be blocked in the courts."
The new mandates target several pillars of state election administration and oversight. They require states to conduct manual election audits using methods established by the Trump administration and to use an approved government system to verify the citizenship of any person working at a polling location. States must also submit a plan to phase out voting systems that do not use paper ballots that voters can mark by hand, which are tabulated during elections.
Most jurisdictions already offer hand-marked paper ballots. But about 30% of voters in the country live in places that rely entirely on ballot-marking devices, machines that record a voter's choices and print a paper ballot for counting, or on direct-recording systems that store votes electronically. Among the places that would be forced to transition under the new rules are Delaware, Georgia, Nevada and South Carolina, as well as Los Angeles County.
The grant conditions also require states to run their full voter rolls through SAVE, or Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, a tool used to identify potential noncitizen voters. Critics say the DHS system is flawed because it can produce false matches and may wrongly flag eligible voters for removal. Many states already use SAVE to vet voter rolls. Others have refused. The Justice Department has sued 30 states for declining to hand over their voter lists for a federal audit using the system.
The election changes Trump is seeking could be enormously expensive for states. For instance, the nationwide cost of upgrading election equipment to align with voluntary voting standards has been estimated at $2.7 billion. In Georgia, where the state legislature has also passed a law to require hand-marked paper ballots, Republican Secretary of State Raffensperger has estimated it will cost $66 million. The new grant plan ups the ante by using a much larger share of the homeland security funding as leverage. Still, the cost of complying might ultimately be even greater than the total amount being withheld from a state, though the grant guidelines specify that states can request additional funding to help implement these changes.
Court Ruling on SAVE Database
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 President Donald 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, which critics had referred to as an unlawful centralized federal database of voter information, had been a key pillar of the second election executive order the Republican president signed earlier this year. The ruling leaves its future uncertain.
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."
Housing Package Advances
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 President Donald 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.
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. For instance, 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.
Why This Matters:
The convergence of Trump's economic messaging, election security initiatives, and housing legislation reveals the administration's comprehensive approach to the midterm elections amid narrow Republican House control. The president's economic approval ratings and Iran war handling present political vulnerabilities that could determine whether Republicans maintain the legislative leverage needed to advance his agenda. The administration's use of federal funding as a policy lever—whether for election reforms or housing construction—demonstrates an aggressive approach to federalism that raises fundamental questions about the proper balance between national priorities and state autonomy. The legal challenges to the SAVE database and election mandates underscore constitutional tensions over executive authority in election administration, an area traditionally reserved to states. Meanwhile, the housing package's deficit-neutral approach and focus on regulatory relief rather than new spending reflects fiscal discipline, though critics argue it falls short on comprehensive permitting reform. The outcome of these initiatives will shape not only the November elections but also the scope of federal power over state functions and the viability of market-based solutions to housing affordability.