The White House cannot lapse in its funding of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a federal district court judge ruled on Tuesday, only days before funds at the bureau would have likely run out and the consumer finance agency would have no money to pay its employees.
Judge Amy Berman ruled that the CFPB can continue to get its funds from the Federal Reserve, despite the Fed operating at a loss, and that the White House’s new legal argument about how the CFPB gets its funds is not valid.
At the heart of this case is whether Russell Vought, President Donald Trump’s budget director and the acting director of the CFPB, can effectively shut down the agency and lay off all of the bureau’s employees.
The CFPB has largely been inoperable since President Trump has sworn into office nearly a year ago. Its employees are mostly forbidden from doing any work, and most of the bureau’s operations this year has been to unwind the work it did under President Biden and even under Trump’s first term.
U.S. Border Patrol commander Gregory Bovino said Tuesday federal immigration enforcement officers would remain in Chicago “for years,” even after months of controversy surrounding the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigrants in the Windy City. 
Democrat Renee Hardman won a special election for state Senate in Iowa on Tuesday, preventing Republicans from regaining a supermajority in the chamber, Decision Desk HQ projects.
Uncle Sam wants you to dress up when heading to the airport, but are people heeding the call?
Tatiana Schlossberg, the environmental journalist, author and granddaughter of President John F. Kennedy, has died. She was 35. 
On December 17, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced a $35 billion deal to sell natural gas to Egypt in what officials describe as the largest energy export agreement in Israel’s history. The natural gas will be produced from Leviathan, a massive field west of Haifa. “On this day,” Netanyahu wrote in a statement that day, the third day of Hanukkah, “we’ve brought another jug of oil to the nation of Israel. But this time, the flame will burn not just for eight days, but for decades to come.”
President Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu were in lockstep on Monday during a press conference following their lunch meeting at Mar-a-Lago, ramping up pressure on Hamas to disarm and threatening to renew attacks on Iran if it seeks to build up its ballistic missile program.
