Washington, DC

1. Kent exposes MAGA rift
2. DHS shutdown update
3. Recession forecasting
4. FISA outlook
5. Iran rejects de-escalation
6. Big Tech’s Gulf risks

Eli Lilly ▼ 6% after analysts said the $150 billion global obesity forecast is “inflated.”

Counterintelligence resignation exposes MAGA divide over Iran

The public resignation of a top counterintelligence official exposes a rift opened by the Iran war inside the “America First” wing of President Donald Trump’s party, Semafor’s Shelby Talcott and Burgess Everett report. National Counterterrorism Center Director Joe Kent resigned today, saying he couldn’t back the war “in good conscience” because Iran “posed no imminent threat” to the United States. He accused Trump of initiating the war under “pressure from Israel.” The White House and its allies pushed back, portraying Kent as an irrelevant player and alleged leaker trying to grab attention. But outside the administration, including in Congress, some conservatives found common cause with Kent. Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., said he was “sympathetic.” Others backed Trump’s war: “If you can’t support the administration’s policies, [resigning is] the right thing to do,” said Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas.

WH details status of immigration enforcement talks

The White House is revealing its latest offer of immigration enforcement changes as it negotiates with Democrats over reopening the Department of Homeland Security. Trump’s advisers are proposing to expand the use of body cameras, limit immigration enforcement at sensitive locations like schools and hospitals, increase oversight of DHS, require officers to identify themselves (unless undercover), and not deport US citizens. Those proposed changes, detailed in a letter to GOP Sens. Susan Collins of Maine and Katie Britt of Alabama, are the clearest new look at the opaque talks since DHS shuttered a month ago. Still unaddressed are Democrats’ other goals, like requiring judicial warrants to enforce DHS orders and blocking officers from wearing masks. Democrats made their latest counteroffer this week, but a senior White House official said it lacks “the seriousness that this moment needs.” Democrats agree a deal is far off.

— Burgess Everett

Economists raise recession outlook

Stocks are edging back up, but recession fears are rising, too. If oil prices remain high for several more weeks, Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s, predicts that the risk of a recession in the next 12 months will likely tip past 50%. Economist Mohamed El-Erian raised his forecast of a recession from 25% to 35%, citing potential spillover effects from the Iran war, such as an inflation spiral driven by oil prices. For global crude prices to stabilize, trade needs to resume in the Strait of Hormuz. Still, the US economy is resilient; it slipped into a recession only once in the last 17 years, for just two months during the pandemic.

Voter ID politics threaten Johnson’s ‘clean’ wiretapping bill

The politics of Trump’s voter ID bill are threatening to derail House Speaker Mike Johnson’s plan to pass a “clean” 18-month extension of the government’s warrantless surveillance authority. Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, R-Fla., said she’ll try to attach Trump’s priority bill to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act reauthorization in an attempt to force the Senate to approve it. She and other conservatives are separately threatening to vote down the “rule” teeing up a full House vote. Johnson will likely need some Democrats on board — a challenge even without the addition of the voter ID bill, which is a nonstarter with Democrats. Democratic Caucus Chair Pete Aguilar said his members were waiting on closed-door briefings before they decided. Rep. Ted Lieu, D-Calif., is bluntly opposed: “There is no way I’m going to give the Trump administration this mass surveillance authority.”

— Nicholas Wu

Iranian regime defiant as Israel kills two more leaders

As Trump’s hopes for a global coalition dim, the US faces the prospect of reopening the Strait of Hormuz nearly alone — a herculean task without a ceasefire in place. Negotiating one remains a challenge. Israel killed two of Iran’s remaining top leaders in strikes on Tuesday, including Ali Larijani, the head of Iran’s national security council, a pragmatist who would’ve had enough clout to negotiate with the US. “Our biggest problem, we don’t know who to deal with,” Trump said Tuesday, pointing to the deaths of the regime’s leaders. “They’re all gone.” Iran’s new supreme leader, Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, rejected a proposal of de-escalation through intermediaries, saying he plans to bring Israel and the United States “to their knees.” Israel has encouraged Iranians to revolt as leaders fall, but privately Israeli officials say they’d likely be “slaughtered,” The Washington Post scooped.

Iran war risks mount for US tech in Gulf

In the war with Iran, American tech companies in the Gulf are in the line of fire. US tech giants operating in the region, including Amazon, Google, IBM, Microsoft, Nvidia, Oracle, and Palantir, are “now belatedly confronting the risks that were always there,” writes ​​Semafor’s Kelsey Warner. Amazon’s data centers in the UAE and Bahrain have sustained damage from drone strikes, while Meta paused a major subsea cable project with a Saudi telecom partner that would have expanded connectivity across Africa and the Middle East. Drawn to the region by cheap energy, plentiful land, and demand from both governments and consumers, these firms now face a far more volatile and uncertain future.

David Ulevitch leads Andreessen Horowitz’s American Dynamism fund, a $1.776 billion pot dedicated to defense, energy, public safety, and other national priorities. This week, Compound Interest co-hosts Liz Hoffman and Rohan Goswami talked with Ulevitch about whether those industries deserve their conservative coding, why venture capital — with its roots in capital-light code — has a right to win in heavy industry, and why he doesn’t want the “moral liability” of deciding how the Pentagon uses the weapons Silicon Valley is building.

Congress

• House Oversight Chair James Comer, R-Ky., issued a subpoena to Attorney General Pam Bondi to give a deposition on the Justice Department’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein investigation.

Politics

• Leading figures in conservative media are clashing over Israel and the war in Iran.
• FCC Chair Brendan Carr’s attempt to resurrect the “equal time” rule is rippling through the midterm elections. — Politico

Tech

• The Defense Department is looking into replacing Anthropic’s AI with a competitor’s within Pentagon systems. — Bloomberg
• OpenAI will cut back on side projects and refocus the company around its coding and enterprise businesses. — WSJ

World

• Nearly 400 people were killed in an Pakistani airstrike in Kabul, the latest attack since Pakistan declared “open war” on Afghanistan last month.
• Australia and the European Union are getting closer to reaching a free trade agreement.

Courts

• New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority sued the federal government for withholding $60 million in funding for a Manhattan subway expansion project.
• Arizona filed criminal charges against Kalshi for operating what it says is an illegal gambling business.

— Vice President JD Vance shows off his festive socks at a St. Patrick’s Day breakfast with Irish Taoiseach Micheál Martin.

Laura McGann, editor

With help from Elana Schor, senior Washington editor, and Morgan Chalfant, Washington briefing editor

Graph Massara and Lauren Morganbesser, copy editors

Contact our reporters:

Burgess Everett, Eleanor Mueller, Shelby Talcott, Nicholas Wu, David Weigel