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What We’re Covering Today

• FEMA Administrator: President Trump nominated Cameron Hamilton, a former acting administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, to be FEMA’s permanent leader on Monday. He was pushed out of the acting role a year ago after he did not endorse eliminating the agency, which Mr. Trump had suggested. Mr. Hamilton, a former Navy SEAL, is likely to face opposition from Democrats because he lacks experience in disaster response.

• Reflecting Pool: Federal records show that the no-bid contract to repair the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool and paint it blue now costs $13.1 million — more than seven times the amount President Trump initially said it would.

• China Trip: Mr. Trump will be joined by 16 top executives in China this week, including Elon Musk and Tim Cook.

 

Trump nominates an ousted FEMA leader to run the agency again.

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President Trump on Monday nominated Cameron Hamilton, a former member of the Navy SEALs, as administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, seeking to install the organization’s first permanent leader of the president’s second term.

If confirmed by the Senate, Mr. Hamilton would rejoin the agency a year after serving a brief stint as its acting administrator. He was ousted from that role days after he testified to Congress that FEMA should not be eliminated, an idea that Mr. Trump and Kristi Noem, then the homeland security secretary, had floated early last year. 

The cost of repairing the National Mall reflecting pool is far more than Trump initially said.

President Trump said that his handpicked contractor would charge only $1.8 million to repair the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool and paint it blue.

The actual cost is now more than seven times that, after the Interior Department nearly doubled the size of the contract late last week, federal records show.

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The U.S. Senate has confirmed Steve Pearce to steward about 245 million acres of federal land and 700 million acres of underground minerals as director of the Bureau of Land Management. Pearce, a Republican former U.S. representative from New Mexico, faced opposition from conservation and hunting groups for his past support of privatizing public lands. During his confirmation hearing, though, Peace pledged he would not pursue sales of “large swaths” of federal holdings. The 46-45 vote along party lines confirmed a large bloc of nominees to energy and environment positions, including Pearce.A third federal appeals court has rejected the Trump administration’s policy of detaining U.S. residents who entered the country illegally years ago and holding them without bond. The majority opinion in the split ruling from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit is the first by a federal appeals court to affirmatively find that not only does the policy rest upon a misinterpretation of immigration law, it also violates the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee to due process. Both questions are likely to reach the Supreme Court.

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Senate Republicans on Monday defended their plan to include $1 billion for security funding for President Trump’s ballroom project as they prepared to take up a politically charged budget bill that faces stiff opposition from Democrats.

Returning to the Capitol for the first time since the components of the spending plan were made public, top Republicans said the security money was necessary given the threats to the president, and claimed that none of it would be used for the ballroom itself. The president has said private donations will pay for the ballroom, which he has estimated to cost $400 million, though some Republicans want tax dollars to go to it as well.

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James Comey, the former F.B.I. director, took aim at President Trump during his first interview since being indicted over his social media post of seashells on a beach, told MSNOW it was a “little bit humorous” to have “this obsession by this 80-year-old man with me.” He also took a swipe a Joseph Joseph diGenova, who was recently tapped to oversee investigations of Trump enemies, quipping that the 81-year-old ex-prosecutor had not served in government “since Duran Duran was on the charts.” Comey, targeted for his investigation into the 2016 Trump campaign’s connections to Russia, lamented that his successor, Christopher Wray, had not spoken up about Trump and his appointees at the F.B.I. Comey said he hoped Wray and others have not been “chilled” by Trump — whom he called “an empty narcissist.”

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Cameron Hamilton attending a hearing at the Capitol last year as the acting administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Credit…Oliver Contreras/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

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