(WASHINGTON) — Lawmakers from both chambers return to Washington this week for the final legislative push before the November midterm elections, the first time since July 23 that both chambers will be in Washington.

The House is in session for its final week of legislative business before the election after Speaker Mike Johnson scrapped two previously scheduled weeks of votes. The Senate has three weeks of business ahead of it — as no changes to the Senate schedule have been announced — though it’s possible Majority Leader John Thune could decide to dispatch his members to the campaign trail earlier than planned as well.

The September session is often plagued by a looming government funding deadline. But lawmakers have already passed a stopgap funding bill that President Donald Trump has signed to keep the lights on until Dec. 11, alleviating any immediate deadline pressure this month. Senate Republicans are also increasingly unlikely to take up a massive budget bill before the midterms.

The move to kick the can on government funding and delay a potential budget reconciliation bill means both items could be at the top of a large pile of priorities facing lawmakers in the lame duck session. 

But freedom from a fiscal showdown doesn’t mean lawmakers won’t feel the pressure — both now and in the lame duck — to produce.

Here’s what the House and Senate have ahead of them:

Funding the military: Over the summer recess, new concerns were stoked about leadership at the top of the military following Dan Driscoll’s resignation as Army secretary. Larger concerns about strained military resources and funding for the war in Iran also became more pressing, as the conflict stretches into its seventh month.

Legislators on both sides of the aisle will likely need to chart a path forward on military funding, especially as the must-pass National Defense Authorization Act continues to stall and the Senate has effectively thrown in the towel on Reconciliation 3.0 — the $95 billion GOP package that aimed at replenishing the military as the Iran war drags on, as well as billions in relief for American farmers and some aspects of the SAVE America Act.

The NDAA doesn’t need to be approved until the end of the year, but if lawmakers don’t find a bipartisan path for it soon, they’ll add to a potential lame duck pileup.

Russia sanctions: Next week, House Republicans will attempt to pass the Russia sanctions bill — despite objections from many Democrats — as GOP leaders will bring the bipartisan legislation to the floor under a rule, requiring only a simple majority for passage while also signaling that there isn’t sufficient bipartisan support in the House to suspend the rules and pass it via a two-thirds majority.

Though the House passed a budget resolution, it’s not clear whether Republicans in the Senate will attempt to take that up before they leave. Doing so would expose members to potentially challenging votes in a vote-a-rama, and it’s also not clear whether Thune even has the votes in his unruly majority to pass it.

Anti-fraud measures: The House will also aim to close out its pre-election legislative blitz by debating several fraud-related measures on the floor this week, including the Preventing Ripoffs and Obtaining Oversight of Funds Act, another bill to protect taxpayers from healthcare fraudsters, and a bill to establish a National Fraud Enforcement Division within the Department of Justice under the authority of the attorney general.

Regulating AI: A renewed focus on regulating artificial intelligence is also likely to come following reports this week that raise significant concerns about AI security. Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have demanded information from OpenAI and launched investigations. 

Crypto and NIL could come up: Other major bills could also finally get their time in the sun during this stretch of session. The Senate is expected to take up a Name, Image and Likeness [NIL] bill as soon as this week. A controversial bill aimed at regulating cryptocurrency could also find its way to the Senate floor, though that bipartisan legislation is currently plagued by concerns from Democrats that the bill includes ethics carve-outs that may be favorable to Trump.

McConnell’s still absent: It’s also not yet clear whether Sen. Mitch McConnell, who has not been on Capitol Hill since a June 14 fall put him in the hospital, will be present this week. A spokesperson for McConnell did not provide an update when reached by ABC News on Friday.

Trump officials on the Hill: Several high-level Trump officials are also slated to appear on the Hill this week. Senators on the Judiciary Committee will hear from FBI Director Kash Patel on Tuesday. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is slated to appear before the House Financial Services Committee on the same day.

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(WASHINGTON) — Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI, joined others in the artificial intelligence industry in saying that his company would welcome a slower development pace for AI to ensure that the technology’s capabilities don’t “get ahead of alignment and monitoring,” as President Donald Trump said there would be “more good than bad” from the technology.

The president, who spoke with reporters on Sunday as he traveled back to Washington from Ireland, said he wouldn’t downplay concerns about AI advancements. He also sought to position the AI race as a competition between the United States and other countries — including China.

“I’ve said it from the beginning,” Trump said. “Whoever wins AI — and we’re leading by a lot. Whoever wins AI wins.”

In a social media post on Monday, Trump reiterated the message, saying “The only control or ‘guardrails’ that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that, in spades!”

He added that there is a “SICK conspiracy going on against AI and Data Centers, and the only one that is happy about it is China,” and that the U.S. is “leading China” as well as other countries in the technology.

Vice President JD Vance said Monday that the the administration is “concerned” about the technology, but any regulations that may occur need to be done “smartly” — with the current situation feeling like a “Trojan horse.”

“It’s something that we’re concerned by, but we want to make sure that we actually regulate smartly, and we’re thoughtful about the risk here. So, there are obviously risks to AI. There are some benefits to AI. I have to say, just personally, I feel a little bit weird about the fact that you have so many Frontier AI tech companies kind of coming to the government and begging the government to regulate them — it feels a little bit to me like a bit of a Trojan horse,” Vance said.

The comments from Altman, Trump and Vance followed a warning issued last week by Jacob Coxon, a former safety researcher for Anthropic and OpenAI, two prominent tech companies, who said that he was resigning from Anthropic.

Coxon said in a social media post that neither Anthropic nor OpenAI “is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives.” He also highlighted the fear within the industry about the potential for an AI takeover.

“The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade,” Coxon wrote.

Altman said late on Sunday that his company would welcome a federal framework “that sets consistent safety requirements for frontier AI.”

“But we do not believe we need to wait for an anti-trust exemption or legislation to begin the work of providing this confidence,” Altman said on social media. “Consistent rules to manage frontier risk so that we can maximize the benefits are a good idea (and we are excited by ideas like independent auditors).”

That statement came after House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries said Sunday that lawmakers need to take urgent action on the growing threat of AI.

“We certainly need to begin to act urgently to address the challenges that exist,” Jeffries said on ABC News’ “This Week with George Stephanopoulos.”

“We should take decisive action now so that we can slow down, as the CEOs have recently acknowledged, slow down the pace of development in order to protect the American people and ensure that AI is proceeding safely,” Jeffries added. 

Lawmakers from both chambers return to Washington this week for the final legislative push before the November midterm elections, a renewed focus on regulating artificial intelligence is also likely to come following reports this week that raise significant concerns about AI security. Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have demanded information from OpenAI and launched investigations.

Altman on Sunday detailed “two ways AI progress could go very badly and that we must avoid.”

The first, he said, would be an “unacceptable” loss of control over AI. The second, Altman said, would be to “end up in a world with too much concentration of power.”

“If an extraordinarily powerful AI is used by one person or company to impress their worldview onto everyone else, the results could be extremely dystopian,” he said. “Avoiding these two threats requires walking a narrow middle path; for example, one country could gain too much power. Another example is one lab ending up with too much power.”

Anthropic’s CEO, Dario Amodei, published a blog post last week, in which he said that “we must pace the frontier,” as in slow the pace of AI development.

“We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models,” he wrote. “Progress will still seem fast, and we must make wise use of the time we gain.”

Altman on Sunday said, “When we talk about ‘pacing,’ we do not mean ‘stopping.'”

“Progress has been rapid and will continue to be. But it should be slower than it otherwise could be; interventions like safety cases and monitoring have significant costs,” he wrote. “Pacing will be well worth this cost; no amount of American competitive pressure should justify recklessness, or let capabilities get ahead of alignment and monitoring.”

“Where we will need the help of our government is for international coordination,” he added. “But first we should do what we can ourselves.”

The president on Sunday also confirmed that he personally uses AI, but did not say which systems or for what purposes he uses it for.

ABC News’ Zunaira Zaki and Ahmad Hemingway contributed to this report.

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(WASHINGTON) — The Supreme Court has blocked Missouri Republicans from moving forward with a U.S. House map that the state’s highest court had already invalidated ahead of the November election.

In a brief unexplained order, and over no noted dissent by any justices, the court granted a request by a Democrat-backed advocacy group to pause a lower federal court order that greenlit the GOP-favored map just days ago. 

The decision likely ends the legal whiplash over Missouri’s map two months before the high-stakes midterm election takes place. It also hands Democrats a small victory in the nationwide mid-decade redistricting war.

State Republicans could still technically attempt to ask the justices to take the case for oral argument and decide the merits, but that process would very likely exceed the time left before the vote — and the Democratic-favored map would remain in effect in the meantime, the order indicated.

State election officials will now bear the brunt of having to quickly lay groundwork for administering the vote with a district map different from the one used in the primary.

The group that sought to preserve the 2022 map calls this the “definitive answer” in Missouri for November.

“The law is the law, the Missouri constitution is clear as was the Missouri Supreme Court,” Richard von Glahn, executive director of the group pushing the referendum vote, People Not Politicians, said in a statement. “Over 305,000 Missouri voters — Republicans, Democrats and Independents took action to block this political power grab last fall. People, not politicians, will have the final say when they vote NO on Proposition A this November.”

The state’s Republican-controlled legislature last year passed into law a new congressional map that redrew the district currently held by Democratic Rep. Emanuel Cleaver to lean Republican as part of a nationwide mid-decade redistricting push encouraged by President Donald Trump.

But Democrats and other opponents of the new map filed legal challenges, pushing for a ballot initiative to put the new map up for a vote in November. They also argued that if the new map was put up for a referendum vote in November, that would suspend the law establishing the new map unless voters approved it and that Missouri’s elections should be held under the state’s older congressional map.

Missouri Secretary of State Denny Hoskins initially decided in early August that he would not certify the referendum to the ballot, saying he had determined it was unconstitutional. People Not Politicians successfully appealed that ruling to the state Supreme Court, which ruled to block the new map from being used in November and to allow the ballot initiative to proceed.

Republicans appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court seeking intervention as they simultaneously pursued a second-track legal front. 

Just days ago, Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who oversees Missouri federal courts, declined to intervene in the dispute over Missouri’s congressional map.

Earlier this month, a federal district court judge directed the state to use the GOP-favored map, which was used in the primary, even though the state’s highest court directed the opposite.

Missouri Republicans had pushed back against a change to the map, saying in a court filing that a change-up at this late hour would “disenfranchise millions of primary voters” and “unilaterally void a congressional map before a statewide vote.”

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(WASHINGTON) — President Donald Trump said on Wednesday that he would give American adults a $5,000 “dividend” if Republicans kept the House and Senate in the midterm elections this fall, marking at least the second time he’s promised to use tariff revenue to send payments to Americans.

“Because of our tremendous strength and success economically, I will issue a dividend to every adult citizen in the United States of America for $5,000,” Trump said, likening it to what “a successful company will do a cash distribution to its shareholders.”

ABC News has reached out to the White House for further details.

The president’s claim, which came during his speech on the first night of the GOP’s midterm convention, followed a promise he made last year to use tariff revenue to give Americans a $2,000 “dividend.”

Ten months later, those previously promised returns have yet to materialize. 

“People that are against Tariffs are FOOLS!” Trump posted on Nov. 9, 2025, on his social media network, before adding, “A dividend of at least $2000 a person (not including high income people!) will be paid to everyone.”

The next day, Trump doubled down. 

“And one of the things we’re going to do, we’re going to issue a dividend to our middle-income people and lower income people of about $2,000,” the president said at the time. “And we’re going to use the remaining tariffs to lower our debt.”

White House officials were exploring ways to execute the plan put forward by Trump, then-press secretary Karoline Leavitt said at the time, but she did not provide details about specific options.

“The president made it clear he wants to make it happen,” Leavitt told reporters at the White House. “So his team of economic advisers are looking into it.”

ABC News has reached out to the White House for comment on the $2,000 “dividend.”

A “dividend” typically describes a payout to individual shareholders, funded by a company’s profits. Trump as he announced the $2,000 “dividend” said they would be coming at a time of prosperity, touting in his post that U.S. stock markets were near all-time highs and there had been a “record” investment in the U.S. He said that “plants and factories going up all over the place.”

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos at the time that the $2,000 dividend “could be just the tax decreases that we are seeing on the president’s agenda — you know, no tax on tips, no tax on overtime, no tax on Social Security, deductibility of auto loans.”

He said the “dividend” may come “in lots of forms.”

If Trump’s proposals came in the form of a one-time payout to Americans, they could be similar to the three stimulus checks mailed to Americans during the pandemic, two of which were authorized by Trump.

Those three payments totaled as much as $3,200 per tax filer, as well as $2,500 per child, according to the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee, a watchdog established by Congress.

Trump said in his speech on Wednesday that at least some of that $5,000 would be expected to come from tariff revenue, though the mechanism and legality of delivering on that promise are unclear.

Not only did the $2,000 “dividend” payments never come for Americans — but much of the revenue collected by the government from Trump’s tariffs had to be paid back to the companies.

The Trump administration paid out a milestone $100 billion in tariff refunds through the end of July, according to an August court filing. That was more than half of the $166 billion owed to thousands of American businesses who paid the tariffs that were later struck down by the Supreme Court.

Trump added on Wednesday that the only condition attached to the proposed “dividend” would be that the distributed money must be spent in the U.S.

ABC News’ Max Zahn contributed to this report.

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